Pilgrims' Progress

by MamaBear

How’s that for an inspirational title?
We have been home a week, and the blog has not had a look-in. The van battery had been recharged, the garden weeded and ready for spring planting, the summer clothes are organised, a photobook has been compiled (priorities, you know!), a few walks have been undertaken…..now to finish off this journey in blogland. For the sake of ease, I am going to type directly from my journal, which was written in a state of stupour on various trains and aeroplanes, but I will save you the agony of reading my theological thoughts about goings-on in Westminster Abbey and leave them in my paper journal!

Because we had turned the boat at the winding hole yesterday and moored at the wharf overnight we were able to have a relaxed start to the day. On waking everyone greeted each other with with cries of, “Only eighty hours til we’re back in bed!” Is it romantic optimisn that hopes everyone will do OK? I don’t expect complete absence of tears or grumpy faces or even exhausted exasperation, but if it can be contained to a low-grade stress level, I will be one happy Mama.
My hopes will be raised later on the bus when Mboy10 will tell us that he has a strategy for not getting too tired and grumpy; when he feels his eyes start closing “like this” (you gotta see his expression – one of dopey resignation with eyelids drooping downwards), he will turn off the movie or game and let himself fall asleep. Not a bad strategy if he manages to employ it. Sleeping BEFORE complete exhaustion would be even better and we may well suggest it, but it is encouraging to see his intention to self-regulate his behaviour wisely.
We will also be impressed at the way everyone takes our advice on the plane with regards to water. They will all prove to be very responsible with staying hydrated, limiting juice intake and almost totally restricting fizzy (only a couple slipped through the gaps on that score).
But first there’s the last day.
We check out of boat, miss the train from Aldermaston by two minutes (the place must be jinxed!), wait an hour and head towards Reading on the next one. We don’t even try to make the connection to London! Not because we thought we’d fail (again), but because we’d decided to take the short stroll up the high street (actually called Broad Street) to get foodie provisions. Old and new stand side by side, in fact new seems to squeeze inside the old. Buildings are old with modern interiors and signage. Broad Street is a wide (broad?) pedestrian precinct lined with shops….take an escalator up from teh street and you find yourself surprisingly in a large open mall. Thankfully for us it provided some seats ot perch on to eat our last lunch in shelter from the unforecast but persistent drizzle.
Arriving back in London at Paddingtom Station, the first priority was to find the statue of Paddington Bear! It was smaller than most of us had expected, but satisfying to see and touch nonetheless, especially for the Short People, who are delighted by his antics.

We had entertained thoughts of going to Covent Garden to eat, but our packs were heavy (with chocolate and Marmite!) and quite frankly it seemed too far to be worth it! Instead we took the direct route across Hyde Park (cue squirrels and more threatening drizzle) towards the coach station we would leave from later. Having scouted out a place for dinner, the young souvenir-hunters took an age to decide on their London purchase, and we raced to Westminster Abbey for evensong.

My oh my, what a building. It soars majestically up to the heavens. The stained glass windowns hold your eyes captive. The hundreds-of-years-old memorials to dear departed ones engage your emotions. The flagstones underfoot are worn smooth. You notice Wilberforce, Isaac Newton, William Pitt, Faraday – and that’s just the beginning. We cannot “sightsee” as we are there for a “service only”, but there is plenty of opportunity to soak up much as we walk up the side aisle to be seated, as we sit listening, as we walk still-awed out again afterwards. The service was similar in many respects to the one at St Pauls – choir, prayers, readings, lessons, pomp and circumstance. Yet it was different too. Sadly there were no hymns for congregational singing, it was shorter, the organ was not played as impressively.
From where we were sitting we could not see the choirboys, but we had seen them file out after their pre-service practice, all dressed in red robes with white ruffled collars. I couldn’t help, but think of a poem I had read about them (and now cannot lay my hands on – anyone know it? first stanza about an angel in the choirstall, second stanza about a ragamuffin slipping out the back door – both about the same boy), and I wondered what out-of-abbey life consists of for each of them.
It was a fitting way to end our time (note to self: refrain from typing out pages of questioning treatise and move on to dinner)….maybe not quite “end”, we still have to linger over a pizza-pasta-salad buffet before checking in at Victoria Coach Station late at night, where the attendant was incredibly friendly and went out of her way to speak to the driver to ensure we boarded the bus first. She even physically restrained someone else who tried to sneak in before us! While embarrassed at the singling out, with such a long haul ahead, we were grateful for the privilege and claimed seats all together at the very front of the high bus, which had the added advantage of plenty of legroom. Although there would be an hour’s break at border control at some undisclosed hour after midnight (including removing packs from bus and having them x-rayed), and then the semi-excitement of going through the Chaneel Tunnel, everyone did *some* dozing, and some got a decent one.

