Day 4 - Big Ben: Here We Come
Today we had one goal – finally see Big Ben & The Palace of Westminster.
09/11/2023
I’ll start this blog with a bit of an insight into tomorrow’s blog and also how hard our life is these days. I am currently writing this in a shop called “The Good Wine Shop” while sipping on a Sokol Blosser, Evolution Lucky No.9 White, USA 2020. All of which means nothing to me, but what it equates to is a very chilled afternoon of wine, crisps (this means chips to you Aussies) (also the crisps are from Surrey!!) & relaxing in our new favourite town of Chiswick.
Ok ok I’ll move onto the actual day’s events now.
Today I’ll skip the morning routine stuff for you, but we are starting to sort our day-to-day life out. Both happily waking up early, smashing out work, which for Matt means checking in with the managers at Poinciana, organising the trades for the renovations starting on the internals of our large amenities block, and organising social media content. For Chelsea, tasks are assigned to her while we sleep, so she wakes up with either a lot on, or a calm morning (most days seem to be a lot at the moment).
After the morning work & catching up with Grandad, we headed off into Chiswick for a morning walk down a new street – yes, we are so much on holiday now that we count walking down 1 new street as an event for the day. While walking the street, we stopped in for a morning coffee at a local café. Believe it or not, but this is the first coffee we have bought since arriving in England! You’d be proud of us Bill.
We then jumped onto the 94 Bus and headed back into Piccadilly, this time, we bypassed the attractions surrounding the various squares and headed down Horse Guards Road, along Hyde Park and down to Westminster Abbey. We didn’t go in, as we had one goal. As we turned left and walked towards the Thames and there he was! Big Ben!
We can let you all know that the renovations completed on him have left him shiny & looking brand new! Please forgive us for the number of photos we took, but it’s pretty impressive to experience up close. We spent about an hour walking around the area and over the bridge, taking in the scenery and also the vast amount of activity from all the swarming crowds. Chels was so so excited to see Big Ben, I don’t know another person to have had a ‘favourite landmark’ as a child but Ben is Chels’!
After swooning over the sights, we headed down into Waterloo for a mosey around. As a large storm loomed over, we made a run for shelter. This of course led us to a bar (we swear it was the only option to take shelter from the storm).
The bar was named The Waterloo Tap and is located underneath the Waterloo Bridge – you can literally hear the cars driving overhead. We had a beer each (both of which were really good – and cold!).
After the storm passed, we caught a bus back over the bridge (we didn’t find anything in Waterloo that warranted staying too much longer) to SOHO. We found a restaurant and bar that suited us to a tee – Burger & Lobster – which also had a happy hour of $5 cocktails & $1 oysters. What more could we ask for?
Afterwards, we wandered the backstreets of SOHO, which has a very hipster vibe to it. Lots of cool & also weird things to see. After checking out some of the local shops and also the various Christmas decorations and lights around the place, Chelsea managed to find something that was exactly what I wanted.
The place is called Italian Bear Chocolate, and as you can guess, is alllll about chocolate. We ordered the hot chocolate drink (which is pretty much just melted chocolate with maybe a dash of extra milk) + Dolce Ricco (which is a Rich Flourless Chocolate Cake made with cream). We also added a triple chocolate option to the cake, which involves pouring melted dark, milk & white chocolate over the cake … because obviously, more chocolate is better.
This place seems to have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram, with a line forming outside the door (or maybe they saw Chelsea & I go in and knew it must be good). The cake was amazing and we will be back, however, we may need to run there from Brentford to burn the calories beforehand. Chels said she knows someone she will definitely be taking here (cough, cough Asha!).
After stuffing ourselves full of chocolate, we caught the bus back along Oxford Street and managed to catch all the lights turning on. This was the end of a great day that finished with Matt once again falling asleep on the bus while heading home.
Tomorrow will be a more chill day, so cannot wait to catch up on the blog & photos to send to you all, plus plan our trips coming up.
PS. These images are loaded at a lower quality to make the website load easily. If you’d like some of the photos taken to download for yourself, message us through the Contact Us section of the website, or email us at hello@picswesendtomum.com
Cheers,
Matt & Chels
Pics We Send To Mum
