Day 2- From Brentford to Chiswick: Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it
It’s hard to beat yesterday’s entry, but today was all about taking everything in and learning to slow down.
07/11/2023
After what seemed like a full week of travelling to get to the UK, Chels & I woke up feeling refreshed from our 14-hour jetlagged sleep.
Surprisingly (and thankfully) we woke to find that it wasn’t too cold inside the house (It was 5 degrees outside though). This made it a lot easier to get up around 5am, which is when we had finally woken up and decided we’d had enough catchup sleep.
We got dressed into a few layers of clothes and made our way downstairs to setup our workstation. The laptops were laid out, followed by Chelsea’s second monitor, and all the cables plugged into a powerboard we had bought from Australia to cut down on the power converter plugs needed to run all our tech.
15 minutes of playing around with the hotspot on my phone’s new sim card later (which we now realise we don’t need, as Grandad has great wifi), we finally got everything up and running and were able to actually get work done while overseas! TICK!
After a productive 3 hours, we packed up and turned our office back into a dining table. From there, the real work started; unpacking our bags. After another few hours of solid work, we managed to get not very far, but now had some other clothes to pick from to wear today.
Once unpacking was finished (or just delayed), Grandad wanted to take us to the local Morrisons so we can find where to do any grocery shopping we needed to do. On the way, he also showed us the local bus stops and which ones we need to take (we definitely should have been taking notes – after all, we are only from Yeppoon).
We returned home and had some of Grandad’s famous dal for lunch! Would recommend anyone visiting London stops in for a bite and chat about his garden.
After lunch, we rugged up and headed to Chiswick, a little suburb located East of Brentford. Chelsea and I had been here before when travelling to Europe for a couple of weeks previously. We caught the bus into the main street and decided to take time to stroll the pavement, walking into every little bookshop & plant store we could find, as well as window shopping the local real-estate (won’t be buying a home in Chiswick anytime soon $$$).
We managed to time our visit perfectly, as the street was busy, but not bustling. The sun was shimming through the trees, and the temperature, although cool, was nice and fresh. We found a local bar and settled in to sit, relax, and people watch the time away. Chelsea ordered a Popcorn Espresso Martini, and Matt got a Rock Old Fashioned (peanut butter whiskey). Although we could have spent hours there, we did stop ourselves from ordering more (we do have some type of budgeting skills).
This is a different type of travel for me (Matt), as my family holidays have always been let’s do and see as much as we can in the days we have available, and I’ve always wanted to do that everywhere Chelsea and I have travelled. This time, we are making sure to sit & smell the roses. We are blessed to have the time to take half a day to walk 2 blocks in Chiswick, or explore a supermarket for an hour.
In doing this style of “slow travel” we managed to fall in love with Chiswick and its quirky shops & surrounding streets. This will definitely be somewhere we return to I’d say (hopefully next time with my camera for some better photos).
However, on the other hand, tomorrow’s plan is to get into Central London! I’m sure the busy city folk will make it hard to incorporate “slow travel”, but we’ll see how we go!
PS. If anyone wants some of the photos taken to download, message us through the Contact Us section of the website, or email us hello@picswesendtomum.com
Cheers,
Matt & Chels
Pics We Send To Mum
