The last thing I remember our dear friends Ben and Michelle doing before they left London, was sitting in our lounge room, waiting until it was time to go to the airport for their flight. Ben was investing the time wisely on the PS3.

It seems fitting then, that the last thing that we’ve done in London, was sit in our dear friend’s Nick and Suzie’s lounge room, whilst I wisely invested my time playing Nick’s PS3.

People often ask us, “What’s better – New York or London?” – to which there is no real answer – both cities are amazing, and each one has features about it which make it “better” than the other. In the end though, it all comes down to personal taste.

For me, if I was after a 1 year escape from reality, I would head to The Big Apple. But overall, for a life: I would take London.

It’s been an amazing three-and-a-bit years, and I want to say a huge thanks to everyone that’s been part of it.

Farewell London, it’s been a pleasure!

We were once again cursed by the weather on our Cornwall trip – it rained every day until about 2 PM, after which time the sun did its best to break through the clouds (though it didn’t always succeed). Still, you have to take the good with the bad, so we did our best to see as much as we could!

On Wednesday, we headed out to Falmouth, which is on the southern part of the coast. The town itself was ok – nothing too spectacular, though we loved the little store called “Kit”, and had we have had more room in our suitcases, I suspect we would have gone a bit crazy with some purchases. But by far the highlight of the town was lunch at Risk Stein’s fish restaurant, where I had the best fish and chips that I think I’ve ever eaten.

The fish was sea bream, which has such a delicious flavour; not to mention that they use “beef drippings” (whatever that means) in their deep fryer, which gives a very “Sunday roast” flavour to the chips. It was just amazing!

In the afternoon, we headed to The Lizard, which is the southern-most point of the British mainland. We were lucky to have the best weather of the whole trip for the 40 minute walk out to the viewpoint and back!

The coastline was beautiful, and it was probably one of the nicest villages that we saw for the whole trip, simply because it was a bit quieter, and not quite so touristy.

We polished off our time in Cornwall with an early dinner at Senor Dick’s in Newquay. We managed to get to bed by 9:30 PM, which was a good thing, as the alarm was set for 4:45 AM to get an early start on the 5 hour drive back to London!

A few years back, Mom threatened us by saying: “Don’t bother coming home until you’ve seen St Ives”. And, I have to admit, that the number one reason we decided to spend our last days in England in Cornwall was simply to prevent Mom greeting us at the airport, only to send us right back again!

Once again, we had trouble finding a park – school holidays is not a good time to be in Cornwall – but finally we did, and we hiked down the hill to the beach. It was a lovely town, and walking through all the narrow streets and then emerging at a scenic viewpoint reminded me a lot of Corniglia.

We had planned our meals for the day quite badly, and somehow we managed to miss out on lunch. So come 4 PM, we found ourselves famished, and wandered into a little beachside restaurant called The Hub. We were desperately hoping that the kitchen wasn’t closed, and we were extremely pleased when our waitress assured us it wasn’t. The news just got better when I saw crab fettuccine on the menu, which I promptly ordered, and then thoroughly enjoyed!

“Thoroughly enjoyed” is actually an understatement; before it was served, I had said to Kristy, “This fettuccine had better be good; I feel like my whole life has led up to this moment, for me to eat this crab infused pasta”. Yes, it really was excellent, and yet so simple! I’ll be making that one when we get back to Australia. Anyone want to volunteer to come and try it?

Kristy had read about St Michael’s Mount in the Lonely Planet guide, and it sounded like something that was well worth a visit, so we ducked out to see it after the Minack Theatre. We were a little discouraged at first because parking was quite difficult – we tried two different carparks before finding one that would let us in – but finally we got a spot and headed out to the beach.

Basically, there’s two ways to get to St Michael’s Mount; the first, and by far the easiest, is by boat.

For the more adventurous souls though, there’s also the option of walking over – though this is obviously recommended only at low tide. There were loads of people attempting it while we were there, even though I suspect the tide was on its way in.

Unfortunately, this was as close as we could get to the castle, given the amount of time we had available. Had we have had more time up our sleeves, and perhaps more appropriate clothing on (Kristy was in jeans and a jumper, absolutely adoring the English summer weather!), I would have loved to wade over and check it out!

