It was another early start today, and 10 or 11 locks. We plan to reach Teddington at about 14h00 and will stay overnight there. I was quite emotional about it.
For years we had discussed this trip; the UK leg and then onto France. It felt like it was never going to happen but we persevered and in August 2024 we said goodbye to Portsmouth, made our way round the bottom of England and up the Thames, through London, reaching the non-tidal part of the river Thames and Teddington, on Friday 30 August 2024.
Now as a complete co-incidence, 1 year later to the day, we are back in Teddington on our way down through London.
It has been a mixed year and I didn’t want to spend too much time unpacking it all, but needless to say it felt like we had been on the Thames River for much longer than 1 year!
The weather decided to co-operate and it turned quite sunny. The lock-keepers on the other hand all seemed to take the day off, so it was a full exercise day for me but its not too bad in the sunshine. We ate while underway and we got to Teddington with time to spare.
Patrick then asked “why are we waiting around?” He had a quick check on tides and times and suggested we keep going. We could get to Richmond lock for the tide (we can only go through that lock on high tide) and then it would be a few hours until we reached St Katherine’s dock. So we did just that. We had to hang around Richmond for about an hour for the tide and met up with a fellow boat festival traveller. He was heading to the show and so we travelled in tandem, which is always nice. We got to St Kat’s by about 19:00 and settled in. It was a lovely trip down, passing all the iconic buildings and parts of London that we only knew from “the land”.