Day 5 - Oxford to um Oxford.

Stepped outside this morning into warm sunshine, and had a continental breakfast at the cafe across the road.

Back on schedule today, investigated the boat trip itinerary for tomorrow's little 'cheat' down the river to Abingdon.

Demonstrated my skills as a tourguide today, getting us completely dis-orientated in the centre of the town where I grew up as a lad. Managed to find a tourist map and we continued our journey in a more suitable style.. of a pedalo. (The Punt of course being the traditional mode of river transport in Oxford, but frankly I was not willing to demonstrate my hopeless sense of balance, nor fall in the river.)

We spent a peaceful twenty five minutes pedal-powering our way from the town, out towards the parts of the thames that we would have seen had we continued this way by foot yesterday.



Our tranquil journey was interrupted only by the desision that our boat-pedalo-craft was not really fit to take on the comlexities of Osney Lock, so we turned around only to see 5 rowing boats on the way back under the supervision of some foreign students who clearly had a) not understood their brief introduction to rowing b) did not know the front of their boat from the back, and finally thought it was 'cool' to stand up as well as get in our way... the sight of them trying to take on two narrowboats was too much to bear, so we left for a look around Oxford University.

Saw Christchurch, and the Bodleian Library, learned all sorts of interesting stuff about the establishment of both



Being a bloke of course, all I can recall is that there is a rather cool underground conveyor belt that is used to transport books from one library building to the other.. want one.

M&K