Leaving Hurley we travelled to the junction with the Kennet and Avon Canal - at Reading, having stopped at Henley (very posh!) for provisions. We found a very quiet mooring on a back-canal in the centre of town.The next morning we set off up the K&A. What a fascinating waterway it is! The river seems to keep entering the canal and drifting away from it again, so there are cross-currents, weirs, sluices, waterfalls (yes, really!). Even the locks are interesting - some of them have scalloped edges (don't know why), and some are turf-sided - a bit challenging to try and tie the boat off in these. There are swing bridges, lift bridges, some manual, some powered - so it makes for a very interesting journey - no time to relax as you don't know what is round the next corner. There are even some traffic lights! In Reading they've created a shopping centre around the canals which is rather narrow and windy. So you have to stop at the red light and press a button. When it goes green then you can go, but you can't stop along by the shops - you have to keep on going until you pass the traffic light at the other end.Eventually after negotiating all these obstacles, we arrived at Aldermaston and a little further on discovered Frouds Bridge Marina, tucked away down a side canal (rather unhelpfully marked as "No Entry - Sluice"). We were shown to a pontoon and hooked up to the power (not that it was man enough to keep the washing machine, or even my hairdryer going!) Seems they only put low wattage fuses in the power posts - must be a cost saving exercise we reckoned.This is a lovely quiet marina, with the regular supply of ducks and a swan family. I noticed that the swans had name tags (no, not attached with safety pins!) - one was called Kev and the other, presumably the female was Kex. They only had a single cygnet, the equivalent of a teenager who'd already learned the trick of paddling madly with his feet to lift himself upwards to reach the bread on offer.We spent a week here. We had the additional luxury of having the car with us so I went to Winchester to catch up with friends and do a spot of ju jitsu. We also visited a National Trust property called Basildon Hall, home of the Iliffe family, prodigious collectors of art. It was a ;large house and as we wandered round we wondered what was behind the closed doors, and down the spiral staircases. We also caught up with Andy who's kindly looking after our car for a while. On Friday we visited the Great Dorset Steam Fair in Tarrant Hinton. This is a huge steam rally, with funfair, huge craft tent and a massive traders' area with an auto jumble. We managed to pick up some useful items such as gum boots for Clive, a length of hose, some diesel engine cleaner to stop it smoking (don't think it works on humans!) and a small LED torch. It was a blokey heaven, the smell of the traction engine smoke wafting across the fields, the mangle of the auto jumble, the beer tent and any number of ancient commercial and military vehicles. Clive was enraptured by it all. Even I was impressed when I saw four traction engines pulling along a huge steam engineon a low loader - all 150 tons of it!