Thursday 1st July

We left Shepperton and went through the lock. Unfortunately somehow Richard got his bike (which is on a bike rack on the back of the boat) tangled up with a mooring pile and buckled the back wheel – so no cycling for him for a while. After Shepperton Lock we went past all the places I remember well and some of them that I had never seen from the water – it was very interesting. We stopped at Laleham for lunch and Richard came up with the idea of drilling a series of small holes in the 6mm steel hull using my old drill which somehow would become a hole for the washing machine waste. I think he managed about 9 holes before the drill ran out of power! Next we went through Staines – another place I had never seen from the river. We had hoped to moor up somewhere at Runnymede but they seem to have stopped all mooring there now so we kept going hoping that we would find somewhere round the next bend! After Old Windsor and Datchet we were getting rather worried that we wouldn’t find anywhere but eventually we arrived in Windsor and managed to find a mooring place on the Eton side of the river. It was a bit of a climb up to the bank but we sat out in the evening sunshine looking at the castle until dusk when Millie appeared for her evening sojourn!