It’s interesting how the mind plays tricks on you.
After a week on the boat (in spite of the rolling not being significant and in spite of getting off to walk every day) some of us ended up with a drunkard loll around London with the pavenment swaying all over the place. That much we had expected.
What we did not expect was to drift off to sleep on the bus, wake with a start and see the canal ahead with a set of lock gates. I immediately reached down to the floor to put my shoes on quickly so that I would be ready to jump off and work the gate. My shoes were done up before I realised I was on a bus and the canal was actually a rain-soaked motorway – the lock was the back of a truck in the distance.
A couple of hours later Jboy16 would wake and see two gates straight ahead and also think they were lock gates. And Grandpa would confess he’d had a similar experience in the night – but instead of boats passing us on the water, they turned out to be cars. FatherBear still insists he saw many canals!

Thursday 16 October
6am we arrive at Charles de Gaulle Airport. There’s half an hour of excitement as the bus gets stuck at the bottom of a ramp, another bus wedged in behind and and a long string of impatient honking taxis all the way up the ramp to the main road. We are facing two gates (the ones Jboy16 thought were lock gates!), anda cherry picker parked in the way is preventing our passage. Eventually both busses end up reversing the length of the ramp and finding a different route!
CDG is a huge sprawling airport and so we took a shuttle to the right terminal….where…somewhat amazingly we alighted outside the very desk we would have to check in at; we could ended up at any of fifty counters stretched down the elongated hall.
Organic blueberry yoghurt with a hint of lime, nutty muesli and fair trade bananas made a delicious wake-up breakfast before needing to check in. (I remembered how the kids had objected to washing our bowls in the toilets when we left NZ on the first trip…..now they think nothing of it).
Kgirl13 was clearly tired at this point and looked with little interest on FatherBear’s equally tired and silly antics! At least everyone else was still smiling, and FatherBear *really* was.
I wonder why there are so many posters of the Eiffel Tower in the duty free shops we tramp past and realise we are in Paris, not London! Evidently I’m a bit tired too.
We had thought there might not be much sleeping on the first eleven hour leg to Los Angeles as it was a daytime journey, but everyone managed to doze or sleep enough to keep spirits high. (In retrospect, we would have encouraged everyone to really try to sleep instead of movie-watch this leg, but hindsight is a wonderful thing is it not? With two seats each we should have made better use of them, especially as the following two planes would turn out to be completely full.)
With about three hours to go ERgirl6 started asking somewhat persistently when dinner would be. On reflection, we realised her internal body clock was telling her it was well past bedtime and she ought to have eaten by now! However, it’s not like there had been no food – after the hot lunch there had been a constant supply of focaccia sandwiches, snack bags and macaroons available for the taking, along with neverending beverages. All the same, it was a beaming delighted little girl who came back from a walk with one of the flight attendants – she’d been taken to the business class galley and given two enormous plates of dessert. I must say the passionfruit cheesecake with a layer of choclate in the base was very very good!

looking down on Greenland

And then……the turbulence started. And went on. And on. And on. And got worse. And went on some more.
“When we get over these mountains it should pass.”
“When we get past the thermals above the desert it should pass.”
“When we get over these mountains it should be better.”
We were right the last time – there was nowhere else to go as we were at LAX! A number of our party (and not only kids) felt sick. Tgirl8 couldn’t even touch her meal that arrived in the midst of it all. ERgirl6′s drink spilt with one of the more violent turns. I lost my footing in the toilet and stumbled back to my seat holding on to others’ seats as I went. A bit more excitement than anyone wanted and it did not serve to make time go faster! Finally we touched down in LA and breathed a collective sigh of relief. Everyone else transferring to Tahiti was due to leave in just a few hours and they were herded through to the windowless dingy transit lounge. We had been squeezed on a different flight and could not bear the thought of sitting in that room for nine hours and so we went through the process of customs, collecting bags, transferring them on, changing some money….and we headed to Santa Monica Beach.

Zombie-like we wandered. Tgirl8, Mboy10 and Lboy11 had fallen asleep on the bus, and now they were not interested in the beach at all (although the fresh air was pleasant).
“Oh look at the sea, it’s so far away across the sand, let’s lie down here on the grass.” And they did.

The others wandered down to the pier, which was strongly reminiscent of Brighton – roller coaster, big swings, merrry-go-round (none of which were attractive to our still-turbulent tummies), and lots of people strolling.

