Its been a very quite week this week. On Monday we left Lower Heyford for Thrupp with the intention of only staying a night but ended up there until Friday as Sarah was not feeling too well and the heat was such that it wasn't really conducive to moving on. So just a few walks before breakfast and after supper and lots of snoozing in the shade!
Thrupp was incredibly busy when we arrived and we were lucky to find a mooring place and even more lucky that it was in the shade. The village is all based around the canal and features 2 pubs The Jolly Boatman and the Boat, the latter of which is excellent and has also featured in an episode of Inspector Morse.
On Friday with the temperatures slightly cooler and Sarah feeling better we motored on to Oxford and moored up near the end of the canal in an area called Jericho. According to a plaque on the wall near where we were moored the area has in recent years undergone a face lift. All I can say is that I'm really, really pleased I didn't see it before. We were a bit concerned about any possible problems with the locals but Friday night passed without incident apart from a rather noisy dog in one of the houses but Saturday night's peace ended at about 2.30am with loud shouting and attendant noise which went on for an hour or so. We eventually managed to get back to sleep around 4.00am to be woken up at 5.30am by the carbon monoxide alarm going off. After a sleepy attempt to see if there was a problem I removed the batteries, made some tea and went back to bed for another hours sleep. It appears that it was indicating a low battery but not in the way illustrated in the manual!
Apart from that our visit to Oxford as tourists was interesting. Its probably 20 years or so since we were last here and the level of tourists around appears to have gone through the roof. The song that comes to mind is "There are 6 million bicycles in Beijing" Bicycles everywhere and Chinese/Japanese/east Asian tourists are so thick on the ground its difficult to walk anywhere in the city centre as Sarah found although this was a European visitor. After we had paid a visit to the Botanical Gardens we were walking back through the city centre when she came face to face with a large young 6' German who just stopped dead in front of her and refused to move making her find a way round him. All I can say is that its a good job Sarah was in a good mood (she'd got rid of most of her aggression earlier in the day when she had sworn at a passing boat that hit us and made her drop a carving knife close to her foot - They were very contrite when they returned after winding!) otherwise we might now be starting WW3. It wasn't an isolated incident and it seems that its not only British youth that needs some lessons in manners.
Today we have left the Oxford canal and are moored up on the Thames, still in Oxford though. We will be here until Tuesday when we are getting a few pointers of river cruising, not having done it before.
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| On a walk at Thrupp - a chinese water deer? |
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| Dukes Cut Lock |
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| Some of the 6 million bicycles in Oxford |
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| At the Botanical Gardens |
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| Ditto | |
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