There have been a couple of slalom hairy moments over the last few days. Reenie’s not really cut out for water flowing faster than – well, flowing at all, really. Having had about three days of tropical-except-without-the-warmth rain, yesterday we had a day of what turned out to be national news-level high winds. So navigating the last stretch of the Kennet bit of the Kennet & Avon turned out to be quite alarming: it’s a proper meandering river, with all the S-bends that impl

Today, we went through lock number 100 – and we started, when we left Bristol, through Hanham Lock, No. 1. So that’s a lorra lorra locks (as Cilla would say – well, she probably wouldn’t, but if she did, she might say it like that. And speaking of Cilla, I like to imagine that – when going through a lock – when it warns you of the Cill, that you could just add an ‘A’ to the end of it. The image of her emerging from the lock and saying ‘Surprise, Surprise, Chuck!’ amuses me gr

Having returned somewhat fuzzily from a wedding do on Saturday night (in Bristol), we made a little bit of progress – both along the canals and through our hangovers – on Sunday, ending up at Pewsey. Today, we pootled along to Bedwyn – and had to go down a flight of 11 or so locks. Having spent Friday going up Caen Hill and therefore up a pretty big hill, it feels almost like being cheated out of your altitude, having to come down all these locks again. Fortunately, we shared

We took on and won Caen Hill Locks yesterday – which was a marathon 35 in total. Once we got a system going though, draining the next one while the current lock lifted up 15 tonnes of boat, then we were quite quick at it. Paul and I did the initial six, then stopped to refuel ourselves with pasta – carbs are key for days like this – and then got through the first ten before our friend came to ably assist the rest…So that’s about 10% of the total locks to get to Leeds! Doing t

I’ll be blogging under the tag ‘Reenie’s Progress’ for our imminent journey to The North – Leeds, to be precise. It’s going to be a slow adventure: you can get there in about three-and-a-half hours by train, but it’s going to take us around six weeks. That’s how defunct we consider the rail network. Better late than never. On our way, I’ll be writing daily about our Inland Odyssey – as I’ve dubbed it – and the trials therein. It’s not going to take as long as Odysseus’ journe