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Published: June 18th 2014
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I arrived on Saturday by train with Aunty Janet. It was a good to have her with me to help balance me at times when I struggled to get used to the weight of my travel pack. It totally throws out my balance and stamina. When changing trains we had to briskly walk up a flight of steps and found I was puffed by the top of the stairs. I now know what the biggest losers feel like when they have successfully lost their weight and the trainers pad them up with 20 or 30kg of sandbags for a last training session. My cousin Robyn met us at the station and walked us back to where she lives. My cousins Robyn and William are lucky enough to live right in the centre of London on the Thames. They are not millionaires living in a small shoe boxed size apartment, the price most people pay to live in the middle of London. No, instead they live on a boat. The boat is docked at the Battersea Barges next to a number of other boats, like a little community. It's filled with hipsters! Lots of boats have herb and flower gardens grown from
Hever Castle
House of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII 2nd Wife pots on their decks. Our boat has its own garden, mismatch antique chairs and tables on the roof to hang out on, a bbq and there is even a jetty area with a swimming pool. I felt pretty darn special once I made it on the boat and looked out across the Thames. Old WWII planes and helicopters flew past, with red arrows that coloured the sky with their trails. I like to think that I was being welcomed onto the boat with a parade, not that it was celebrations for the Queens birthday.
The boat is much bigger then it looks from the outside. There are four bedrooms, a tiny cubby that has been turned into a fifth bedroom, two bathrooms, a spacious lounge room and a fully working kitchen. The tide goes in and out and can get rocky when other boats sail past. I've been lucky not to have any sea sickness. It's good fun to have a bath once the tides in rocking the boat. It causes the bath water to splash back and forth around which is lots of fun. But I have also learnt not to have a bath when the tide
is out which leaves the boat on an angle and the bath only half filled on a slant.
Sunday 15th
For my first day Robyn and her fiancé Alex took me to Alex's fathers house in the country. His father is somewhat eccentric, like a fabulous mad hatter. He worn corduroy pants held up by braces, a checked shirt, carafe, tweed jacket and matching cap. His once beautiful1900's house was run down and filled to the rafters with items due to his hoarding tendencies, however it was surprisingly clean and it gave it this sort of magic feeling when you realised that behind the neatly folded newspaper stacks were hidden staircases and doorways. The garden on the property was like something in the secret garden when it was out of use and overgrown to a tangle of weeds and flowers. The craziest part of the garden was the pool that was covered by weeds and green with algae. I was told that a deer had leapt into the pool by accident, drowned and was now fermenting nicely. Whilst venturing into the depths of the gardens I came across Mr Slugg, a very friendly bear sized dog who
instantly became my friend.
Alex's Dad took us out to Hever Castle, Anne Boleyn (the 2nd Wife of Henry VIII's) old property. Anyone who knows me know's how much I love Tudor history and it was a place I had always wanted to visit. We looked though rooms, paintings, letters between Henry and Anne, costumes, furniture and the beautiful gardens and lake. The tour was made even better getting to hear different facts about the era from Alex's dad and to be able to teach him all the facts I knew. To end the day we went to an old village pub for a Sunday roast, complete with Yorkshire pudding and horseradish.
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