It’s been a while since i posted here, but … Haven’t been doing much travelling lately, nobody wants to hear about needful but unpleasant trips to to the dentist, and if I posted work-related stuff I’d probably get fired. However, I had a couple of days of “use it or lose it” leave to use before the end of March (5 days carried over from 2023, 2.5 used on Bank Holidays & a dentist trip), so I’d booked the days off without having a solid plan for what I was going to do with them, then came up with the plan somewhat at the last minute. There were probably more sensible ways to do things, but … This is what I did.
Train to London, then train to Harwich
Night boat to Hoek van Holland
Metro to Rotterdam
Spent the day mooching about in Rotterdam
Metro back to Hoek van Holland
Night boat back to Harwich
Train to London, mooched about in London for a bit
Something to note: The Night Boat back to the UK doesn’t get you to London until 0900 or so, so there’s no way I could start work at my regular time unless I took my work laptop on holiday with me (which HR have made abundantly clear they’re not keen on). The Day Boat gets back to London sufficiently late that I could just make the last train back ‘home’, but only if absolutely nothing goes wrong, and it’s still 0100 or so, which is a bit late for a work night. Thus, two night-boat trips.
This’ll be fairly picture-heavy, so I’ll put in a cut.
Walk to the JW, Taxi to the Airport, Flight to Chicago, Airport Transit to T5, Long-Ass line for Security, Flight to Dublin, Flight to Heathrow, Train into Paddington, Tube to Marylebone, Train to Princes Risborough, Rail Replacement Bus to Aylesbury, Walk to the Travelodge.
Gave myself plenty of time with an afternoon flight so I was able to take a leisurely breakfast at Cafe Patachou, wander around the almost entirely Gen Con free convention center, and check out a smidge before noon. Patachou isn’t so much a tradition for me as it is a very nice, chill place to have breakfast. It’s absolutely rammed during Gen Con, so I like to visit when it’s quiet, and I can mooch back & forth to the coffee, take my time, and know that I’m not taking up a table they could be filling with more patrons.
Well, I slept badly, but that’s to be expected with pre-holiday nerves & a cold of some sort.
There were very short lines at the Aer Lingus check in, but still, it took a bunch longer than expected. I’m not sure why, but the chap dealing with my check-in had troubles, so did the person they called over, so I was sent to the actual Aer Lingus staff, who just sorted it out?
I’m wondering if the preflight information didn’t update or something.
I like them as an airline, but their systems are not good.
I left Blackpool on the Friday & made it to Aylesbury in pretty good time thanks to a lucky connection at Preston where the train arrived as I got to the appropriate platform.
The reason for the trip was a birthday BBQ “Sausage Party” for Becs on the Saturday, with the idea that people would bring weird sausages. I managed to miss the fancy dress element, but was reminded in time.
Maybe wires got crossed, or maybe the folks I was with just ran with a theme, but that theme was ’90s. It’s slightly worrying that all I needed to do to hit a 90s theme was out on a bandana & tie my flannel shirt around my waist.
I didn’t take any pictures of the party, but I did take one of a cafe breakfast that day, so here it is
It was a fun day. 🙂
The very next day I went to Aberdeen, which was a mistake in terms of planning. Should have booked a sleeper trip instead for a few days later so that I could enjoy the weekend, instead of leaving very early to get a train to London so that I could not quite run but certainly walk at my best speed to get to the unreserved carriage in the hope of getting a seat
The booking websites were uncooperative, and I ended up with a ticket to Aberdeen but no seat reservation, which isn’t ideal. I got a bit lucky when it came to boarding; A family with a million suitcases was blocking the closest door to the unreserved carriage, so I went to the other one. Turns out only half of the carriage was unreserved, but my route let me walk through the reserved bit to get to the unreserved, where there were still seats free because nobody could get to them through the million-suitcase-family.
I’m probably tempting fate by saying this, but my packing process feels like it’s getting faster. Some of that will be because of the things which never made it out of the bag(s) in the first place, but I’m thinking that a bunch of it is due to having a designated spot for (most) things, so it’s just a case of findings the thing & stowing it, no decision making required.
