Cow Roast Lock

Here I am Rune

Distance 2.7 miles

Total 429 Locks 8 Tunnels

Running total mileage 582.7 miles

It feels very good to be back on the move on the boat again, although we only managed 2.7 miles today there were also 7 locks so that adds up to 9.7 ‘lock miles’ which amounts to about 3 hours work. The delays were caused by the fact that we had to stock up at the local Waitrose, fill up with water and empty the toilet cassettes, so all in all it was a fairly busy sort of day.

Matters weren’t helped however by having a seriously disturbed night’s sleep due to our deranged swan! Whilst it is mildly irritating to have the swan banging the rear fender against the boat at 4.45pm in the afternoon, at 4.45am in the morning it becomes seriously annoying. I only just managed to resist the (entirely justified) temptation to go out and beat him to death with the aforementioned fender but how I resisted that temptation I’m still not sure. A few minutes of fender banging is sufferable however this swan can keep it up for HOURS!! Imagine someone knocking on your front door for 3 hours continuously would give you the gist of what he was doing.  Having now moved on a couple of miles to Cow Roast Lock should hopefully give us a quiet night’s sleep before we press on tomorrow towards Leighton Buzzard and the North. For those with an interest the hamlet of Cow Roast (where we are) is believed to be a corruption of the name Cow Rest as this was once on the drover’s route to London when they’d be herding their cows. The local area was good grazing for them whilst they rested overnight before continuing on to London. 

Cow Roast Lock at the start of the Tring summit pound