Having spent a good portion of the week in Boscastle and the surrounding areas, Ashwina and I set out to visit the famous Camel Trail. Straight from Wikipedia: The Camel Trail is a disused and resurfaced railway line in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom, that provides a recreational route for walkers, cyclists and horse riders. We had initially planned to cycle down the trail from Padstow to Wadebridge. However, the 595 Western Greyhound from Boscastle terminates at Wadebridge. So, instead of travelling the extra distance, we decided to get off at Wadebridge. The actual distance from Boscastle to Wadebridge can be covered in about 30 minutes by road. However the bus…
Cornwall – Boscastle Harbour
Ashwina and I had originally planned to check out the Bodmin and Wenford steam railway. But we ended up waking up late and couldn’t get the 11.50am bus out of the harbour. Once you get out of London or other main cities, then public transport services are not that efficient. If you miss one bus, the next one is an hour or two away. We decided to just explore the area. Since it was almost lunch time, we went down to the local cafe, where I had a simply amazing Cornish burger which easily beats some really good burgers that I have eaten in London at prices you will never…
Cornwall – Boscastle and Tintagel
Our last holiday was in February when Ashwina and I visited Dunwich Heath to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Since we haven’t taken a vacation since then, we planned a week in Cornwall in the first week of September. This was much needed for us to recharge our batteries. And as usual Ashwina made the necessary arrangements for our trip. We booked a cab to Paddington station in London where we caught the Great Western train to Bodmin Parkway, which is the closest station to where we were staying in Boscastle. The journey is nearly 4 hours with views of the countryside that would be be familiar to anyone who leaves…
Kew Gardens and Kew Palace
The bank holiday weekends in May are always welcome since it means an extra Monday of holidays and a relatively shorter week, even for an investment banker! Ashwina and I decided to visit Kew Gardens and Kew Palace early May. This was one of the many places we had in mind given our Historic Royal Palaces membership. We were joined by Vincent and Indrita. Kew Gardens is located about a short walk from Kew Gardens Underground station which is the second last station on the District Line and good hours journey from where I stay in London. There are four gates where you can enter from and the Victoria Gate…
Shopping and eating
Little above a year back, a young man of 20 something, having finished a year at his new job, received the good news of his secondment to London. In preparation for his six weeks in London, the young man set out to a few shops in the city to buy the necessary attire for the new job profile that he would be in. On 3 May 2010, this young man took his first long haul flight from Bangalore to London. As he walked out of the airplane and took the cab to his apartment, he fell in love with the city and hoped that those six weeks would be a…
London Calling!
My secondment at my company got me flying off to London and I fell in love with the city the minute I stepped out of the airport. And, I have grown to love the place even more in the past three weeks. I must confess that I haven’t seen much of this place, because I have been working a lot more out here than back in Bangalore! But, the work is good and responsibility is even better. I am hoping that the week to come will be a bit lighter. I landed here on the 3rd which was a bank holiday out here in UK and so grabbed complete opportunity…
A new website for my photos
I’ve been using Flickr Photo Album on this blog for a long long time now, maybe well over a few years. However, in a bid to reduce memory usage at this blog and to also utilise my unused domain AjayDSouza.info, I decided to move the location for my photos. In fact, until August last year, AjayDSouza.info served as a secondary location for displaying my photos. It was powered by a script that fetched my albums from Flickr. However, I wasn’t too pleased by the script and so didn’t bother to promote the site. I decided to hunt for a new script today and came across Glickr. Glickr is an extremely…
Room 103 – All Placed!
Those of you following me on Twitter would have seen a status message that read: Room 103 is the first room in college to get placed. Akshat and me were place by November 25 and late last Thursday night, we got the good news that Aditya too was placed. In fact he’s got an excellent job with one of the highest salaries in campus 🙂 And, we are a hungry group. So, we booked a cab on Friday night and headed out to Stone Water Grill in Koregoan Park. This was recommended to us by a friend and it was a first visit to the place. Turned out to be…
Terror in Mumbai
The last time we had a major terror incident in Mumbai was when the bombs rocked the train in Mumbai in 2006. Mumbai is no stranger to violence when in 1993, we were hit by a series of blasts all across the city. However, this time things are different. I reached home at around 10.30 last night after having dinner at Dynasty. A friend informed me off a shooting incident at Leopold in Colaba. I switched on the news to read about the incident and within the next hour realized that it wasn’t just a stray firing but what would turn out to be a full fledged terror attack. It…
Get Flickr Photo Album to work with WordPress 2.3
I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3 when it released last week and had a great deal of trouble trying to get things to work out here. This is one major release of WordPress, that really requires you to check all your plugins. Anyway, one of my favorite plugins is Flickr Photo Album, which allows me to easily integrate Flickr with my photos’ page out here. The current version of the plugin throws up a Fatal error: Cannot redeclare get_users_drafts() This has happened because WordPress 2.3 has done away with admin-db.php and now uses user.php to call the same function. I found a solution in the Flickr Forum. Open wp-content/plugins/silaspartners/flickr/admin_options_load.php…
