The Big Koorey World Adventure 2010: Work and Play

One of the challenges of this trip has been to juggle the "fun stuff" with the "work stuff". I only have so many weekends and annual leave days to play with, so the trips to Legoland or touring around London in a bus have to be balanced with visits to see people and places that are useful to me work wise.

Luckily, being in the transportation field, I can legitimately claim that much of my actual travelling to/from/around one place to the next is "study tour" as I'm constantly finding things that are really interesting from a transport perspective - these are duly noted in my journal book and appropriate photos taken. So it is that I've been able to check out the amazing inter-island bridges in Denmark, the car-free cityscapes in The Hague, the park-n-ride in York, and the excellent cycle facilities around Bristol. And it has only taken a little bit of diverting from the shortest path to also take in the cycle/pedestrian friendly features of Odense (Denmark), the "magic roundabout" in Swindon, and the pedestrian-friendly streets of Oxford.

I've also been lining up visits where possible to meet various colleagues at different places who have shared interests. So far I have visited researchers and Govt transport officials at SWOV (Inst for Road Safety Research) in The Hague, academics at the Inst for Transport Studies at the Univ. of Leeds and the University of Bristol, as well as an old friend now working for Cycling England in Bristol who showed me around the area by bike. Unfortunately my fluctuating schedule and the vagaries of other people's has also meant that I have missed out on catching up with a few other people I had hoped to say hi to. Certainly in the future, longer visits to each place will be desirable to increase the opportunity to catch up with people and spend more than a rushed "hi how are you" chat with them. But part of this trip has been deliberately a "reconnaissance" exercise with future travels in mind.

All this constant travelling has taken its toll however; there's often not been much time at the end of the day to anything work-wise once arrived and settled into another new place and having sorted out a meal (and often trying to still arrange some of the future accommodation options). It got to the point in the Netherlands where I left the rest of the family to go and visit Utrecht without me one day, just so that I could work my way through the growing pile of "to-do" items. A shame, since I would have liked to have visited the city, but then the Netherlands overall needs a much longer visit next time (e.g. we never did manage to get into to see Amsterdam).