UK Travel Recap Days 8-9 2021 at Brighton and London

I’m slowly and steadily making my way through the rest of my England trip footage and now have made it to days 8-9 of our UK visit back in November 2021. We finished out our time in Brighton, then headed up to London for the last few days of our rest of our trip. As this was in November, there were alot of wonderful holiday lights and displays around London.

Day 8

Took the bus from Brighton Marina to what I refer to in my mind as central Brighton (we got off at the Clock Tower). Before this, we got coffee and hot chocolate from McDonald’s located right behind the bus stop. We still needed a bite for breakfast, so we grabbed sausage rolls from Greggs before walking around the shops.

We later ventured into the Lanes to peruse and look for a lunch spot. We ended up stopping into the Market Inn for a pint and lunch - Scott snuck in some time on the slot machine of course.

After lunch, we headed over to the Royal Pavilion located across the street from the Market Inn, and I've always wanted to visit inside, but since we were food comatose by this point, we ended up just walking around the gardens. At the end of our visit, we took the bus back to the marina, and had dinner at one of the restaurants in the marina - Malika Indian Restaurant . It was really tasty, and we even got homemade limoncello shots at the end.

After dinner, we packed up that night to get ready for check out the next day. I had quite a bit of anxiety around this because we had one large roller luggage dedicated to just sweets, chocolates and other UK food items. I was dreading having to lug the suitcase around with two other roller luggages whilst in London (especially moving in and around the underground). So I had looked at possibly leaving this case at a luggage storage at London Heathrow since we would have to head that way to drop off the rental car and take the underground from the airport. In the end, I just braved through it and realized that I only had 1 stop to get off at anyways, and although there wasn’t a lift at our stop, there weren’t that many stairs to climb up - so I feel like we lucked out.

Day 9

After checking out of Malmaison in Brighton Marina, we took the rental car back to Europcar near London Heathrow Airport, then we took a shuttle back to the airport so we could get on the underground to get into London using the Piccadilly line to Holborn station (it's nice cause this is one line from the airport to our stop) We then checked into the Club Quarters Holborn hotel, it's so close to Covent Garden, so we headed over there next to go look at the Christmas decor and market set up. They had a lit tree and also later dispersed fake snow (small foam bubbles) into the air as we were leaving. It’s super fun over there during this holiday season as they’ll set up different photo op spots and it’s a joy to experience a Christmas market (cider or mulled wine included), since I didn’t grow up with these types of festivities.

We had a late lunch/early dinner at YORI Covent Garden, a Korean Restaurant - which I was so incredibly stoked about because I needed some spicy, Korean flavors on my palate after having eaten lots of pub type foods for the past week - we opted for the grilling, made me feel more at home lol. We headed to the Italian Gardens in Kensington Gardens to visit our proposal/engagement spot - we always come here when we are in town and take a photo in the proposal spot. We ended the day at Oxford Street to look at the Christmas light displays, shop and so that Scott could finally get a Mr. Whippy ice cream.