With the chores checked, and the chums chatted to, we were back on track travelling towards London. We had a very pleasant overnight stop at the 48 hour Shepperton VM. (Visitor mooring)
Sailed right past Hampton Court palace, (with a touch of envy at the boats moored there)
Through Kingston, where some modern architecture thought he was designing a cruise liner, its actually called the Admiralty building
And under Kingston Bridge. Eric had spent his teenage years around this area, so spent some time checking out his old cycle routes but found it so different from how he remembered it that it wasn’t fun.
And we moored up for the night at Teddington lock
Teddington locks mark the start (or end) of tidal reach for us. The locks are managed by the enviroment agency and transit needs to be booked and is timed to aid navigation go with the flow. We dutifully paid our mooring fee and set the alarms our passage for 7am the following morning.
It had been a long days cruise so we didn’t go far exploring, but I was quite excited to see a fully laden pear tree along the towpath, until I realised, it was also full of parakeets and all the pears had been “tested” we’ve been seeing and hearing these colourful pigeons since we reached Windsor, but I hadn’t been able to snap a photo of them until now because they fly so quickly and are so well camouflaged in the tree tops. Mind you we can certainly hear them. There have been parakeets living wild in the UK since victorian times but their numbers have increased drastically since the 1990s. In 2012 There were around 32000 in London, I suspect its a lot higher now, and it doesnt take a rocket scientist to wonder about the impact these birds will have on our native wildlife.
