Doesn't this thing go any faster?

Chaps, how are we all? Well, what a week we've had! Talk about a change of lifestyle! On Friday we finished emptying the house and loading up the car and eventually left Southampton. I think we did very well to get down to 1 car load from all the stuff we had in our house, how do you accumulate so much stuff?!!!

We picked the boat up in Berkhamstead at a place called Cow Roast Marina (funny name!). She's called Buffallo and she's lovely (it seems all boats are girls), there's more storage space than we thought there would be, particularly in the Kitchen where there are loads of big cupboards, so that's great.

Alex, the guy, who we are renting her from gave us a bit of info about how to use the boat and a run through on checking the engine and batteries and how to start the engine etc. And then we were on our own! It was so beautiful, helped by the fact that it was really sunny and warm.

The next morning, Saturday, I woke up early and went for a walk down the canal, it was just so peaceful and beautiful and there were loads of birds around. After breakfast we headed off for our first cruise on the boat, suffice to say its a lot harder than it looks! After a few attempts and after narrowly missing a couple of other boats we made it into our first lock:

We made it out in one piece which was a bonus. In the afternoon my parents came to visit us which was nice. When we came back to the boat after going out for a chinese with them we found the boat on a bit of a tilt because the water level had dropped, so it felt really strange trying to walk around the boat, made me feel a bit sick! We actually rang up british waterways because we didn't know if it was safe to stay on the boat with it tilted over and they said they would send an engineer to sort it out! All we know is that by the morning the water level was back to normal and we were able to get back on our way.

Memorable bits from Sunday included going into a lock in front of a pub where there was a group of guys sitting out having a drink and starting to open the 'paddles' to let the water out of the lock only to have it pointed out to us that we hadn't closed the gates behind us, so there wasn't much chance of the lock working! We also went into a lock that had an anti-vandal lock on it, so you couldn't let any water out of the lock without a British Waterways key, only to find that we didn't have a clue where our key was, so after sitting in the lock for a few minutes while we searched for the key, we had to retreat back out of the lock! Fortunately a guy from another boat very kindly offered to give us a lift back to the marina so we could buy another key, otherwise we would have had to walk for half an hour back to the marina. We ended up mooring in Berkhamsted and were absolutely knackered, its hard work this canal boating! We went to watch The Hangover in Hemel in the evening to relax (very silly, quite rude but very funny!)

On Monday Debs had to go into London for a meeting and I went to retrieve the car from Watford where we had optimistically parked it the day before and took it to Hemel which included a beautiful walk through Cassiobury Park, very pretty. Then we headed off again. We met a lovely couple called Ed and Jan who gave us lots of hints and tips and travelled with us on Ed's boat, makes locks much easier it turns out. They were really kind to us and even cooked us dinner, lovely people!

I had to go to work on Tuesday which was a bit of a nightmare as we hadn't quite made it to teddington as we'd planned, which I'd worked out was a distance of about 30 miles from berkhamstead, instead we'd made it to hemel hempstead, about 6 miles from berkhamsted! So I spent over 4 hours in the car on Tuesday getting to and from work in Winchester!

Today we headed into London to pick up Deb's contract for her new job and to meet up with John, Nom and Reuben which was really nice:

Oh yeh, our fridge doesn't work, so that's making things a bit interesting, oh well, we'll just have to keep eating out! ;-)

Wow that was a long post! Bye!