Overlooking Porthcurno bay in Penzance, the Minack Theatre is quite possibly the coolest thing that I have ever seen, ever! And I’m not even a theatre fan!

Basically, it’s an outdoor theatre built into the side of a rather steep hill, overlooking a rocky outcrop into the ocean. It was built largely by one woman – Rowena Cade – over the course of her life; she was still toiling away at it well into her 80s! This alone is an achievement in itself, but when you actually see the result of her handiwork, it redefines the word “impressive”.

Pictures don’t really do it justice; you need to see it for yourself! Honestly, it’s amazing, and at only £3.50 each to visit (not to mention that it’s the only place in Cornwell where we haven’t been charged for parking) it scores extremely well on Julian’s admission price:interest ratio.

For our final four days in the UK, and our final road trip in Gazpacho, we left London on Monday morning and headed out to Cornwall – the south-western most county of England. We’re staying here until Thursday, when we’ll zoom back to London to drop off the car to it’s new owner, before making our way to Heathrow for our final departure!

The drive out here is long – in the region of five hours – so we took a number of breaks along the way. When we saw signs to Cheddar, we knew that Sister Susan would never forgive us if we didn’t stop to pay homage to the birthplace of her beloved cheese, so we made a quick detour to check out it.

The area’s main drawcard is in fact not a bunch of cheesey attractions (see what I did there?), but instead the gorge, and the caves where it’s thought that the cheese was originally made. But at £17.50 a pop for a tour of the caves (“The ticket is valid for 10 years!” says the ticket lady), and with two-and-a-half more hours of driving ahead of us, we gave them a skip.

We finally arrived in Newquay at around 5 PM. Kristy had read about a funky cafe called Cafe Irie which apparently made a delicious afternoon tea, and even though it was a bit late in the day for it, we decided to give it a whirl anyway. Funky, it most certainly was!

Their food was excellent; Kristy especially can verify this, as she received two servings of pancakes instead of the two pancakes that she thought she had ordered. That’ll pay her for being indecisive with her toppings! Funniest of all though, the waitress didn’t even bat an eyelid at how much food it was – she must have thought Kristy was taking the whole “eating for two” thing very literally!

This turned out to be more than enough food to see us through the evening, so after a very quick walk around the town, we checked in to our hotel and had ourselves an early night.

On Sunday afternoon, we held a very casual “Farewell London” party at our favourite pub, The Jolly Gardeners (the same place we held my 30th birthday). We turned up a little early to enjoy one last Sunday roast for lunch – their meals have always been at the better end of the “pub food” scale, and our roast chicken with “all the trimmings” lived up to our expectations.

We were stoked to be able to catch up with so many wonderful friends before we left – especially since this will be the last time for (possibly) a long time that we’ll see many of them! It was very happy sad indeed; saying goodbye to amazing people is no easy feat; mercifully, Eva bought along cupcakes to ease the pain.

We did our best to get a photo with everyone before they left (except for Haswell who flat out refused, and Nick and Suzie who snuck back to their house to cook us dinner!). My apologies if we missed anyone, it certainly wasn’t on purpose! (Full credits to Pat, Kirsty and Steve for their photography skills!)

A massive thanks to everyone who came along – you (and all those that couldn’t make it too!) will all be missed greatly – please come and visit us in Australia!

Photos from the afternoon in the “A London Farewell” gallery on Picasa or on Facebook.

Chiswick High Road has load of restaurants along it, to the point where you’re actually spoiled for choice when selecting where to dine. Of course, it has its share of the high road regulars – Pizza Express, Nandos, Giraffe, etc. – but there’s also loads of others, which to the best of my knowledge aren’t chains.

Franco Manca

We were happy when Eco pizza opened up just before we left the shores of Chiswick for Putney. As it turns out, we must have been some of the only ones who were happy about it, because it didn’t last very long! The space it occupied has now been taken over by a sourdough pizza restaurant called Franco Manco – or perhaps Eco have just changed their name. Who knows!