It was an interesting assortment of folks. A drunk guy looking for a light for his cigarette ended up stealing another man’s fag. A man was pushing a tandem. There were groups of young people hanging out. Families. Homeless. Fat people. Skinny people. Black. Tanned. An old lady with a cane. Runners. Walkers. A lady tottering in six inch high heels. And on the corner were three guys with a snake and three parrots (one each of red, white and blue). I’m not quite sure what they were up to. They didn’t do a show or anything, but did talk amongst themselves loudly with a colourful and very limited vocabulary.
The sun, an orange ball, sank down to the sea. It was a deep sunset, a beauty that I was aware we were not really appreciating.

Then back on the bus to the airport ERgirl6 lost the plot. She whined and kicked and pushed and argued for the entire trip and then settled completely upon our arrival (thank goodness). Then it was Mboy10′s turn to refuse to do what he was told to (which very unreasonably of us was to tell him to sit down for a rest!) He went through the security checks with a face like thunder. (Speaking of security checks….ERgirl6 and Kboy15 were both chosen by the beeping twinkling machine for random drug tests, and when Tgirl8 presented a cast, she too was taken off for testing!) We still had a couple of hours until boarding and so everyone lay down on seats or on the floor and SLEPT.

Jgirl18 suffered from her usual exhaustion response – crying out and sobbing inconsolably as she failed to be able to wake herself from a bad dream (strangely enough this one was being in a canalboat that was sinking and she could not get out – she was quite distraught). Apparently. I didn’t notice as she was a) across the other side of the departure lounge and b) my spot on the floor was confortable enough to allow sleep to overtake me completely for the first time.
Kids staggered to their seats on the plane and the ParentBears took control. No movies or games or anything for at least five hours. They could eat the meal, but apart from that they ought to try to sleep.
I was the only one still awake for the midnight takeoff! Tgirl8 did not get to her first meal until half an hour before the second one arrived!
Given that we had been on the go for over fifty hours before any significant meltdown occurred, I think they’d all done really well.

Wednesday 17 October
It could have been a disaster. ERgirl6 was sleeping very uncomfortably with her head falling into the aisle and being knocked by passers-by. I knew she would not last long in that position, and if she did, she’d wake feeling very sore. So I made the executive decision to swap seats with her so she could lean against me. Well, when you wake a hibernating bear (because, of course, she did wake despite my best efforts to move her slowly and unobtrusively), don’t expect a pretty sight. She kicked the seat in front half a dozen times and my heart sank. When we had arrived at the airport after her bus trip antics, I had sat outside with her until she settled. I could hardly take her outside now. Lacking a guarantee that it would work, but with very limited options available at 36,000 feet, I did up her seatbelt, told her to sit still, gave her permission to stay awake (but not move or disturb anyone else – the rest of the plane was sleeping) and ignored her. She fell asleep, spread over me and stayed that way for five hours. Whenever I was tempted to wish I could get comfortable I considered how she could be awake and making a scene. Any contemplations of slaking my thirst were quenched when I thought of the performance that might ensue. When she woke there were just three more hours to endure.

At this point the journal scratchings peter out. I don’t remember when we arrived in Papeete….yes, it must have been dawn as it was still darkish. I lay down and went to sleep, dreaming inevitably perhaps that I was on a swaying canalboat. Evidently FatherBear managed to have a shower. It appears the latter served as better refreshement than the former!

My journal records the barest of details:

Thursday 18 October
We leave Papeete on Wednesday, but it is already Thursday in New Zealand. We’ll be crossing the International Dateline and losing a day.
(Actually I went on to record six pages of post-trip(almost) reflections ranging from whether I’d do it like this again, long distance walking, canalboating versus motorhoming and camino thoughts.) But this post is already long enough.

All that is required now is to say that after a delightfully short five final hours hours on the plane we arrived early afternoon on Thursday, kind friends picked us up from the airport, we got home and started churning through the mountains of washing, and managed to stay up until……OK so we didn’t make it to anywhere near bedtime as we had intended – the youngest kids were asleep by 6 and the last of us tumbled into sweet bed at not quite 7pm. The next few nights would get later by only a small increment each time, we would wake at 4:30 but refuse to get out of bed….and then suddenly after a week, we’d find ourselves adjusted. We’re just glad it was much quicker going the other way and we were not struggling for our entire time in Paris!

The End.

Our final day in London will be spent catching the train from Aldermaston back to London. Evensong at Westminster Abbey.

Overnight bus from London to Paris CDG Airport
Midday flight to Los Angeles
9 hour stop-over in LA – hoping to get to Santa Monica
Flight to Tahiti
3 hour transit in Tahiti
Flight to Auckland

So we leave the canal boat at 9 am Monday morning, and arrive back in Auckland 1pm Thursday. It WILL be memorable I am sure!