For a long time I’d been doing the much-advised “tightly roll all your stuff to save space” thing, but after some experimenting, I’m not sure that it’s as generally applicable as travel blogs/vlogs/instagrammers like to think. Recently I’ve gone with “fold until it’s roughly the same dimensions as the bottom of the compartment”, which then lets me stack things and let the weight of the stuff above compress it for me. To be fair, this is for things like Cargo Shorts, Sweatpants, Hoodie, … Not the things I’d need regular access to, so it doesn’t matter much if I need to move something to get at it. ( The Big Black Bag is a sort of front-of-the-top loader, a squat rectangular shape where the front ⅔ unzips )
Didn’t sleep amazingly well on Friday or Saturday nights, so my precautionary 2 hours before alleged checkout alarm was very useful indeed. Most of the packing up was done the night before, so I could do the second to last bits (any clothing items I’m not wearing, laundry, anything in any room of the place gets moved to the bed) before wandering out to get some breakfast from the amusingly named Boston Tea Party¹.
I was impressed. They had a nice location, on a corner jutting into a square, so they could have outside tables and awnings. Good food, and one of the “scan the code to order at your table” systems, which are great for a low-brainpower morning.
In theory I was supposed to check out by 10, but since the owner had basically said “please be out by the time the cleaning lady arrives at 12”, I feel that my 10:15ish departure was OK. ( A bunch of that was just putting things back roughly where they belonged; unfeasible number of cushions back on the sofa, weird embroidery cushions on a chair and not the floor, chair by the desk and not in the bedroom fireplace to keep the ghosts at bay, … )
I made a stop a the pinkest & most floral cafe I’ve ever seen; Sweet Little Things. It’s like drinking coffee in a very fancy cupcake.
As a side note; Is Bath one of those Hen/Bachelorette party cities? There was a group who showed up while I was there, but then went to one of the other locations in Bath, possibly because of size of group or whether they were doing actual breakfast; The location I was at had apparently called the other one to let them know a group was incoming .
Then there was another smaller group I passed on the way to the station, and I’m pretty sure I saw a few more during the week.
And then to the station.
It got oddly crowded on the platform after the photos were taken, I’m told due to there being no trains yesterday because of rail strikes. As a stroke of luck I’d noticed that the Great Western Railway app had a ‘how full is this carriage’ indicator on their live train information screen; It had been blank earlier, presumably because the train wasn’t running yet, but had now updated to show that the middle of the train was full ( I’m assuming it’s showing reserved seats, not actual people per carriage ), so I moved myself to the far end of the platform to line up with the back of the train.
Surprisingly, it worked, and the last carriage isn’t full. I don’t think there are any empty doubles, but I’ve not got anyone sitting beside me, and I can see some empty seats around. Meanwhile, much as with the trip out here, they announced that they couldn’t do the cafe cart service because they can’t move through the train.
Maybe it’s just a polite fiction, and there is never a cart?
¹ Who are a chain, maybe a franchise, that I’d never heard of prior to going to Salisbury. Looking at a map, I think I can see why;
Back to the Geovation hub to work today, even though I (correctly) expected it to be deader than yesterday. I stopped off at the coffee place from yesterday ( Goswell Road Coffee ) and hung around in there for a bit.
They may be winning the “weird decorating” prize.
Pretty sure that’s a Sinclair C5 (not my picture; from where I was sitting there was no non-creepy way to take a photo)
The hub was, as predicted, dead. Other folks have commented that it’s cliquey & techy, and I’d have to agree. I know they do networking events, and I’m guessing that’s the only time that people from different groups interact. Still, got some work done, which was the point, and left in the early afternoon, which was the consequence of some late-ass finishes earlier in the week.
Commuting through London when the footpaths & underground aren’t rammed? Pretty nice.
Moving through London when you get to a tourist bit? Not great. Kind of annoying, because people move really slowly and spread out to fill the space.
