Waffle House
Apr 3rd, 2010 by admin
The weather hasn’t been that great the last few days. We had made plans to visit Leeds Castle and Canterbury over the Easter break, but the weather wasn’t cooperating. So instead we made a shorter trip to St. Albans, about 30 minutes or so north of where we live in London: we all piled into the Mini Cooper and headed out; it was Adair’s first full excursion!
The main attraction was the famous ‘Waffle House’. We started off by getting some coffee while debating the menu:
As you can probably guess, this restaurant’s thing is waffles – and not just breakfast waffles. No, at this restaurant everything comes as a topping for waffles. Even beef stroganof or cheese, ham and mushrooms:
These dishes were…interesting. Can’t say we were a fan; the toppings themselves were OK, just not really a good match for waffles. So just to make sure the trip was fully worth it, we ordered some dessert. After the desserts came I was more worried than ever about my waistline…
Pecan waffles with vanilla ice cream and butterscotch sauce; banana waffles with ice cream and butterscotch sauce – yes, these were waffles as they were meant to be devoured…yum.
We decided to walk off the waffles, so headed towards the central part of town. St. Albans has been around for centuries. Verulamium,the second-largest Roman settlement in England after only Londinium, was built near-by. In 324, legend is that Saint Alban, the first Christian martyr in England, was beheaded here, and the settlement eventually took his name. The town is home to St Albans School, a public school founded in the late 900s – that’s not the late 1900s, that’s the late 900s! How cool would it be to go to a school with a thousand-year history? And it turns out it’s the only English-speaking school to have educated a future Pope…also among its alumni – Stephen Hawking.
Anyway, the city itself reminded the MBH and I of Bath – cute shops selling a variety of hand-made goods and crafts, Roman walls and ruins, an outdoor market. And of course the surroundings were beautiful; some of the buildings have been around for literally centuries:
The weather wasn’t that great – in fact, it was quite cold most of the time – but we still had a great time. Adair was awake and happily sitting on my lap the whole time at the Waffle House, but slept through most of the site-seeing and shopping that followed. Here he is, just before his three-month birthday!