Final post when we feel human again after a loooong set of sleeps back in our own beds

PROMISE: this post will be updated!!!! MamaBear journalled the trip back, so nothing will be forgotten. We are just trying to recover right now and it’s taking a tad longer than we expected (though we have weeded the jungle turning it into a vege garden ready for spring planting)
Photos and stories to follow…..

by MamaBear

Last day on the canal.
Sorry, but we have to discuss the weather before proceeding any further. (This is England you know, and if you discuss nothing else, you do talk about the weather….at least that is the stereotype and it is what we have experienced). Anyway, today’s weather was significant on two counts. Firstly, at 8:45am it was MINUS one degree Celsius. COLD! Look – there was even ice on the boats:

The other significant factor is that this was our first day in England in two weeks in which it DID NOT RAIN AT ALL. Sure, yesterday was sunny – but there was a hailstorm that completely saturated some of us. But today the sun shone all day. It was cold and we were amazed at the number of people sitting outside pubs all rugged up in layers of clothing (we, too, were wearing long johns and thermal tops!), and we can only surmise that Brits are a hardier bunch than we are! You won’t find too many Kiwis sitting outside when the mercury in the thermometer has not quite reached double digits, but I guess when you don’t get a lot of sun, you make the most of it…and all the riverside pubs were busy busy busy this Sunday afternoon.

Traffic ON the water was also much more noticeable. Over the week we have met and shared locks with just half a dozen different boats and have only met a couple of boats coming the other way. Today we were constantly passing boats coming at us, at times had to wait for locks, and never used one without another companion boat. This also provided us with opportunity to take photos of passing boats – as per a reader’s request!
So here you go…..boat spotted downstream:

…getting closer now…

…and about to pass…

It’s a good thing we didn’t meet on this stretch:

We had a number of locks to pass through – in fact, in the thirty or so kilometres we went upstream, we met a lock on average every kilometre – yes that means, we’ve done sixty of them! And to remind ourselves, we photographed the process at one lock the other day (the very astute observer will work out there are two different photographers as everyone features in the pics):

If you click on the picture you will be taken to the folder and if you then click “Newer” quickly you’ll feel yourself approaching the lock, going down as the water empties out and then coming out the other side of the bridge! – sorry we can’t use slideshow-making-technology right now!)

And finally we get back to the first bridge, the one where we get to stop traffic on a main road, and even on a Sunday afternoon there were over a dozen cars in each direction and twenty-off pedestrians who had to wait for the two boats to pass:

Little kids ended the day trying to fish with a safety pin and some sausage. In our adult minds they were not really fishing, and so it was fine for them to do without a license, but how do we explain this justification to them without ruining their enjoyment of what they thought was the Real Deal?….especially in light of Mboy10’s journal entry from the other day which read: “I am kinda sad that we haven’t been fishing, but I guess we’re only obeying the law.”

(I wonder why he came in saying he was cold!)

by MamaBear

“It’s surely not summer holidays yet?” we are frequently asked. Cue quizzical expression on enquirer’s face. No, it’s not, but these kids don’t go to school anyway. However, they are not short on learning.

Architecture…

Boat-handling skills…

Bridge engineering….(as well as comparing these to the French and Spanish bridges, we’ve been reading the informative plaques – the brick one was designed and built in 1799)

Photography….

by Jboy16

by Kgirl13

History…GrandpaBear explains the pillboxes we frequently pass:
”During the second world war when France, Holland and Belgium were all occupied by Germans, who were preparing to invade England, we needed to prepare defences. Firstly the beaches were covered with barbed wire and all manner of things to keep invaders out. The second line of defence was the canal system running across the south of England. It was to act as a deterrent for easy progress of troops, supplies, guns etc. The plan was to blow up bridges and several hundred pillboxes were installed along the north side of the river/canal.” Later GrandpaBear also throws in some Geography….most of the landscape is almost Dutch-flat, but there was one hill 300 feet high and he knowingly pointed out to everyone nearby that it is the highest spot in southern England…

Seasons……(four in one day here – we started with a wintery mist hovering over the water and an almost-freezing temperature, sun emerged for a few hours, but was chased away by rain that turned to hail as we were negotiating a swing bridge with hand-operated barriers, and sometimes the sun-dappled leaves looked springlike, other times obviously autumnal)….

winter

spring

summer blue sky

autumn

Lifestyle choices…..