Anyway, we’ve eaten there twice now, most recently just yesterday, and once again I’m happy to say that the food is excellent! They only have a short (pizza) menu, with around six different combinations of toppings to choose from, as well as a couple of daily specials. Their drawcard however, is that they use a sourdough recipe for the pizza base, which comes out of the oven quite thin, but very soft.

Sadly for Kristy, all of the cheeses they use are unpasturised, and unpasturised cheese is high on the “foods that may kill you and cause serious harm to those around you, if you’re pregnant” list, so she had to steer clear of all the best toppings. Worse yet, she reports that “no cheese == no flavour”, so it wasn’t quite the same experience for her. But my pizza with pepperoni, chorizo, and mozzarella was fantastic!

A word of warning on their service though – we dined around 8pm last night, and the restaurant was teeming with patrons. The staff had real difficulty coping with the numbers, and we waited a long time to be served. Trying to get the bill was even worse, and after 20 mintes of waiting, I walked up to the till and paid on the spot (after waiting a few more minutes for the staff to notice). And instead of an apology, the owner simply said, “Everyone came at the same time!”. As Kristy put it so well – who’d have thought people would want to eat around dinner time?! Madness!

Rice

If there’s one thing I regret about moving back to Chiswick, it is that we didn’t eat at Rice immediately after arriving. We went there for the first time last Friday night, as a farewell meal for the Cookes. Philip had noticed it – as well as another Persian restaurant directly across the road from each other – and suggested that we try one of them.

Truth be told, we originally had tried to get into the other one first, but upon arriving, we found it was full. When we turned around and looked at Rice, one of the street-side diners beckoned us over, giving us a huge thumbs up as encouragement. So over we trotted, and the friendly young lad, with a huge grin on his face, told us that the food was “amazing”. I was convinced that he must have been the owner’s son – but then the owner came out and I asked her, and she replied with – “I’ve never seen this man before in my life!”

Ok, so maybe it was all an act, but it worked for us, so we tried out luck. Our new friend even went so far as to recommend some meals for us – the sharing platter to start, and the mixed grill for mains – so that’s exactly what we had. And he was spot on – the food was delicious!

It was an absolute delight for meat lovers!

The other big winner for the night was our wallet! We were so impressed with the place that we were back again only two days later with Julian and Shelley, and to our delight, the owner recognized us! I suspect Julian and Shelley were equally impressed, though after dining they suffered somewhat from “I ate too much meat” syndrome. Ah yes, we’ve all been there!

Preparing for a move is always hard. There’s the packing, the admin, the goodbyes, the mental adjustment to your new life, and the regrets about whether you’ve really made the most of the time you’ve lived in a place.

With that in mind, we’ve been trying to indulge in as many only-in-London activities as possible during the past months. Here are a few things I’ve checked out, other than steak and ale pies. It was only when I came to write this story that I realised it’s all about houses! Here’s a quick review of each, in case you’re ever looking for something a bit different to do in London.

Dennis Severs’ House

This Georgian terraced house in Spitalfields (east London) has been turned into a museum of sorts. I visited with Ariella during one of the Silent Night tours (12GBP), where you walk about the house by candlelight, immersing yourself in the sights and sounds of the house as it may have been in the early 18th century.

“Woven through the house is the story of the fictive Jervis family (a name anglicised from Gervais), originally Huguenot (French Protestant immigrants) silk weavers who lived at the house from 1725 to 1919.”

Sounds (hoofbeats) and smells (fresh bread) are pumped in to help your imagination forget the modern world outside. It’s quite cool to journey through time, and experience a London very different to the one we’ve come to know and love!

I struggled with inconsistencies through the house though: notes about a queen’s inauguration on one floor, and clippings about her death on another. Ariella struggled with their insistence on silence during the visit, but it was a fun and quirky experience!

Chiswick House and Gardens

During our time as members of English Heritage, we would have been allowed to visit Chiswick House and Gardens (in our own suburb) free of charge, but we somehow never got around to it! It’s plagued me, so I recently shelled out 5 quid to check it out.

“Created by the third Earl of Burlington, who was inspired on his grand tour by the architecture of ancient Rome and 16th century Italy, Chiswick House is a stunning homage to the work of Renaissance architect Palladio.”

