We’re not making much progress

All day long, some wonderful old working boats have been coming by. They were, I’ve been told, at Rickmansworth over the Bank Holiday weekend, and are now making their way North to their next destination, Crick Boat Show maybe, for further North?

It seems like, the closer we get to London, the slower our progress. But the lock-mile calculation of 3 lock miles per hour (20 minutes for either one mile or one lock) has always held true. We’ve planned some very long journeys on this principle, and it’s always got us to where we wanted to be when we’d planned to arrive.

There are frequent locks on the Grand Union, close enough together so that one of us is constantly on the toe path walking to the next lock. They’re deep double locks, so it takes time to fill them and get through them. So, although we’ll be cruising for hours, we might only have moved on a few miles.

We stayed overnight in Hemel Hempstead yesterday, after only three hours cruising. Mostly because Steve needed a new pair of binoculars after dropping ours into the bilges. We walked a couple of miles to the supermarket on a busy road, before realising that we could have done the journey along the canal, and through some lovely nature reserves. The traffic noise really got to me yesterday and I realised that we’ve been spending the last few weeks in glorious rural isolation.

Hemel Hempstead is where Steve and I first lived for a couple of months after getting married, and where I briefly made a fool of myself as a photographic model. It’s also where Steve decided to form his first company, so it holds some fond memories for us.