Thunder.

Still moored at Reading.
533 locks, 637½ miles, 18 Tunnels, 37 swing bridges and 10 lift bridges since Nov 2006

Last night Dot’s daughter Tracey came to stay for the week-end and this morning she wanted bacon and banana pancakes for breakfast. Well this is not normal fare for us so we said “Go for it, the galley is all yours”. Well I must say that breakfast was better than I had imagined and was very nice.
The day started fine, warm with high cloud. It looked safe enough for a bit of painting so I cleaned 3 sections of the roof and masked it all up for undercoating and laying sand for a non slip surface.
About an hour after I had finished painting some ominous black clouds started to roll in with a clap of thunder. I then had to search the boat for things to lay over the new work to protect it. I found an old shower curtain, a mat and a roll of sandwich wrap (Glad wrap in NZ). Hopefully the paint has been on long enough to dry and the covering will protect it. Fingers crossed.
While painting, a Tupperware cruiser sat out in mid stream opposite us waiting to pick up his crew. He must have had a knackered V8 engine in the engine bay because he had twin exhausts which were pouring out so much blue smoke it was almost suffocating. If that had been a car on the road he would have been prosecuted and put off the road until it was fixed. They complain about global pollution, well this guy was not helping the cause one little bit.
On a more pleasant note I saw a steam driven Thames cruiser with its highly varnished wooden hull and over sized chimney puffing its way upstream. The engine bay was open and you could see the engine working and a row of dials that would do a railway steam loco justice. Unfortunately I was busy trying to cover the paintwork from the rain and didn’t have a camera handy.
We walked Tracey up to catch a train back to Wimbledon only to find a signal failure at Slough had put all the trains back with the delays getting longer and longer. Tracey opted to come back to the boat and travel to work from Reading in the morning. On the way back we stopped for a coffee with Warren and Wynne (fellow New Zealanders) on Kiwi Cruiser II who are moored by Caversham bridge.
A big thank you to Del and Al for putting us right about Lessor Burdock
that I photographed a couple of days ago at Theale. How right your dad was.