The thing that’s always entertained me about this place is that, although we think of Chiswick as a London suburb and commute daily, in 1729 when the house was built it was a country estate that the Earl entertained at when his friends wanted to escape from London. As slow as the District line is, horseback much be an ever slower way to travel.

It was also interesting to learn that the ‘house’ has no kitchen, and little room for beds, as the family continued to live at an adjacent property (using a link building to move between them), and used the villa for conducting business, receiving guests, and displaying their art collection. Critics found this ridiculous and said that it was: “Too small to live in, and too big to hang to a watch”. Gotta love 18th century humour!

The audio tour was quite short and manageable, which I was pleased with given my short attention span for names and dates about architecture and art history. Getting lost in the gardens actually took up more of my visit time!

2 Willow Road

Jump forward 200 years, and you get 2 Willow Road (admission 5.50GBP), designed in the 1930s by Erno Goldfinger (awesome name). This Modernist home was equally controversial in its time, chiefly for its unapologetic use of raw building materials like concrete.

Goldfinger too used his home to show off his art collection, but made it distinctly more liveable. Designing a home for your own family is certainly the way to go if you want it to be flexible, liveable and reflect your personal style! Of course it helps if you’re a trained architect.

Most of the internal walls here fold back to create massive entertaining spaces, and there’s a platform/stage in his wife’s painting studio so that models could sit for portraits (though I imagine his kids would have interrupted their parents’ work to put on impromptu shows). A lot of furniture designed by family members was used and is now exhibited in the house, and the work of master artists is exhibited side-by-side with a framed picture of a car that Erno’s grandson made by typewriter keystrokes.

Every little feature of the house is carefully considered to be as efficient and functional as possible. There’s no traditionalism, and no assumptions about how things should be done. Skirting boards are abandoned in favour of extending the flooring a few inches up the wall or, in the case of the bathroom, all the way up the side of the tub! Apparently it’s a trick used in hospitals to avoid the hassle of keeping the floor/wall join germ free.

This was my favourite of the three houses, probably because I know nothing about architecture or art and found this much more accessible than the others! My opinion may also have been influenced by its proximity to an awesome coffee shop…

We based ourselves in Killarney for day three, as there’s loads to do in that part of the country. First up was a visit to Ross Castle.

Turns out there’s not much to do at Ross Castle, unless you’re willing to shell out cash for a tour of the lake. Willing we were not, so we instead headed down to check out the Torc Waterfall. We all agreed that it was very waterfally.

Another big drawcard of the area is Gap of Dunloe. We were told that it’s “near impossible” to drive through the Gap, and were instead encouraged to rent some horses (for the girls) and a cart (for Philip and us). Of course, this all turns out to be a huge myth – it didn’t look any more precarious than the rest of the driving we’d done – but the Irish lad who drove our cart was quite entertaining, and well worth the cash – though I hope for his sake, he invests some of it on some underarm deodorant. Poo-ey!

Persistent rain on day four ruined our plans to drive the Ring of Beara, so we took an early turn-off and headed back to Blarney to visit it’s famous castle. My expectations were very high after the glowing review it got from Julian, however I suspect they visited on a day that it wasn’t pouring with rain.

The Cookes were particularly amused at the lack of safety equipment fitted to the castle; instead, they merely blow off any potential lawsuits with a blanket warning along the lines of: “Old castles pose an inherent risk to visitors”. I suspect that the climb to the top of the castle (where the Blarney Stone awaits your tender loving kiss), up multiple sets of slippery, narrow stairs would definitely fall into the “inherently risk” category; but when in Rome Ireland…

(Note the rain on my jacket!)

Despite Trip Advisor’s claim that this is the most unhygienic tourist attraction in the world, Dani, Philip and I all puckered up for the challenge – though I was somewhat comforted by the bottle of antibacterial surface spray that the attendant had sitting next to him, even if it was only for show. I dunno if my speech is, like, more eloquent now and stuff, but I definitely reckon that it’s done us wonders, ay!

View the Ireland photo gallery on Picasa or on Facebook.