(or maybe that picture could be called “jigsaw puzzle design”)

Exercise (we have walked lots of the towpath)…

And the biggie that non-homeschoolers often get concerned about:
SOCIALISATION

here they are fishing
(that is to say, they’d like to be,
but have to be satisfied with pretending to as we do not have a license)…

And finally….

from Lboy11’s journal:

Today as we arrived at the third lock a man who had been sharing the locks with us showed us an American signal crayfish, which is considered a pest. They are constantly breeding and have no reproductive cycle. It is LAW to kill them (you can eat them). The man let me kill it.

Well that’s the important detail, is it not?! The reason there is a law prohibiting you returning the crays to the water alive is that they are such a problem – they eat the native fish eggs and the large ones even eat ducklings, and more disastrously they burrow into the banks and cause the canal sides to fall in. They are costing the country millions of pounds as a concerted effort is underway to rid the streams, rivers, canals and ponds of these destructive  varmints and repair the extensive damage they have caused. Many of the canalboaters travel equipped with nets and buckets, and find the crayfish make very good eating (after at least half an hour sitting in fresh water). Today’s was too small, and so the honour of extermination went to whoever was willing to write about it later!

Biology and ecology done.

What happens when you are cruising down the canal which is approximately 25 or 30 feet wide and want to turn your 70 foot canal boat around to head home? Until yesterday this was just a theoretical question, but we had hit our half-way point and needed to spin around to head back east to Aldermaston. We knew we would need to look for one of these semi-circular arrow-squiggles on the map which indicated a "winding hole" on the river. Good start!

A winding hole is an area of the canal or river where there is a scallop carved out of the bank, or sometimes where a side "tributary" canal joins, or perhaps a weir to the main canal. Regardless, there should be a minimum of 75 feet of turning space unless otherwise specified, which gives us just under a couple of meters to spare. As we approached the W.H. our strategy was simple – stick close to one bank of the canal and then slow down before hauling fully on the tiller… at some point engage reverse to slow ourselves down completely. As the bow neared the opposite bank, Jboy16 would jump off with a rope and help pull us through 90 degrees to finish the turn. That was the plan, and that was (somewhat surprisingly!) exactly what we did!  Admittedly it did take us more than five minutes to fully turn around and we sure stirred up plenty of mud . Turning complete – only one more to do at the very end as the boat company ask that the boat be returned to the dock pointing upstream!

starting to pull over

tugging hard, hoping we’ll make it (in the rain)

mud!

As mentioned, we also spent some time looking around the town of Hungerford, a small town of approximately 5000 residents that was a bustling canal town in the 1830s. The canal between Newbury and Bath was proposed and designed back in 1788 by a group of Hungerford "gentlemen" who thought that the canal would bring prosperity to the town. Barges of stone, brick, timber, tiles, coal, manure and peat ash were ferried up and down the canal until the early 1900s when the railway gradually replaced the canal as the preferred means of transport.

These days, the town is a typical small English town – and even more typical today as it was shrouded in a light fog that hid the sun from view all morning. However, there is a fantastic collection of antique shops through the town which actually captured all of our interests with their range of ancient instruments, tools, pots, carriage and boat parts, post boxes and all other unimaginable but interesting bits and pieces! The local butcher’s shop also looked fantastic with traditional sausages, fresh whole pigeon, guinea fowl, partridge, grouse and venison. We decided to stop by the butcher tomorrow on our way downstream to buy some handmade sausages for dinner!

After our near-miss yesterday, I thought it beneficial for all to do a quick dummies guide on how to safely operate a lock! Not that we are experts by any stretch of the imagination.. but we have operated over thirty so far, but all of these have been going upstream which is easier than going down we are told. Of course, the locks are used to join different sections of the canal which are at different water-levels (different heights). Sometimes the difference is only a meter or so, sometimes the water level differs between the two sections by more than two and a half of metres.

The first task when approaching a lock is to look for the white mooring bollards which are always provided near the lock. We typically tie up at these to allow the lock-operators off the boat, and also to allow all the kids to get off the boat (so they are not on board if anything goes wrong!). You also need the boat to wait here until the lock has been emptied and the lock gates opened for you. Going upstream, you bring the bow of the boat into the side first. allow the front rope handler to jump off and get a rope ready to go around a bollard… then slow the boat down and bring the stern in alongside the siding so the rear rope handler can jump off and get a rope around a second bollard – and then tie off both ropes.

