We Are Here - My first sleepy post

We are here! We arrived on Saturday and checked into the hotel at around 4pm after a nine hour nonstop flight from Seattle. I slept pretty much the whole way much to Greg’s chagrin. We are staying at the NH Hotel on Cromwell in Kensington (Earl's Court) . It is a nice understated hotel that doesn’t try too hard to be hip. It’s pretty reasonable, but not as centrally located as the myhotel Chelsea.

After we checked in, we headed out into the city. After going in one big circle we finally found our way to Chelsea and then to King’s Road. After an early dinner at my favorite Malaysian restaurant, Awana, we walked back to the hotel and crashed at about 10pm.

All was good until about 1:30am when we both awoke to a party going on across the “garden” from our hotel. It wasn’t overly loud, just enough to wake us up. We both read for awhile and were serenaded by a nightingale outside our window who wanted to let us know we were not the only ones up at that hour. Finally at around 5:30, after repacking suitcases and trying multiple times, we were asleep.

We were so asleep that we didn’t wake up until 12:30 in the afternoon. After forcing ourselves out of bed and into the shower, we hit the streets. After about a ten minute walk, we were ready for a pastry and a coffee. We spotted Paul the day before and decided to check it out. Pretty good. We then headed through Hyde Park to our flat. Greg was super excited about the location (whew!) in part because there are so many restaurants listed in that area in the “Food Lovers Guide to London” (Thank you Deepa and Carrie!). In particular, the area north of us has quite a few cute cheese shops, fish mongers, bakeries, etc. After grabbing a quite bite we walked back to the hotel for several games of spite and malice. Later we plotted our day of exploring on a map and it came to almost ten miles - no wonder I was tired!