Regent's Park

Day 2:
It's a beautiful morning in London. Partly cloudy all day with a high of 70. Just a few steps from our place is a nice little coffee shop named Alma - pretty good latte. After picking it up, along with a croissant for Kim, we strolled south through Regent's Park and towards the city center. Regents is home to the Queens Rose Garden with every variety and color you could imagine. Along the way, we passed 221b Baker Street - guess which fictional character lived here?

The last time we were here in 2018, I wanted to go to the area known as Little Venice. There are canals here with long "narrow boats" moored up everywhere. People live on these things year round. I occasionally watch this guy on YouTube, "Countryhouse Gent," that lives on his boat here in England. It's one of those day-in-the-life kind of vlogs that shows him cruising the canals and talking about his life. I find it relaxing to watch, but Kim, not so much. I think Adam and I may rent a narrow boat someday and do some cruising ourselves.

When lunch time came, we took the Tube down to Borough Market near the London Bridge. Wow! was it crowded with tourists. On top of that, it's a bank holiday today, and even the locals were out in force. We squeezed our way through and found some meat pies to try - the chicken mushroom was tasty.

Topped off with food, we "topped-up" our Oyster cards (the payment method for the underground subway - the Tube) and headed to Leadenhall Market to find a couple of the Harry Potter filming locations for the Leaky Cauldron Pub in the Sorsorer's Stone. We looked into going to the Harry Potter studio also, but it was all booked up. And, speaking of booked up, the Sky Garden near Leadenhall has been on my list for London 3 times now, but, alas, they are booked up for over a month in advance - did I mention there are a lot of tourists here?

We checked out the Covent Garden area where I planned to go to this Swedish bakery, Bageriet, but it was closed for the holiday. We settled for another bakery nearby for coffee and pastries instead. Maybe next time.

As the evening approached, Camden Town was our destination for our first fish-n-chips at Poppie's, a famous restaurant for such. Not exactly the best fish-n-chips, and they were all out of cod, so we had halibut instead. This same travesty happened to Kim and me in 2018. We will have to give this UK staple a try again some other day.

Tomorrow, we have afternoon tea planned. I'm going to go as Mrs. Nesbit :)Read more