A Quick Update Before We Go...
We get up tomorrow morning and head back home from Heathrow (through DFW). Our three week blur of a trip is pretty much at an end! It’s been great, but it will also be nice to get back to Austin and everything there (people/things/eating in a manner that doesn’t pile on the pounds).
We’ve been here in London since the afternoon of the 25th, having taken the Eurostar from Paris. I’d taken it years ago (2006) when visiting the Ogdens shortly after they’d moved to Paris (I’d been in London for work for 2 weeks, and it was the weekend in the middle). It’s not much more for ‘Comfort’ class — totally worth it, too (nicer seats, more seat pitch, and a decent meal). We took a cab from St. Pancras station to the Airbnb we’d booked in South Kensington. The place has worked out quite well: we have it all to ourselves, it has things worth going to in short walking distance, and the Gloucester Road tube stop is pretty close by, letting us get most anywhere easily.
We were a bit worried about the weather here, as when we looked at the forecast when leaving Paris, there was a chance of rain on 4 of the 5 days here. In the end, I don’t think it rained substantially other than at night one night. We stayed dry all day, every day. Our days tended to follow a pattern:
- Set an alarm, and proceed to hit snooze a bunch of times.
- Get up and get ready pretty leisurely, and then try somewhere nearby new for breakfast. (often not until the 11-noon block)
- Go shop/see something/wander in an area, find a good lunch option to eat 3-4ish
- Do some more shopping/wandering some days, return to the flat on other days
- Try somewhere for dinner
I think much of my cell plan data was used for either Google Maps navigation or restaurant rating research (TripAdvisor/Yelp/etc). Ordering a SIM before the trip to use over here and reload as needed has turned out to be a very good thing.
It paid off, as we found some excellent places: Hafez (Persian), Dishoom (Indian, on a Jen Lowry recommendation from her recent trip here), NOPI (an Ottolenghi place here), and Randa (Lebanese) were all great dinners. We hit some random places for lunches and drinks between lunch at dinners, and they were all pretty decent, with some turning out to be particularly excellent, like the Peruvian place we hit today (Pachamama, in Marylebone) or our lunch at a Chelsea gastropub early on (Tommy Tucker, where there was even a customer with a cute long haired miniature dachshund). We liked one breakfast place nearby (Coco Momo) enough that we went there the past two days in a row; they had an avocado toast on steroids sort of thing that Kelly would eat every morning at home if she could.
We did plenty of shopping along the way: shopping in the Kensington High Street area, Harrods (where I actually got a beard trim that I badly needed; the rechargeable trimmer I packed got turned on in the luggage and has been dead for over 2 weeks), Chelsea, Shoreditch. We’ve definitely needed the collapsible duffel I put in my suitcase to expand and use to take back some of Kelly’s purchases.
We also hit some tourist spots too, as can be seen here:
We have some more pictures on the 7D and also on Kelly’s rented RX100, but it’s late, and we still have packing to do. I might put up a few of those once back in Austin. See everyone soon! Long travel day ahead tomorrow…