Lucky Lucky Lucky!

We had lovely night's sleep last night - there were no marching Cyborgs on the aluminium bridge, just a fan thing droning on the side of St Mary's hospital, but no big deal.

I rang up C&RT this morning to get an update on the Elsan situation at Little Venice; they said they had fixed it but it was now blocked again and was in a very messy, stinky state!

Bugger!  Our two cassettes were almost full!!  I used the disabled toilets in the nice office block next to the boat ... I didn't even have to fake a limp - the polite doormen showed me the way!

We decided to leave our prime position mooring and head off to Limehouse and stop at the facilities on the way to diffuse the near to exploding cassettes.

First though we had to go to Paddo post office to send some mail to Oz.  Whilst we were in the queue waiting I noticed an old boy in bit of a distressed state.  He was sitting on a seat but kept repeating "Excuse me, I don't know what to do",  "Excuse me, I'm hungry" and "Excuse me, I'm too hot" (to himself).   Everybody was ignoring him, including the post office staff.   He wasn't drunk; we were worried that he may have been a diabetic and was in a confused pre-diabetic coma state.

I noticed that there was an Ambulance parked down the road outside Tesco, so I went down and had a chat with them.  Even though they were in the middle of their lunch they came down and checked him out and ended up taking him away. Lovely people :)

Back to the boat and off we went.  We decided to fill with water at Little Venice anyway and when we got there there were no boats, plus the Elsan was working and all lovely and clean ... or as clean as an Elsan can be!

Result!  Full of water and empty of sh*t!

So, we then thought that perhaps before we headed off to Limehouse we should head back into the basin ... just, by some lucky chance, our space might still be there?

Elaine was looking through the bins on the way back into the basin ... "Eureka" she cried, "it's still empty" ... or words to that effect !!


Back we were in the basin in a primo position.  Lucky, lucky, lucky !
(We were glad to stay at Paddo as we still have the gas bottle to change over tomorrow - sometime!)

We got tied up and then the phone rang - it was Andrew from St Pancras Cruising Club with the news that we can join them on Sunday for the run from Limehouse to Brentford, up the tidal Thames ... woohoo!  This is the one part of our adventure that I really wanted to do ... motoring under Tower Bridge, past The Houses of Parliament, plus cruising past all the other famous London landmarks.

So I checked over the engine etc., dug out the extra long anchor rope and removed some plants off of the roof.

The widebeam trip boat came past full of school kids ... he had a bit of trouble turning at the end of the basin as a couple of other widebeams had breasted up, ignoring the sign not breast up in the basin. I think the kids enjoyed it when he rammed the wall!

After all the excitement it was time for a afternoon nap, only a short one tho'.

We took the dogs for an evening walk around Paddo trying to find a dog friendly pub -  it's a bit harder in the big city. We found one but I had to agree to pay any cleaning costs if the dogs decided to crap on the carpet.  I said, "No worries mate, they will just go to sleep" - and they did!  Good boys!

The amazing sunny weather continues ... are we really in the UK?

Kate Update ....
No armed guard on the door yet, television vans now parked in the side streets, as it's too crowded outside the hospital.
All this to get a shot of Pippa's arse!