The lock operators walk up to the lock and firstly check there isn’t another boat waiting to use the lock upstream. Given the all clear, you then need to empty the lock. Each lock has two pairs of gates, and the water between the two gates is the lock itself. If the lock is full of water, emptying it simply means opening the paddles on  lower lock gate whilst the top gates are shut. The paddles are small sliding sections of the lock which let water flow through while the lock gates are still shut. The paddles are operated by using a pair of winding arms which are stored on each boat. The paddles are easy to raise, but lowering them on some requires you release a ratchet and manually hold it open whilst slowly winding the paddle down in a controlled fashion. Not easy for little arms to do.

Once the lock is empty, the paddles can be closed again and the lock gates can be opened by heaving with all your might against the gate arms. The gates are HEAVY, and it takes a good bit of shoving to open them! Once the gates are open, the boat can be carefully manoeuvred into the lock – after the rope handlers have untied both bow and stern ropes and the front rope handler has given the bow a good shove towards the middle of the river (not easy with a boat 70 feet long!).

You can’t go racing into the lock because you need to carefully stop BEFORE you hit the cill on the upstream pair of lock gates. The cill is the concrete base of the lock gates which is exposed when the lock is empty. In actual fact, the real danger is when coming downstream to avoid having the stern of the boat over the cill when the lock is emptied. If you do this, the rear of the boat catches on the cill and tips the bow of the boat under water. Not recommended!
With a boat our size, we often have to bring the bow of the boat right up to the cill in order to be able to close the lock gates behind it. We have two rope handlers in the boat front and rear who throw ropes up to two more rope catchers on the bank besides the lock. The rope catchers put the rope around a bollard front and rear, then pass the ropes back down to the rope handlers in the boat so they can keep tension on the ropes to secure the boat in the lock. Much easier than it sounds .

With both lock gates shut, and the boat positioned in the lock between them, the trickiest part of the operation commences – flooding the lock. This is done by opening the flood paddles on the upstream lock gates. Some locks have paddles that are below the water line even when the lock is empty so flooding is easy. Many locks have the paddles directly above the cill – which means that the water bounces off the cill when the paddles are opened – threatening to pour into the bow of your boat as we found out yesterday! (and another boat user discovered last week when their boat did sink). The trick is to position your boat as far away from the cill as possible, and open the paddles SLOWLY!

When the lock is full (which takes three or four minutes or even longer if you are going really slowly!), you can then open the upstream lock gates, cast off the ropes and motor to the bollards on the other side of the lock to pick up all crew. Simple eh? YEAH RIGHT. Not the first few times, although by lock 30 we are getting pretty good, although I wouldn’t like to do this with only a crew of two!

Tgirl8′s journal entry from today:
In locks you can go very close to the cill. If you go too close to the cill you will have to let the water into the lock very slowly, and if you let the water out too fast you can very easily sink the boat and if the boat does start to sink you need to get on the roof in two minutes. If the boat does not sink you will not need to use these instructions!

“Do I get onto the roof? Do I get onto the roof?” Jgirl18 shouted with a tone of panic growing in her voice.
“Jaala, get on the roof NOW,” MamaBear shouted, or perhaps even screamed. Ordinarily screaming does not help in an emergency, but in order to be heard above the roaring torrent of water cascading into the bow section where Jgirl18 was standing the boat the instruction giver resorted to LOUD. Panic SLOWLY, the boat hire trainer had told us. I am not sure how slow we had been
Jgirl18 has no recollection of asking the questions, but she jumped onto the roof like a scalded cat (giving herself a decent bruise in the process) all the while heroically holding on to the end of the rope that was tethering the bow section, and FadaBear pulled the boat back so that the bow section was no longer under the deluge rushing into the lock. It was all over in less than fifteen seconds, but those seconds had ticked by very slowly, and in the process we gained a first hand lesson in lock safety.

It had all started when we edged our 70 foot boat into what appeared to be a 74 foot lock. There certainly was no room to spare, and to complicate matters further, this lock had flood paddles that were actually in the lock gate themselves. This means that when you open them to flood the lock, the stream of water often bounces off the cill (the flat concrete base at the bottom of the lock gates) and fountains upwards. This lock had been more extreme than the others, and we had even taken pictures of the fountaining streams of water that arced in front of the bow of the boat – safely in front of the boat at first….

