Packing day and saying goodbye to London

Well twelve days just flies by and we are devoting Sunday to packing and a closer look around our own neighborhood, something that we somewhat neglected while foraging far afield.

We have grown to love our quiet (by London standards) Chelsea neighborhood and our cute little apartment. It was always such a relief to be able to get off the train and have everything seem so calm and low key without all of the hustle and bustle of the city. This has been an idea location to explore London from and we would be happy to stay in this area again.

The view of the courtyard from our apartment

The good and the bad about staying in one area for a long period of time as far as packing goes is that it allows you to actually unpack and settle in, placing all of your clothing on hangers and in drawers and feeling somewhat at home; but by that same token by doing so it means at the end of your stay you must once again somehow muster the will to take all those stowed away items and impossibly find room in your suddenly shrinking luggage. It is so...depressing. Not are you only saying goodbye to an area you have learned to love, but (Ack!) you have to take part of a vacation day to actually pack.

Our apartment duck

We spent a good part of the morning packing and cleaning the apartment. Part of the process of renting on Airbnb is that you are reviewed by the owners of the apartment as short term tenants the same way you review the apartment you have rented. This allows you to build a renter's profile and helps to ensure that not only are the places that you may want to rent properly reviewed, but that you as a vacation tenant have a profile that allows property owners to rent to you without reservation. It's an amazing system as it puts the onus on both the owner and the tenant to put their best foot forward. Thus you tend to rent dialed in and well kept vacation rentals and leave the rentals in pristine shape when you leave.

After squaring the apartment away and packing pretty much all of our luggage we decided to head out and take a walk to get some bakery items at another Gail's Bakery, the same bakery we purchased the amazing Crumb Cakes at on the other side of London! We found out that Gail's is a chain of bakeries and we just happened to have one in our own neighborhood and we hadn't even realized it.

We walked down a series of streets we hadn't visited before and after about a half mile stroll from our apartment came upon the Fulham Street Gail's. It was a cool and breezy morning and it felt good to duck inside and have a look at all of the wonderful baked goods they had on hand for the Sunday shoppers.

We bought a couple (Two this time!) of Cinnamon Pecan Crumb Cakes and a loaf of the Current and Sour Cherry Sourdough bread (we had read great things about this bread) and left giggling like school girls we were so excited by our haul.

These are just plain fantastic! Don't think they could be improved on.

We would have toasted slices of this bread the next day with butter, OMG!!!!!!

After exiting the bakery we ran across another one of the chains we had been so smitten with just down the street from Gails, Carluccio's Italian Restaurant, the same restaurant we had dined at in Oxford and had such an outstanding meal. We couldn't believe our luck, two places we had yearned to visit again and here they were in our Chelsea neighborhood about sixty yards apart and we had found them on our last day in town.

It had started to rain and we were hungry for lunch so we decided to relive our Oxford experience and stop at Carluccio's on Fulham. Well you know how that old saying goes, "you can never go home again"? About how some things are just never the same as when you first experienced them, and don't ever hold up to your memories or your expectations. Well that was our dining experience in a nutshell. Slow, unresponsive service, a long LONG wait for our food, tepid wilted uninspired food, and a resounding disappointment overall! If it wasn't for Gail's Bakery we might actually believe that "you can never go home", but Carluccio's on Fulham was a far cry from the lovely, vibrant Carluccio's we experienced in Oxford, and the difference in the staff and food was monumental!

After leaving Carluccio's in kind of a depressed state we stopped in at a Starbuck's about a block down the road to purchase half a kilogram of ground Espresso Roast, UK's equivalent to a pound, and it cost a whopping 4.5 pounds. Prices here on most food items are well below what we pay in the states. It feels like a real ripoff and is slowly enraging us.

After we purchased our coffee we headed over to the Fulham Wholefoods Market, which is where we bought most of our more hard to find grocery items during our stay in London due to the fact that they have a much better selection than the smaller neighborhood chains. We needed to pick up a few items we were going to need and that might be hard to find in Northern Wales, the next days destination.

We walked back along our familiar route to our Chelsea Creek Apartment and had a light dinner and finished up prepping the apartment for our departure early the next morning. We will miss London and it will always be among our favorite cities in the world.

We have had a wonderful time and it seems as if we have only scratched the surface of what there is to do and see here, but by the same token it seems like we have a real understanding of the city, and we would very much enjoy visiting it again if we get the chance. Tomorrow we will go from one extreme to another, leaving a city of close to nine million and after multiple train connections ending up just under three hundred miles away in rental cottage a half a mile away from  Beaumaris, a small village of just over two thousand people, on the Isle of Anglesey in Northern, Wales. Now that might be something of a culture shock!