Maidenhead to Staines (or how to feel inadequate even on a 10-week boating holiday)

Much better weather today, so we took the boat canopy down and were on our way.  There's not much to beat floating down the river on a sunny day, especially as it meant I could finally wear the sun-hat I bought in Banbury - which now I come to think about it was the last day it didn't rain.

But the sunshine brings out all the really big, smart boats - vast, glossy gin-palaces and newly-built wide-beam barges which (as I know from a visit to a boat show) have televisions that rise up out of the polished hardwood floor, and king-size beds which you don't have to construct every night out of a jigsaw of sofa cushions.  They also had impossibly slim, elegant and well-dressed female crew members.

We then passed what seemed like hundreds of extraordinary - and extraordinarily expensive - houses, where apparently nothing was considered too much:  turrets, castellations, and statues of lions that were bigger, I swear, than the ones outside Buckingham Palace. The manicured lawns ran down to boat-houses bigger than our flat, and we did start to feel a bit impoverished, unsuccessful and inadequate.

We snapped out of it pretty fast - sunshine is a truly wonderful thing - and met some lovely and very normal people while we were going through locks: mostly people hiring boats for the day, who don't look down on our poor battered old Boaty McBoatface.  Unfortunately these are the very people who aren't used to driving boats, and we narrowly avoided a possibly terminal battering when someone forgot to tie up in the lock.  When a tiny fibreglass boat is squashed between the lock wall (stone) and a drifting narrowboat (steel) there can only be two winners - neither of them would have been us.

Luckily, Mike is a super-fab seaman and averted disaster with a nifty bit of reversing. It's gone to his head, though: we are moored up in Staines tonight, and he is enjoying Captain Pugwash jokes way more than a man in his mid-fifties should.  As long as he doesn't try to rename me Roger I suppose I can put up with it.

Another blip in boating happiness was mooring up last night having failed to buy any provisions (motto: staying in hotels makes you soft).  Boveney Lock is just opposite Windsor Racecourse, but many rainy miles' walk to the nearest shop, according to the rather sadistically cheery lock-keeper.
This would have been just about ok - we have horrible emergency boat food such as Pot Noodles and cans of sardines - but when we surveyed the cellar/bilge, we realised we'd drunk everything bar two cans of lager.  Even this would have been fine (as per previous posts we've been meaning to cut down) but the people on the boat moored next to us had obviously found a secret riverside branch of Majestic and were really quite tactless about it:  "A cocktail, darling?  Or shall we open the fizz?"

We considered piracy, but we only have a 15 horsepower engine.  We also considered a game of dominoes, but in the end we just put ear-plugs in and went to bed early.

Going past Windsor was amazing.  Loads of rowers, tourists, rowing-tourists, and yet more grand houses, including this one:

Well, Windsor Castle's ok if you like that sort of thing, but as you may be able to see from the picture, it's right under the flight-path to Heathrow!   The really amazing thing about today might be that we STILL prefer our boat and our flat.  Maybe we're easily pleased, but that's very useful when it comes to being happy, sunshine or no.