We had a lazy start to the morning and walked to the other side of town to have breakfast in The Street Café.

I was hoping to have the ‘tomatoes on bruschetta with herbs and balsamic vinegar’ that I had in November last year when we had breakfast there. It wasn’t on the menu this time so it took me a while to choose from the menu. Eventually I settled for a chicken schnitzel and fried egg waffle with a drizzle of maple syrup. I thought that it would be smaller than a full English breakfast. I was wrong, the portion was enormous!

After breakfast we slowly wound our way to the Cathedral, browsing around shops along the way. We picked up a bargain £1 cook book from W H Smiths; Sirocco Fabulous Flavours from the East by Sabrina Ghayour. Its pages promise some tasty food adventures.

Mr C returned to the hotel to drop off his rucksack along with the cookbook and other purchases he had made whilst I waited in the Cathedral Garden. Before visiting the Cathedral, we shared a tuna and cucumber baguette in the Cathedral café.

Due to it being Easter, the cathedral wasn’t as tranquil as it had been on our previous visit. People everywhere caused Mr C to nearly knock me over near to the altar in the Lady Chapel. Thankfully the altar rail saved me from falling over backwards.

Before leaving the cathedral, I browsed the gift shop thinking to buy a gift for mum but I wasn’t sure I could choose a gift that she wouldn’t reject due to her current state of mind so I left empty handed.

We were unsure of the difference between the two Easter morning services so we asked one of the guides who referred to the Easter service leaflet as I had done. She was as puzzled as I was and went to seek the advice of a Verger who clarified that the earlier service was the one to attend if you were seeking a more spiritual experience.

We wandered back through town to have afternoon tea and cake in Café Roma where I chose blueberry bakewell and elderflower presse. The sunshine was so lovely we decided to visit Wetherspoons for a drink which we enjoyed in a sunny window, chilling out before returning to the hotel to chill out some more.

We dined in L’Italiana where I chose chicken in tomato sauce with olives. The food was just as good as our previous visit; we were even served by the same waiter.

We decided to have a post dinner drink in Wetherspoons. When we arrived, we were informed by one of several bouncers that there was a queue to get in. The queue was not obvious as is it snaked around the venue and away from outside gate which is the main entrance to the venue. The queue was ‘very’ long and we were not prepared to wait to get into a pub.

We walked the short distance to The Cock which we had visited on our previous stay in St Albans. The same few seats as last time were vacant so it felt like home from home.

Case packed; we check out of the Premier Inn before our last breakfast in St Albans. We both had a senior moment in the car park; we paid the car parking fee put the bags in the car and then remembered that we were walking into town for breakfast!

We had to leave the car park and drove round the corner to re-enter the car park and were surprised find that the next entrance was to a different car park albeit part of the same building complex.

Mischief managed, we walked into town and settled on breakfast in The Street Café due to the appealing breakfast menu options. Luckily there was one table available and once seated, I perused the menu beyond the breakfast options and noticed ‘tomatoes on bruschetta with herbs and balsamic vinegar’. That is my kind of heaven for breakfast and, when it came, it was beautifully presented with the tomatoes diced and piled on the crispy toasted bruschetta with balsamic vinegar drizzled across the plate. Mr C’s ‘full English’ was equally well presented.

Before leaving town, we walked to the war memorial which we had been meaning to visit but hadn’t quite made it to. We looked at the names on the memorial to see if any of our family names were there.

We drove to the nearby De Haviland Aircraft museum, arriving just before it opened. As we queued to pay it was quite noticeable that I was the ‘token girly’.

When we arrived in the first hangar, we were greeted by one of the volunteer guides who explained the aircraft exhibits on display, the Mosquito prototype and the Horsa Glider in a corner of the hangar. The guide explained the Mosquito was constructed of wood and that layers of materials were used to strengthen the wings. The Horsa Glider was of particular interest to Mr C as his grandfather lost his life landing in the sea on one of these during the invasion of Sicily in 1943.

Mr C told the guide the story of his grandfather. The same guide caught up with Mr C when he arrived at the Horsa to share additional information about the aircraft.

We looked round the other hangars walking through a de Havilland Comet and looking at an autogyro. We were also taken into a workshop and shown the restoration process of a passenger aircraft’s wings. By this time, we were thinking of lunch and decided that the café menu options weren’t quite what we were looking for.

So, once again we perused ‘The Extra Mile’ and settled on Fred & Ginger Coffee in Kings Langley High Street. The food was delicious, my choice was toasted tomato and mozzarella of focaccia bread.

On our way home we picked up dinner items for ‘fine dining’ at chez nous.