Saturday was a more relaxed day than the others. Victoria woke up feeling under the weather and I had felt a bit achey from all of the walking we had been doing, so we decided to take it easy.
We left the hotel and went for a short walk to check out the laundry facilities we could find. There are actually quite a few along Shepherds Bush road. We stopped into one to see that it’s actually quite expensive to do your own laundry here.
After that, we dropped by Spice Grill’s Curries & Grill’s (sic).
A certain joke by David Mitchell about sign painters comes to mind. Anyway…
Having experienced a “medium” piri piri in Britain I asked the owner if he could give me a medium spice according to him, not Britain. He obliged and it was delicious. It matched about what you’d find in Toronto for medium spice level at a good curry restaurant, and was full of flavour.
We nipped into the Costa for a quick coffee and to share a square with each other, and beside it was a Superdrug where we picked up some insoles for me as I had neglected to add them to my Blundstones before leaving Canada.
After that, we headed to the park again. It was such a lovely day, we took a slow walk through the tiny park and then sat at the far end for a while.
We took it all in and watched people pass by. One man’s dog was a big fluffy malamute and seemed especially sad that he was not allowed to play with the other dogs. He circled the area where we were so I saw him twice huff, dejected, that he was not allowed to play. I smiled, and the man taking him for a walk kept his same, unimpressed expression.
One thing London has no shortage of are these bicycle share services. This one appears to be the leave-anywhere kind of service, except that there are actually proper parking zones for them. The bicyles all had red tags hanging fromm them saying you had to park in a proper zone to avoid a fine of 20 pounds!
Having our fill of sun, we headed back to the hotel to rest again. Victoria was a little better but still not feeling 100%. I took our clothes across to one of the laundry facilities—for only a pound or two more we could have them do the laundry for us—and we both relaxed for a bit.
At dinner time we decided to try the nearby Thai food place. We shared a pad-see-ew and spring rolls with a mixed berry cider. The whole meal was a bit pricey, about $36 CAD, but that was only really one meal we payed for.
The ambiance was worth the price of admission at least once. It was a cute restaurant.
In the evening we took a little walk south to the other park, Brook Green.
This park was also quite nice, and the same huge trees we sall all over London were here too. We sat in a fenced large open space where some man was playing kick-ball with presumably his children as well as any of the neighbourhood kids who wanted to join.
We played a little bit of Pokemon Go here as Victoria had dropped a lure and she noticed one of the stops was a composer’s old stomping grounds.
Then we stood outside this pub and beat the Blissey out of a yellow gym. Take that, paste-eaters!
When we finished up with that, we walked the diagonal path through Brook Green home having noticed that our friends in cosplay were sword fighting with light sabers again. Apparently they are a club, whom you can find here!
Satisfied with our sleepy day adventures, we retired to the hotel. Instead of watching something we brought with us, we took in British TV and they were showing the story of Eddie the Eagle, the British ski jumper from the 1988 Olympics. It was a real life wild story shoehorned into a save-the-cat adventure formula, changing bits of history to make it fit. This actually made it… worse than it could have been. The real life story of Eddie the Eagle is worth a read.
Sunday we start our first road adventure ending in a farm-house cabin! See you then!
