Research!

I have been very busy these past few weeks researching all the cities, towns and villages we will be passing through on our trip along the Thames.  I am also looking into some places that David and I may be visiting before and/or after our boat trip.

Researching the towns along the way is one of my favorite things to do!  I love digging up every little (and big!) place there is to visit in each town.  We've seen things as little as one of the oldest trees in France.   On this trip, we'll be visiting some really big and famous places too, such as Windsor Castle!

In addition to sightseeing, I will also look into possible places to moor our boat, including the nightly cost and availability of electric to plug into or water to fill our tank.  I'll try to find the best restaurants in each town...... sometimes it's the only restaurant!  I'll know where to find groceries, which we'll need, and where the nearest hospitals are, which hopefully, we won't need!  I put all of this information into a "trip guide" and each member of our party gets one.

I leave it to Captain Dave to tentatively plan where we'll stop each night.  He'll have a good idea of how far we can go in a day so we can reach our destination on time and also see as much as possible without too much rushing.  These plans are always tentative as we find that sometimes our speed is out of our control, such as a lock being unexpectedly closed, or bad weather.  On a few occasions on other trips, we decided to leave the place we expected to stay in because it wasn't very nice or there was little to see there.  If it wasn't too late in the day, we decided to push on to the next town, and that usually was the right decision for us.

To do all this planning, it helps to have a navigational map of the river.  We'll get one from LeBoat when we arrive, but we like to do all our preplanning, so we found a great map on Amazon which arrived today!!

I spent a little time looking through this map.  Naturally it includes the path of the river and the locations of bridges and locks.  It also has the heights of bridges, and all sorts of information about the various marinas where we might spend the night.  I'm looking forward to poring over this during the next few months!