PLACES
For my birthday, Dan managed to get us tickets to see Ed Sheeran at The Royal Albert Hall (I know right!) so we decided to make the most of it and book an overnight stay to get in some all important shopping and eating time whilst we were there!
We got the train in to London Marylebone and from there it was pretty easy to get the tube to Mowbray Court Hotel, which was a two minute walk from Earls Court Station. I was a little sceptical about our hotel as it was a really last minute booking and we just went for one of the cheapest we could find, but I was actually really pleasantly surprised - it had a really nice entrance area where you could help yourself to tea/ coffee/ bottled water and the rooms were clean & modern (if a little small). I don't really like wasting money on expensive hotels on a city break because lets face it you don't really spend much time there!
Check in was from 3pm but we got there early to get rid of our bags, but they actually had a room ready for us, which I was really grateful for - it was nice to be able to freshen up a little before heading back out in search of eclairs!
The eclairs from Maitre Choux were something else! I wanted to try them last time we came to London but we left it too late in the day and they'd all sold out (the sign of good food right?), so this time I made sure it was one of the first things we did. We got one pistachio and one raspberry eclair and tried half of each - obviously after I'd been all annoying and taken about a million photo's, because why buy something so pretty and not get your camera out!? We were super lucky with the weather and spent a while wandering around Notting Hill and marvelling at how beautiful the houses are - plus I even found a pink house!
After all this eclair eating, my sweet tooth wasn't quite satisfied so we decided to visit the ridiculously instagrammable Peggy Porschen Cakes, which was even more beautiful than I'd imagined with its gorgeous pink exterior and heavenly cupcakes! I tried the raspberry, lemon & rose layer cake whilst Dan went for a salted caramel cupcake - yummmm.
I love that we got to have such a chilled out first day in London, we've been quite a few times before so we decided not to do the whole touristy thing this time around. We went for an early, quick dinner at Franco Mancas, a place which does incredible sourdough pizzas, thennn we headed on over to the Albert Hall for Ed Sheeran! He was so so good live and the fact that he doesn't have any backing band and it's literally just him and his guitar is pretty incredible! Busted were the support act too, so all my nostalgic childhood memories were re-lived, plus their new music is really good too.
The next day was a little bit more hectic, I basically dragged Dan around alll the shops and purchased waay too many goodies! Lush Oxford Street is always a favourite when I go to London - there's just soo much choice and I got quite a few exclusive products as well as some of their Easter bits (separate blog posts to come!). We also went to Libertys and Harrods just because it's fun to look at all the luxurious displays and crazy expensive gadgets. We also found the cutest shop called Crosstown Donuts which served one of the best donuts I've ever tried - a pink glazed beetroot and lemon thyme flavour one - it was sooo good. It was really nice to get away for a couple of days although London is always pretty hectic and involves a hella lot of walking!
