And so back to Aldermaston

 We had been contacted by Alice, one of the Trustees from TEABAG, the charity we help run in Ghana.  She is working as a carer at Treloars School in Alton and we had invited her to join us on the boat as she was off on a few weeks leave over the summer.  So she and a colleague, Madu, came and joined us for the day.  I promise that I had not said anything about the opportunity to relax in the front of the boat, or to sit and watch the world go by.  The two of them took charge of all the locks and I think enjoyed it!! They gave that impression anyway. 

I met them on the bridge in Newbury - I had been to buy some food for lunch, and they were going to ring us when they got there, but as it happened they arrived as I was nearby, so that was very fortuitous! We did the first couple of locks together, and then they did the rest!!!

Leaving Newbury by canal you come out into countryside quite quickly.  The river passes very close by and often joins the canal.  The stretches where it is separate are much calmer and so reeds have a chance to grow, here, both sides of the canal.

Two willing volunteers, honest!  Where the canal also has river flow, it is never as calm as the water outside the lock, here.

There are some quite long stretches where the river flows into the canal and you can make really quite fast speeds going through those sections.  The water is quite clean and you can see the weed flowing in the water with the flow.  We stopped after the first 5 locks for lunch.  There are not many moorings on the rivery bits, and we were fortunate that a boat was leaving a mooring as we came along.  It was really tough getting to moor though as the boat was being swept past the mooring by the river.  With the help of a couple of people on the towpath and three of us off the boat, we managed it! 

The local wildlife don't seem to have too much problems with the flow of the water though!

There are quite a number of swing bridges that have to be man-handled along the route, and this one was quite easy to swing out of the way.  You can see the next lock in the distance, so Alice and Madu walked along to it! The towpath has generally been in good condition on this canal, certainly much better than on the Oxford Canal.

I like framing pictures through doors or window frames, and the handrail on the top gate of this lock made a good frame here I thought.

These trees were really elegant and we passed them at speed!  There's a lock called Woolhampton not far from Aldermaston which has a feed from the river joining just after you leave the lock going east. And very shortly after that, you come to a swing bridge which has a full blown road, albeit a minor road, going across it.  Someone has to leave the lock and go and open the bridge so that when the boat comes out of the lock it is alright that it goes like the clappers past this open swing bridge and not crash straight into a closed one!  The mechanism works with a key and has claxons, flashing lights and barriers.  What a sense of power! We didn't stop all that many cars - only from one direction because the cars from the other direction were all being held up at the level crossing for the railway 150 yards away!!  That was all very exciting.

And this is the last lock - the one at Aldermaston with that very unusual side structure.  We went down with another boat and one of their crew went to sort out the next lift bridge to find that there were time restrictions on it, so that you could not operate it between 5,00 and 5,30pm!  It seems to me the priorities are a bit confused!! 

However a little bit later you can see that we did make the bridge lift and came through to the boatyard where the staff had gone home for the night, but by moving two of the boats they have for sale along a bit we managed to make space for us to moor.  Alice and Madu joined us for dinner at the local pub, and then I drove them home.  There wasn't enough connectivity to get this uploaded last night, so I didn't write it then either!   Here it is though.

So we are now moored there until 9th September when we shall set off to bring the boat back to Northampton and to our mooring at Gayton.  We have some fixed points in the calendar for that trip - 15th September we have booked to go through the lock at Brentford off the tidal bit of the Thames and into the canal system.  We have then booked to stay at Paddington Basin for the nights16-20th September, inclusive, and plan to be home by the end of the month, so should have a fairly leisurely journey back up the Grand Union.  I will be contacting those of you who live along the Thames to suggest some times when we might meet! 

So on this trip we have done 74 miles, 6¼ furlongs and 92 locks from Aldermaston Lift Bridge No 28 to Keynsham Lock No 2.  And back again! We have been blessed with a significant amount of dry weather and quite often lovely sunshine.  We've had the company of 7 friends on board at various places along the route. So it's been a very successful 19 days and thank you so much for sharing it with us!