We bought our river licence and made our way towards the Thames Lock: our first foray onto the big river. We had to be there for 12:30 to catch the tide coming in. It was very exciting to come out of the lock onto the Thames - it was like turning from a B road onto an eight lane motorway. There were cruisers everywhere, and it's so WIDE. We had our life jackets on and Clive had readied the anchor, just in case of engine failure. Scary stuff. We zipped along, the tide carrying us with it. the wake of other boats causing us to bob madly about. Having a flat bottom doesn't help with stability when there are waves! It was a gorgeous summer day - ideal for ogling the fabulous houses along the river and the big cruisers out for the day. Credit crunch? What credit crunch? There's plenty of money on the Thames.The locks are all manned and pretty large - so you wait in a queue until the lock empties, then go in one by one and find your space. If you're unlucky enough to be at the front going up then you get all of the force of the water shoving the boat around. With some advice from one of the lock keepers I managed to work out the optimum method for holding the boat steady, and someone else showed me the best way to lasso the rope over the bollards. I was getting quite good at it by the end of the day.We stopped at Shepperton and carried on the next day to Windsor, where Gill caught a train home. It's a very busy tourist spot, but we managed to find a mooring on a small backwater, where another canal boat helpfully moved up a few yards for us to create a space. From Windsor we travelled up to Hurley and moored by a field, visiting an ancient pub (1153) in the village for dinner.