Still, I had a nice time, learned some things about actually working in this city, and now hold a firm opinion on a specific underground route, which feels like a win to me.
Someone seems to have moored a small building off Greenwich
The plan for Saturday was to get an early start & go to the British Museum before it got crowded. This didn’t happen.
What did happen is that I got there later than planned, got through some of the Mesopotamian & adjacent bits, and left earlier than planned because it was too crowded to move through & the airflow … wasn’t? Should have expected that for a Saturday.
Still, I saw some stuff, and marveled at the tiny tiny cuneiform writing, and learned about sealing up contracts in clay envelopes with a summary and rolled-on pictures on them as an anti tampering technique, so that was pretty cool.
Canary Wharf continues it’s impressive streak of confusing me, so well done there; Didn’t know there were ‘underground’ bits below the various plazas and parks. Also didn’t know there were parks.
Found some artwork though, which was nice
Greenwich on the weekend is a madhouse. People in all directions, and pity anyone trying to drive anywhere. I spotted someone who’d probably gone the wrong way, thought they’d found a route out that didn’t require reversing, and were then blocked by a taxi doing something weird.From that point, they were probably better off parking the car and recovering it after sundown, because the odds of them manoeuvring back out in that crowd were not good; Could be done, but you’d need a spotter and a lot of yelling at pedestrians.
I kind of want this to be a detective agency, or at least a pair of amateur but surprisingly effective investigators. Maybe they’re involved in the production or sale of their respective substance, or maybe they’re just importers who keep finding bodies/evidence of crime.
( OK, this does maybe link nicely to one of my Gen Con games – CHEW )
I could also see it as a wacky superhero cartoon, with a sentient bottle of champagne & wheel of cheese fighting superpowered food crime. Whatever that is. Kind of the opposite of Milk & Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad, for those who remember that.
It turns out that I’ve evolved a check-out routine without realising it.
Everything that can be packed the night before gets packed. Clothes for the next day get set aside.
On the day, everything is either on my person or on the bed, so that the rest of the space can be checked. As soon as something can be packed, it gets packed.
Google maps gave me all sorts of interesting options for getting between Greenwich & Paddington, including walking from Lancaster Gate because the stop is a lot closer than it looks on the standard map, but in the end I went with a three-line hop; DLR to Bank, Central to Oxford Circus, Bakerloo to Paddington.
Made it with an hour or so to kill, so I found a relatively sane bit of the station to hang out in, and checked the departure boards online. Got a window seat during the early phase when the platform was announced, which was lucky, as the train filled up with folks heading for Penzance whose train was for some reason starting in Reading, not Paddington. (People were standing in the vestibules in some carriages)
I’m trying to combine a round-up of all of the other bits of Canterbury, plus some sort of round-up of how the working process went. Let’s see how this goes, shall we?
The Roman Museum Did this on on the Sunday, partially by accident because while I’d planned to go to it, I was just out for a wander and happened to spot the sign down a sidestreet. It is, I think, aimed at a younger audience; The audio tour certainly was. Lots of reconstructions of ‘Roman Stuff’ with models & life-size displays, but also actual historical information & artifacts scattered in there. Mention of the existence of slaves, but not dwelling on what that actually means. It was a bit difficult to figure out what they were trying to say in some places; The layout of pictures and descriptions of Roman Canterbury through history meant that it took me a bit of cross-checking to get “the city grew, and then people just stopped being there anymore, and we don’t really know why” as the high-level summary.
That said, it was interesting and fun, and they have a thumping great section of mosaic floor preserved where they found it, which is kind of cool.
Generally Wandering Around I did a lot of this on the first few days, partially to get a feel for the place, and partially to get out of the hotel room for a while. The side of the main street which hasn’t been developed into a giant roofless mall, still has some of the ‘narrow streets and slumping buildings’ feel of old cities; A lot of cafes & restaurants & places selling tourist stuff, and also an art gallery and a Harry Potter shop.
