A Great Autumn Day.

Warm but overcast, today’s journey was excellent and we made very good progress.

Our first delight was this beautiful lock keepers cottage at Leighton Lock with, what looks like, all original features.

Wonderful wide open spaces  between Grove and Church Locks as we head away from Leighton Buzzard.

At Slapton Lock there’s a “boater’s herb garden” behind the seat if you need the odd sprig of something – kindly kept by the people in the lock cottage we presume.

Further on and we saw the flattest fields you could imagine.  Fields of turf as far as we could see, all mown to perfection.

We’ve used this picture before but it’s just a perfect ‘chocolate box’ canal picture (airbrush out the nasty blue boat though!)

For fourteen of today’s nineteen locks we teamed up with a lovely couple, Miriam and Eddie on nb “My Precious”.  A good contender in the competition for the shiniest boat!

Here’s Miriam and Eddie with two of their friends who arrived to help us up the Marsworth flight of 7 locks.

After scaling the Marsworth flight, and arriving on the Tring Summit a lot earlier than expected (thanks to Miriam, Eddie and friends), we had the wonderful surprise of meeting friends and fellow bloggers Jaq and Les on nb “Valerie”.  It was great to see them both looking so good and after a quick catch-up chat we were back on our way ……..  

…….. through the the lovely autumn coloured Tring Cutting.

We’ve moored at bridge 29 next to Tring railway station for the night as Doug needs to catch a train in the morning to collect the car.  With a lot of leaves now off the trees the cutting isn’t as dark as it could be.  With the thick carpet of leaves on the ground it’s even more important to use the day-glo pin covers to stop anybody going “A over T”!