/tacanderson

Almost 1,000 years later the Anderson children think the ruins of Battle Abbey is one of the coolest places on the planet. We spent the whole day hiking around the battle field and climbing on and walking through the ruins of the Abbey. 

If you ever get the chance to go to Battle England we highly recomend it. It makes a great day trip from London. 

The weird/cool steampunk ship thing is actually in a fountain and the oars actually row. The Adelphi theatre where Jen and I saw Sweeney Todd is actually the only theatre we've been to and was a favorite of Charles Dickens.

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” ― Albert Einstein

I committed myself to reading a book a week back in early January, based on Julien Smith's tips on how he did it. The end of this week will be week 10 of the year and I will have finished 8 books and will finish at least one more by the end of my long flight home tonight and I have one more at home I'm almost done with. You can see all my book reviews on my Goodreads profile. I still have a few more to add there but so far so good. I'm a little behind but only barely. All that travel recently really helped out. 

Virgin Megastore closing (Photo credit: Digiart2001 | jason.kuffer)

Living in the Western United States most of my life, I haven't had many opportunities to fly Virgin. I constantly have heard glowing reviews from my friends who do fly Virgin, some saying they'd never fly anything other than business class on Virgin. I have only tried to fly Virgin 3 times. The first time I was flying from Seattle to NY, I checked in online the night before, printed off my pass, had no bags to check and went straight to the gate the next morning only to discover the flight was cancelled and no one was even at the gate. Apparently it was cancelled sometime in the night and I failed to check again when I woke up. 

When I flew from London to Johannesburg, my client, who booked my flight, booked me on Virgin (I usually fly BA). I flew economy and while it was fine, it wasn't any better than any flight on British Airways. I guess all the hypes in business class. The downside was that my flight was delayed 30 minutes but on a 10+ hour flight they made up the 30 minutes easily, so no big deal. 

Then tonight, when I was supposed to fly back from Cape Town to London after being in South Africa for over a week, my flight was cancelled. After waiting around in the airport with very little information, we were shuttled off to some hotel in Cape Town somehwere (where I've had to pay for wifi) with only a vague promise that they will be in touch with us threw the hotel. Great. 

Not only am I delayed in seeing my wife and kids another day, which sucks, I'm also going to miss a special pre-event for the London Web Summit, that I was looking forward to, At this point I'm just hoping I get back tomorrow sometime. 

Dear hotels,

Not having wifi is unacceptable. Period. If you don't offer wifi, please kill yourself. If my airplane can give me wifi, surely a hotel can manage it. 

Wifi should be free but making me pay for wifi that sucks should be a criminal offense punishable by public flogging.

Single-device wifi access is a joke. It makes you look out of touch and irrelevant.

I will gladly pay more for a hotel room with good, free multi-device wifi. I don't even need cable or the movie channel. 

I'll tell you what? Give me free wifi and you can keep the shower caps. Deal? 

(Who uses those shower caps anyway?)

Today, I make my last trip of the month (which also happens to be the first trip of March). From London, I've been to Brussels, Seattle and San Francisco and now I'm heading back to South Africa where I'll visit Johannesburg (also called Joburg or Jozi, by the locals) but this time I get to continue on to Cape Town. 

That's a lot of travel, especially when you consider that I went to Helsinki in January and will probably make one more trip to Munich before March is over. I'll continue to share pictures and posts here but if I'm a little slower to respond to emails and comments over the next 10 days, you'll know why.