This lock we had changed over responsibilities, so the older boys were on paddle duty and the two girls were on rope duties. This subtle change, combined with the high risk lock flood paddles provided just the variables for near disaster. As the lock fills with water, the boat often surges around the lock unless securely roped off around the bollards along the side of the lock, and the people on rope duty need to continually take up the slack from ropes which is introduced as the boat rises with the water in the lock. This time, the inexperienced ropers didn’t manage to keep the ropes taught, and so the boat started to surge forward. This was not really a problem at first as we only had the paddles open a crack, so water was spraying into the bow but not enough to pose any real threat. One of the boys on the paddles was asked to close the paddle completely so that the water spraying into the bow would stop. However, inexperience meant that the paddle was actually opened wider instead of being closed off. Suddenly, the inconvenient spray turned into a rushing torrent of water that was surging directly into the bow section of the boat, buffeting Jgirl18 and threatening to swamp the boat. We were told you have two minutes until the boat sinks in these circumstances – not a statistic we wanted to test. FadaBear jumped on the end of the middle tether rope and managed to pull the boat back in the lock within a few seconds, and the torrent of water stopped coming into the boat. There were some very nervous and shaken-up pilgrims – poor ERgirl6 was a bit frightened by the whole episode and the emergency-toned shouts that were being made! It all gave us a very good object lesson as to why we get everyone off the boat for lock passing, and why we only have one person giving instructions at locks! Thankfully we didn’t end up in any real danger.. and we will certainly be keeping our wits about us for future locks! Given that we typically pass through ten locks a day this will be most of the time .

all smiles in the end!

by Ella-Rose aged 6 (copied directly from her journal in which she had dictated the following)

Being on a canalboat is like being on kayaks because it’s skinny. Canalboats are always skinny so that they can fit in the locks. Locks are hard to open and it’s hard to wind the metal sort of thing. Mummy helped me do that. Then Tessa and I opened the swing bridge all by ourselves. It was hard too, but we pushed with all our might.

by FadaBear

I am officially the captain of the Bewicks Swan, a 70 foot canal boat. This beauty has a top speed of (I estimate) 8-10 mph, however the speed limit on the section of the Kennet canal is 4 mph (officially). It is powered by a sweet and reliable (so far!) Isuzu marine diesel which throbs away not-so-quietly under your feet as you pilot the behemoth down the canal, shaking the tiller roughly in your hand. We gained control of the vessel after a quick walk through the boat with general operating instructions (how to operate the toilets and not flood the bathroom, how to drain the showers, how to fill the water tanks etc). Then general operation of the controls and motor… then we had an hour’s hands-on training as we motored up the canal with a technician on board, showing us the ins and outs of operating the swing bridges, and opening and closing the locks without sinking the boat! Simple really! I mean, how much damage can one really do with a 70 foot stell vessel LOL!!!! There were a few anxious moments that first hour cruising, but “no worries mate!”.

The Bewicks Swan is a 12 berther – 4 single bunks fore and aft, and two double beds (or can be configured as two single) mid-ship. It can be configured with two decent sized tables (although we manage to all squeeze around one!) There are two bathrooms, each with toilet, shower and washbasin. Not palatial, but waaaay more room than in a motorhome! It has a decent galley – 4 burner fast hob, gas oven, microwave and full size sink, and more bench space than some apartments I know! There is also a surprising amount of storage under bunks and in several large cupboards and wardrobes. The passageway that winds its way from fore to aft is mostly single-track riding only!… no passing expect at passing bays which are the bathrooms and the central cabin areas. Ella-Rose was right, just like living in a kayak! Still, we are VERY comfortable! Just as well, as this will be our home for the next week, and the weather forecast is typical England… so we might have quite a few hours below decks! Thankfully today was fine, and we have started to perfect (?!) our lock-opening-closing technique – but more of that in a later post! Nine locks in total today, and no mishaps at all!

better pics to come hopefully!

by MamaBear

London to Aldermaston (Borough to Paddington on the tube in rush hour, Paddington to Reading on a train, then we missed the connection to Aldermaston by a few seconds ….we watched the train pull out of the station), Aldermaston to Woolhampton by canalboat

When you travel to England you do not make plans that are weather-dependent. Did you ever hear anyone say you need sun to have a picnic?
Last time we were in these parts we had a wonderful sunny afternoon with family in Alton. When they heard we would be back this way they suggested we get together again; we optimistically suggested a picnic at Aldermaston Wharf before we picked up the canalboat and they graciously agreed to make the trip to meet us. They even ordered the weather.

It didn’t rain. No, no. no. Not rain. It wasn’t even drizzling according to the cousins. Well, not much anyway. And to be fair, it wasn’t until we had almost finished eating that we needed to pack away the coleslaw to prevent it drowning. Thankfully we were wearing our raincoats – not that it was raining or anything. But it WAS cold! We don’t usually go for picnics in 12 degrees Celsius at home. And certainly not in the drizzle. We ended up sheltering under a tiny verandah…..and it was lovely (make that first syllable rhyme with “put” as in “put the umbrella up”) to catch up with GrandpaBear’s father’s sister’s boys and their wives. But just quietly, between you and us, it was wet. Wet and grey.

no, this is not lens distortion! This baby is 70 foot long!

