We had a great mooring at Osney last night (1 Sept) and as a bonus when I took the dogs for their midnight walk last night I found that some of the pub patrons had left their beer and wine glasses near the boat. As this was a health and safety issue I took them back on board, cleaned them and put them in the cupboard for safety!
As I didn't get to bed till 2.00am it was a bit late before we got away. It was yet another magical day as we motored up the deserted Thames …
All the Thames locks are kept in immaculate condition and each one has its own lock cottage which once again is always immaculate …
We passed the remains of Godstow Abbey, which is just beyond the lock …
And through Godstow bridge …
We turned off the Thames onto Dukes cut which would take us on to the Oxford canal …
And into Dukes lock, which was very unlike the Thames locks … as it was run down and surrounded by dog shit!
Through our first canal bridge which seemed so small after being on the wide canals and the Thames …
The canal lock cottage, a very poor cousin to its Thames counterpart …
Elaine was resting after one lock!
But it’s so good to be on narrow locks again, they built the narrow locks to keep out the wide beam boats, relegating their owners to being continuous marina users.
We were soon into Thrupp, passing the deserted visitor moorings …
We didn’t see the Maffster … he was probably turning the new mooring signs into firewood !
This chap was moored just outside Thrupp … he reckons it is going to kick off soon in Syria so he was installing his very own early warning system base station. He is covering the southern canals, and some chap up north is building one to cover the northern canals. He thought his name was Tom-from-a-boat-that-no-one-can-pronounce-its-name … he thought it was called warethehellareyou !
We helped this chap through a lock - the boat was called Skip….the word rubbish would be added when he could afford more letters! It was an interesting little boat, powered by a 12v outboard connected to a battery, which had a battery charger connected to that, and a little petrol generator running the charger. It did about .05 MPH …
It was made out of plywood. It does look like a rubbish skip with a pointy end, he said he is going to glue two together for the widebeam version!
Finally after the last lock of the day we anchored for the night at Lower Heyford … pretty exhausted! It's been a busy few days!
It was such a lovely evening. We had picked heaps of blackberries today, plus we had a load of damsons that we borrowed from a Thames lock…..
Elaine converted them into a yummy crumble!
We had no internet and no phone signal at Lower Heyford, hence my tardy blogging of yesterday's events!
it's lucky they don't make narrow road bridges as some wide beams wouldn't be able to change marinas and that would be Boring....
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