A Travel Blog
On our final night in London, we made it out to Clerkenwell and The Eagle pub, which is one of the first pubs to begin what became known as the “gastropub” movement.
The phrase has become worn out in recent years, but originally, a gastropub was simply a pub that served very good food. The Eagle opened in 1991 and recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.
London is such a vast city that even a full week spent exploring as tourists meant we barely scraped the surface of a few neighbourhoods.
In between all the other major landmarks, museums, pubs and restaurants we visited and blogged about, we also came across other things that caught our interest. Here’s a random compilation.
May 20, 2016 is our 10th wedding anniversary. Josie had always wanted to see Oxford, having read many books and watched many dramas set in that town. This seemed like a perfect reason to take a train and get out of London for the day.
The trip from Paddington Station to Oxford took 56 minutes and cost us £25 (about $50 CAD) each, return. We enjoyed random views of the lush English countryside from the window of our train.
The Borough Market is very close to our hotel, off Southwark Street near London Bridge, and it is one of the best food markets we’ve ever visted.
A maze of tiny paths and squares under the railway arches is filled with food vendors and specialty stores of all kinds, open mainly during the day. In the surrounding laneways are many small restaurants and pubs that open into the street during the evenings.
Ye Olde Mitre is a pub in the Holborn district of London, hidden at the end of an alley that extends from a gated laneway near the Chancery Lane tube stop. It’s closed on weekends.
One of the oldest in London, this pub dates to the time of Queen Elizabeth I. “Built in 1546 and extended in 1782” says the website. Rather than a single room, the pub is more like a warren of small cozy rooms, with two levels and a courtyard.
The other customers mostly seemed to be suited regulars on their lunch breaks.
Our Reykjavik layover was short, so we only had a few hours on our last evening to explore the downtown area.
This was the colourful corner of Klapparstigur, Týsgata and Njálsgata near our hotel.
As in most cold-weather countries, Icelanders consume a lot of coffee. We visited Reykjavik Roasters, one of the city’s most serious coffee places, where I enjoyed a very nice and very hot $6 Americano.
Since we only had two full days in Iceland on our layover, we made the most of it by booking a six-hour bus tour of the Golden Circle with Reykjavik Excursions. A bus driver and friendly guide took us efficiently around the loop to see the most popular natural sites within a few hours of Reykjavik.
The first stop on the tour was Gullfoss. It’s hard to express the vast scale of these falls in photos, but the size of the tiny people walking on the path on the left helps.
We started with high, distant vantages and then walked all the way around until we were being soaked by the spray. Gullfoss is the “golden waterfall” and it lived up to that name and made good on our guidebook’s promise of frequent rainbows.
On our way to London, we took advantage of the Icelandair stopover option, which lets you extend a short changeover at the Reykjavik airport into a stay of up to 7 days for no extra airfare. We took two full days, spending the first day in Reykjavik, then taking a Golden Circle bus tour on the second day.
Our overnight flight landed very early, so we dropped our bags at the hotel and headed out to explore drizzly Reykjavik in a haze of jetlag. Impossible to miss almost anywhere in the city is Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church in Iceland. It took 41 years to build, with construction starting in 1945 and ending in 1986.
It cost 900 ISK (about $9) to go up the tower in an elevator, where we were rewarded with photogenic views of otherwise low-rise Reykjavik.
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We stayed at Hotel East Houston (since renamed the Edge Hotel as of 2017) for the first time. This is the view of the hotel from the north side of Houston St. It’s very close to lots of trendy neighbourhoods, but still maintains a bit of grit through its proximity to the Lower East Side, Houston Street and the Bowery.
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The view up Elizabeth Street from our hotel room. We stayed at the Nolitan Hotel for the second trip in a row. It’s in Nolita (aka “North of Little Italy) and is pretty much on the boundary between SoHo, Chinatown, Little Italy and the Lower East Side. It’s a great central point with good access to multiple subway lines.
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The Leadbelly on Orchard Street, a bar snacks and mixed drink joint on a somewhat deserted stretch of Chinatown. We enjoyed some excellent oysters at ludicrously cheap buck-a-shuck prices, which worked out well since the rest of their menu was on the expensive side.
This archival post was migrated from an old Facebook album, so please excuse the choppy writing and odd formatting.
Brattle Hall in Harvard Square, currently housing a theatre and an unusual cafe called the Algiers, where we ate falafels and had beer after we checked in to our hotel.