”You chose a lovely day for it,” (remember to say lovely the right way!) as a runner along the towpath called out to us soon after we had set off. I guess there’s a reason the shoulder season for boats started this week….but from what we hear, the summer wasn’t all that different!

Don’t make plans that are weather-dependent in England. How bad could a canalboat be in the rain? we had cheerfully wondered from the comfort of our study in front of a computer screen showing a happy couple on a sunny waterway….
We set off in a steady drizzle that slowly soaked us through and froze our extremities (feet, hands and noses). Eagerly anticipating descending the stairs to the warm haven below, the bigger members of the party stood stoically outside ready to man the locks and control the bridges. In the short hop from the wharf there were a lock and tilt bridge to learn the ropes on and then another lock and swing bridge far enough away that the steerage crew had worked out how to stay in the middle of the canal to practise on before mooring for the night.
For me, standing stationary outside in the cold and wet was as miserable as the wet day on the Camino had been for others (I preferred cold-and-moving and did not mind being wet when walking). Only this day was not to end in a warm Pension; the heaters would not work! Thankfully the duvets and blankets made for a snuggly night.

Did I say something about weather-dependent plans? We had booked the canalboat with a view to travelling up the Thames to Oxford. It was a wry smile the guy in the office gave us as he brought up the warnings page on the computer screen…..apart from two short sections, the whole of the Thames route is “red boarded” due to flooding. Red board is a bit like a red light, the only difference being you have to wait 24 hours before proceeding once it has been removed. And 48 hours of no rain would be required to get the flood levels down enough….what’s the weather forecast? Sunny for the whole of England except the southwest. Guess where we are! And we only have a week! So there’s no way we’ll be heading to Oxford, and we can’t go to Windsor Castle either. We’ll head westwards instead and visit Newbury, Hungerford, maybe even Pewsey; places we’d never heard of before today! If we had an extra week we’d even make it to Bath and back…and some big kids who were previously eager to get home were overheard wondering why we couldn’t stay for just another week

Although we are supposedly staring at showers for the next two days, we’re not too despondent; if there’s one thing we’ve learnt about weather forecasting in Britain, it’s that it’s even more unreliable than in New Zealand! We suspect they predict rain every day and then if the sun breaks through everyone thinks it’s a bonus! We’ll see what the morning brings (I can tell you now it will not be sunshine, but the clouds will have lightened and a technician will come out to work his magic and fix the radiators!)

This former royal residence is a magnificent display of the extravagance and opulence of the royal court – particularly under King Henry VIII. The young children all eagerly donned Tudor gowns and we firstly wandered through the royal kitchens. This took some time as the kitchens consist of over 50 rooms and three cellars, and were often preparing over 600 meals per day back in the 16th Century, going through 1240 oxen, 8200 sheep, 2330 deer, 760 calves, 1870 pigs and 53 wild boar in a single year! That sure is meat-lover’s heaven! The kitchens were matched by an even more impressive banqueting hall which could seat 300 at a time. When you are the guest of the King, the amount of meat you ate was the measure of the kingdom’s might! Today at Hampton Court they had a “live day” in the kitchens and we were able to talk with the staff, who shared numerous interesting insights into the workings of the kitchens, Tudor pie recipes, how to use a quill pen and the importance of the potato in helping industrialise England (one particularly enthusiastic historian clearly got a bit chronologically sidetracked sharing information!)

Back in the day, the way to impress your guests was of course to build a lavish palace with a large, sprawling entrance courtyard; pair it with an equally large and impressive entry stairwell … and match it by hanging a clock off the palace walls. Not just any clock, but a LARGE clock! Hampton Court Palace has it all. Oh, and throw in a well-manicured sprawling estate, with its own maze, tennis court and lake…

We certainly have learned a ton of English history in the last week. As GrandpaBear commented today, “I have learned more English history in the last week than in all my years at school.” Visiting the place “where it all happened” is a great way to interact with history. Talking with passionate historians is both educational and inspirational. As is watching costumed roleplays, which have been carefully scripted to inform as well as entertain. Seeing people wearing costumes, which previously had been nothing more than frilly pictures in books, really brings the time alive. However, impressive as Hampton Court was, it just confirmed what a ratbag Henry VIII actually was (as if the tower of Tower of London visit hadn’t done that already ).

One day wasn’t really enough to take it all in, but that sums up our week in London. So much to do, so little time! We have thoroughly enjoyed our time in the capital, but we are really looking forward to a quiet week on the canal boat motoring along the Thames. One day, we may need to come back to London again!