Just three locks and four miles took us from Cropredy to Banbury where we are moored tonight - but they also took us about three hours to negotiate. Boy, were things busy.
To begin with we were third in a queue going down, with no-one coming up - which means that every lock has to be filled again after the previous boat has emptied it before the next boat can go down.
We passed one or two boats after that but never crossed in a lock but somehow by the third lock there were four of us waiting to go down and no less than six boats waiting to come up.
We stooged into Banbury past a long line of filled-up 48 hour moorings and were on the point of giving up when we spotted the last empty spot almost outside Tooley's Yard where Harry was built.
The Yard still exists - just - but virtually all the Harry era buildings have been long since submerged beneath a massive shopping mall. And sadly the bloke who built Harry wasn't around either. In fact, without knowing it, we'd passed him at a lock earlier in the day heading north. A shame neither of us realised.
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