Country: England
Distance travelled:
Weather: no rain but no blue skies either

It was a bit of a mad rush to finish off our packing this morning. We were on the move fairly early though, and made it back to Twyford Wharf only 15 minutes late. It didn’t seem to bother Colin, the owner though, as he was busy preparing their other boat, Cheiftan, for her next voyage. We moored Conqueror against Cheiftan and made a bucket line to move all our belongings to shore.

While Mark and I were stashing our things back in the Van, we discovered that we had no fresh water anymore. Since we had filled the tank up to the brim before embarking on our narrow boat adventure, we had to assume that the forecast frost last night caused the temperature sensor on the boiler to dump it all. This is a protective measure to stop water in the boiler freezing and damaging the pipes. I’m so glad we found out before we had gone too far. Colin kindly let us fill up from one of their tanks.

Colin and Mike refilled the fuel tanks on Conqueror and it turned out we had used £100 of fuel. We must have covered quite a distance unless it was the heating which was also run on desiel. Mind you it was so cold some mornings I wasn’t going to go without the heating no matter what the cost. I don’t care anyway, I had a great time and loved every minute. We gave Colin copies of the best of our photos for him to use on his website for further advertising, I hope they help.

From Twyford Wharf, we headed into Banbury to find a laundromat. The only place we could locate had absolutely nowhere nearby where Mark felt comfortable parking our fairly large vehicle and more suitable spots didn’t start appearing until we were quite a distance from the laundromat itself. Disdaining to lug our dirty washing around the streets, we headed off in a generally easterly direction while I searched online for another spot do do our laundry. We eventually ended up in Stony Stratford, a villiage on the edge of Milton Keynes where we found a carpark, a laundromat and a cafe to have some lunch.

While we waited for the washing to finish, Mark got online and sorted out a campsite near London. We are catching up with some friends of his and since we are not interested in driving or parking in London, we have decided to camp nearby. It was all sorted out by the time our laundry had finished so from there we dropped into a supermarket to stock up our empty fridge and then headed straight to tonight’s parking spot at Daisy Bank Picnic Spot. We are back out in the countryside surrounded by more golden canola fields and apart from a couple of people having a late afternoon picnic, we are all alone again.

Daisy Bank Picnic Spot