on the water

Last Friday, the 8th, we travelled 22 miles up the Thames from Westminster to Hampton in a little passenger barge. It was our first venture out as a family. There was lots of weather, lots of birds, and lots of scenery.

Though modernization delivered the Thames from all kinds of unimaginable forms of pollution, the river has also lost much of its ceturies-old vitality and become difficult to appreciate as anything more than an ephemeral tourist "experience." It is also more than a little ironic that London, dynamo of the global industrial economy, enjoys one of the only major water bodies to actually benefit from industrialization. Typical.

Bella loved the boat so much that in the evening we were trying to devise a scheme for opening floating child-care centers. We'll see. Lots of images below:

The river.


The gardens at Hampton Court Palace, at the end of our boat trip.