Perfect Harmony

Perfect Harmony
Moored at Huntingdon

Saturday 25 July 2015

25th July '15

We had a good explore around Reading on Thursday afternoon and discovered the station and bought my tickets for tomorrow.

 
The old Abbey gatehouse, just a few minutes behind the moorings at the gaol.

 
A lovely little carving that has stayed in remarkable condition at the side of the gateway.
 
 


St Lawrence Church that was part of the Abbey complex, originally built by Henry I. Before that apparently Vikings used this corner of the Thames / Kennet at a base for raids on the surrounding country.

ON Friday I caught the train as planned and visited my mum. It was lovely to have such a short journey and it made the day a lot quicker than normal. I like travelling by train though, and missed the buzz of being on the London underground system and charging from one platform to another. I'm a true country girl, but still love London and cities for visits. Unfortunately it poured with rain all day, I'd worked out that I'd been doing these rail journeys to mum's for over a year and this one in July had the worst weather I'd yet encountered! Great British summer.

We were going to stay in Reading until Sunday but the weather forecast was pretty awful so we decided to get moving on Saturday instead. It meant that we had to miss the Mikron Theatre who were going to be performing on Sat, evening in the gardens just behind the moorings, but we thought it was best to move on a good day. As it was. it started pretty miserable but brightened up as we travelled although there was a cool breeze for most of the day. Actually to be honest we had a gale blowing in our faces for the first section, that and going against the flow made for a long day.


Leaving the last lock on the Kennet this morning. It was suddenly busy with two of us in the lock, one waiting to go up and 2 more waiting to go down. We were the only ones going Oxford way though. However we still found it pretty busy in most of the locks, but it was joyful having them operated for us.



A new suspension bridge being constructed across the Thames, beautiful lines.



It's not always clear which way you have to go on the river, but this sign at least is obvious. Some are so obscured by undergrowth that you can't see them and some seem to have disappeared altogether.


Lots of plastic pigs all moored up. At one point the one we'd been following for ages moored up and there were hundreds of them all having a BBQ. At least if they're moored they're not in the locks! It's always a bit worrying because if one of our proper boats hit one of the plastic ones it would be carnage! Try telling the insurance about that!


We've got a superb mooring on Benson Lock for tonight, with permission from the lovely lady lockkeeper! I'd been chatting to her and then said as we were leaving that we were just going to stop outside the lock for Paddy to have a pee break! Poor lad had been hanging on for hours.... and she said if we went over the other side we could stay as long as we liked, so we asked if that meant we could moor there for the night and she said that would be fine. We are really having so much better luck with moorings since we bought the shears.

We'd covered 20 miles and 7 locks and by the time we'd moored up we were both pooped, because it took about 7 hours. so we went out and found a pub (Three Horseshoes) recommended by the lockkeeper and had a lovely meal. We went out last night for an Indian as well so my diet needs to be got back under control asap

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Traction engine sat outside the pub. It been a busy day today, as we came past Goring they were having their Regatta, thousands of people, hundreds of boats and at least the sun was shining. Not as posh as Henley one feels but everyone looked as if they were enjoying themselves.

Tomorrow we have to get to Oxford as we only got a 2 day pass for the Thames, it was either that or a week and we want to get back onto the narrow canals again, and explore the Oxford one more. Rain is forecast, so we have our fingers crossed that they are wrong!

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