Two Peas in a European Pod: One Week in Ireland & England — Day 6
Longmoore Street in Westminster, London (…because I had to get that stereotypical travel pic)
10:43am, Friday — Fresh off a visit to a nearby vintage shop, we sit down for a traditional English breakfast at a café called Iris. Seemingly to burn their name into my brain, my cappuccino arrives with the letters I-R-I-S spelled out in the foam.
You might think the experience would lose a little of its luster the second time around, at least at the margins, but waking up in perhaps the most famous city in the world for a second consecutive day was no less thrilling. The only bugaboo this time is that we didn’t have a full day in London ahead of us. It would be but a mere few hours before we needed to return to London Stansted Airport and head back to Ireland for the very final leg of our whirlwind European adventure, meaning there was no time to spare.
So, wasting no time, we got up at (roughly three and a half hours after) the crack of dawn, and got Day 6 underway by heading over to a vintage shop on Upper Tachbrook Street called Retromania. Part of the FARA charity retail group, which supports orphaned and abandoned Romanian children, the shop has a quality selection of fashion finds and is known to be frequented by some high-profile clientele, including the likes of Florence Welch (if this Time Out writeup is to be believed, anyway). Florence and her Machine were nowhere in sight on this particular day, but I ended up setting my sights on a grey patterned suit jacket with some robust shoulder pads. The price — under $40 — was not in the least bit daunting; the prospect of fitting it inside my already-bulging carry-on bag was another story.
With my new suit jacket in tow, we made way for what would prove to be our final stop in Westminster before checking out of the Airbnb on Longmoore. Iris, a friendly little café just around the way on Warwick, was brimming with a young (and talkative) wait staff eager to serve up a couple of traditional English breakfasts (eggs, sausage, toast, tomatoes, bacon, mushrooms, and beans) for us, which felt like a lovely little cherry on top for the London portion of our travels.
11:33am — Much to my traveling companion’s chagrin, I enlist her to help me stage a quintessential (and perhaps a bit cliché) travel photo outside our Airbnb upon checkout. But am I really a travel blogger if I don’t get a photo of myself standing in the middle of the street, luggage in hand, facing away from the camera wistfully?
12:26pm — On the way to the tube (see: subway), we make a detour to get a look at the offices of British GQ. The result is underwhelming: the words VOGUE HOUSE are splashed across the building’s façade, but no GQ insignia is anywhere to be found.
Rather than honor our return bus tickets on the National Express, we opted to take the much faster Stansted Express train back to the airport. It felt like a totally foolproof move — until we arrived at the train station and realized we’d done messed up, A-a-ron…
12:56pm — Liverpool Street Station is alive. Unfortunately, so is this Stansted Express employee who tells us we have train tickets for the wrong station.
Okay, okay, it was me. I am the one who messed up. If I had only paid more attention to what I was doing, I would have seen that I purchased train tickets from the Tottenham Hale station to the airport, when it was actually Liverpool Street that we needed. This unfortunate event was followed by another when the employee who informed us we had the wrong tickets failed to mention how we might correct the situation without spending more money unnecessarily. Thus, instead of nabbing cheaper tickets that would have gotten us from Liverpool Street to Tottenham Hale, and then using our already-purchased tickets to go on from there to the airport, we instead got the more expensive tickets from Liverpool to the airport. To put this another way, we essentially paid twice for the portion of the route from Tottenham Hale to Stansted Airport.
Of course, after boarding the train at Liverpool Street and finally getting a look at the route map, realizing where we went wrong, I made sure to put a hex on that station employee and her house for being NO HELP whatsoever. Ahh, the joys of travel.
Anywho, by that evening, trains, planes, and buses had delivered us back to Ireland, where we promptly checked in at our final accommodation: the Ashling Hotel, just off the River Liffey in Dublin. Given the hotel’s stag/buck insignia, you might mistake the Ashling as a stronghold of House Baratheon. In truth, it is but a mere four-star hotel sporting over 200 rooms, a restaurant, and a bar, situated very near attractions of all kinds, including parks, museums, shops, restaurants, and the famous Guinness Storehouse across the river, which we would visit the following day.
In typical Irish fashion, it was a mild — mild! — and overcast evening in the capital city, and the only item on our agenda before turning in for the night was grabbing dinner at a spot near the hotel.
7:18pm — We pull up a chair at Nancy Hands Bar & Restaurant just up the street from the Ashling. I don’t know what Nancy purports to do in this dining room of hers, but this is the stickiest table I have ever encountered.
8:01pm — A man armed with an acoustic guitar sits down to liven up the joint. His first song selection: U2’s “With or Without You”.
Nancy Hands, the first woman-owned public house in all of Ireland, ended up the winner — and just to be sure, I ordered a chicken dinner (the sticky sesame chicken, specifically, in hopes that the table might feel a little less self-conscious). My traveling companion, meantime, opted for bangers and mash, a dish we had neglected to indulge in up to that point. We washed it all down with a couple pints (or maybe that was just me) and then listened to the dulcet tones of Acoustic Guitar Man for a short while before calling it a night like a couple of 80-year-olds. Why? Because we already knew our final day abroad would be another whirlwind of activity put together harum-scarum style, and that we’d need plenty of energy to go out with a bang.
-LTH