There’s a chunk of the main street which is being paved, or re-paved, or something, but it means that a wide pedestrian zone is reduced to two narrow walkways which get clogged with people almost immediately, and can be brought to a screeching halt by an uncooperative toddler or a few confused tourists. Was glad to have a rough idea of the twisty somewhat parallel streets when that happened.
There wan’t much to photograph which hasn’t been captured a thousand times already by better photographers than me, so I mostly went with things which amused me.
A fraction of a second later the young woman in the headscarf did a grinning double metal-horns gesture at my camera; I’m sorry I missed it.
The Westgate; Not perhaps their best attempt at naming, though it is at least in the North-West of the city. Canterbury West railway station, on the other hand, is almost due North of Canterbury East railway station.
Also a nice park which eventually wraps around towards the other railway station, following the path of the remains of the city wall. I did take a few walks along the wall, and up the Dane John mound, but didn’t take any photos. Nice place to walk along though.
On To The Overview I enjoyed Canterbury. It didn’t go perfectly, but it was fun, and I learned a few things about remote working & travel in the ‘what to do differently next time’ department.
Having a working location right in the heart of things isn’t all that useful if you’re working a standard job; Most tourist things are closed by the time you’re free.
Big Red, as a pack, is great for moving stuff around, but it doesn’t have much in the way of internal structure, which means a whole lot of unpacking every time you look for … Well, anything.
An improvised workspace is OK for a day or so, then it gets annoying.
I did not need all of those connector cables.
Getting sink-laundry dry is much easier in hotel rooms with air conditioning & in places with warmer weather; I can dry a shirt in a few hours by hanging it in front of the air-conditioning vent in a humid city, but that doesn’t work nearly as well with a wall-mounted electric radiator.
It is possible, if you time it right, to cycle through 50-100 channels of television and hit nothing but advertising.
Hotel breakfasts will turn on you; Do not trust them. This may be a smidge unkind. I had a few days of feeling unwell, which may have been the standard “you’ve relaxed, time to get sick” immune system response, but also might have been one too many poor choces from the breakfast buffet options. Or both. Erring on the side of caution, I made better choices & dipped into the traveling medical kit. One of them worked.
English hotels continue to fit bedding designed for arctic expeditions. In this case they also fitted a heater I could get at the controls of, and a window I could leave open, so that was easily solved.
Leaving On A Big Train Something I’d not figured out soon enough is that hotel check-outs happen during the working day, leaving you with nowhere to work if, hypothetically, you’d decided to take the afternoon train back to Aylesbury. I was able to do some shuffling around of hours to give myself a nice long ‘lunch’ break on the last day, so that I could pack up, check out, post a postcard at the world’s slowest post office (the machines were offline, so I joined a short queue which took forever, partially because the guy behind the counter was a very slow typist, and partially because those few people ahead of me wanted to post very complicated things – by the time I got to the head of the line the machines were open again, but also had a scrum of people around them and a lot of red lights, so I stayed in line), and wander down to the train station to get back to Aylesbury via London so that I could work the afternoon from the office. Even got my old desk back.
I’m expecting to go through a few iterations of the packing scheme before I get it right. Today’s version had the everyday clothing in the low compartment, the stuff I thought I’d need as soon into a hotel room in the very top compartment, and everything else in the middle, as a sort of protection layer around the laptops.
waiting on a train at Aylesbury
It sort of worked. I’d thought the top compartment was too full, but it seems like the issue is that there wasn’t enough in the middle one to support it, so it droops over the rest of the pack. So some fine tuning to be done there.
Work happened. I checked out of the hotel & dragged the bag in, and had a mostly standard working day. There was a team lunch, a farewell for someone who’s moving to a new job in another company, and that was fun. ( Also kinda fancy – It was a very nice restaurant )
There were after-work drinks for the person who’s leaving, and I did go for one, while trying not to make her leaving do all about me & the Big Red Backpack.
waiting on a train at St. Pancras
The trip to Canterbury was pretty uneventful. Train to London Marylebone, tube to St. Pancras, train to Canterbury, and I got to the hotel at around 23:00.
