The return of the family

The family made it back to England from Italy on Sunday. They were a bit delayed, but they made it in the end.

I got up to London at high noon on Sunday and post-M&S sandwich, headed on a long tube ride over to Notting Hill Gate so I could finally cross Portabello Road off my list. So, Notting Hill is really cute. And there are a lot of cute colored houses on cute streets and cute little shops and cute antique stores (which is Portabello's 'thing', apparently). I walked along said road on a nice sunny, relatively warm afternoon, and came a cross an adorable little cupcake bakery a la Magnolia or Cupcake Royale and so I had to go in for investigative research to see how things truly compared. Delicious, but could have used a little more moist I think. Overall, cute cute cute.

Headed over and after pacing around and killing about an hour and a half, met up with the family at their hotel, walked back to Portabello Road to show them the cuteness, then had a pub dinner over on Kensington Church Street.

On Monday morning we went over to Kew Gardens for 'Mother's Day'. It involved going to zone 4 (well, zone 3/zone 4 border). Kew Gardens is a big park with a variety of really old plants and some buildings with other plants in them and a sort of small palace that no one has lived in since the first half of the 19-th century. In the afernoon, I went shopping with the mother-type while the boys went up to Abbey Road to take pictures of each other walking across the street. We dined on some cheap Belgian food in Covent Garden for dinner, and then I high-tailed it to Waterloo and hopped on a train back to Southampton.

Sometimes I think that visitors should go to Notting Hill just to go to Hummingbird Bakery. The visual story of these two days has been added to Picasa.