Friday, 11 September 2015

Away from the Hurley Burley

10.09.15

After meeting our friend Christabel for lunch and a good old catch up at the haunted Little Angel pub, which felt anything but haunted on this lovely sunny day, we stayed on our Henley mooring for a second night. C is recovering from a knee op and has some amusing tales to tell of her convalescence in a private somewhat dilapidated nursing home with it's very eccentric patients, kindly staff and extra expenses. Her small single room filled up with people on her arrival; one attempting (not very successfully) to block a wasps nest outside her window which ended in his staple gun breaking and exploding staples and bits of mechanism all over her bed, a cross nurse trying to take her details and fill in an endless form whilst another demanded to know what she wanted for dinner right now otherwise she would get nothing and her bemused friend who had kindly delivered her there and was given a £3.60 cup of tea for her troubles! Mind you, Christabel has recovered well, so they must have done something right.

On sunny Thursday we travelled on to Hurley where we have never stopped before. There is a long bank of public open space upstream of the lock opposite Danesfield Hotel which we had supposed we could stop on, signs telling us we could moor for £5. However, the bank was so overgrown with reeds and the river so shallow, there was no hope. We abandoned that idea, stopped to fill up with water in the lock cut and Pete went to the keeper to ask if we could stay here. He directed us back and into the 'bathing pool' on the back stream of the lock island, suggesting we moor on the island side so that we could get off across the footbridge for the pubs in Hurley. A wise piece of advice! Apparently it's called the bathing pool for just that reason; people used to bathe here. I wouldn't! We moored on the end of the island, the campsite beyond hidden by trees so that we felt we had this little patch of land all to ourselves. Pete canoed in the late afternoon sunshine.

Hurley is expensively beautiful as so many of these villages are along the Thames. We had a beer at the Old Bell, but the horrible smell of muck-spread fields beyond it sent us back to the boat for our second. The sun set over our 'garden' and the temperature dropped off rapidly so of course we lit the fire.




tranquil bathing pool







A chance to get some washing dry




Long shadows on way back from pub!



Shutting down for the night

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