A beautiful spot

After 12 locks and 6 miles I have moored at a really nice place in the midst of the Chiltern Hills. Rose you might remember it as the place where there were peacocks. Although you might not, as you were in agony with your foot at the time. I had to go through a manual swing bridge on my own today. What a laugh. Up until now I have always had help. The usual drill is to send your crew over the bridge where they swing it around to let the boat pass. The mechanism is on the offside so the only way over is to cross the bridge. Obviously this means the bridge operator is on the offside and the boat is on the towpath side. I've read about how you do this when you are single handed, so I took my bow rope across the bridge with me and operated the bridge. So far so good. I pulled the boat through but then realised that the bow rope was too short and I needed a longer one so that I could keep hold of Olivia (remember she weighs many tons). I had to devise a creative way of stretching back onto Olivia to get the centre rope without falling in. By now the bow was in the bushes off side and I had run out of bow rope so had to let it go. Luckily the centre rope was fine, I pulled her through on it, shut the bridge, crossed back over, pulled her back to me using the longer rope and off we went. All the time I was doing this there was an angler sitting RIGHT NEXT to the bridge on the off side. He didn't look at me nor speak a word. By the way, those bloody peacocks are still at it.