Up Father Thames to Kew Gardens

Aline writes: It was quite warm a few weeks ago, so we decided to take a long boat trip on the Thames to cool off. Since we have been to Greenwich several times before, we decided to go the other way on the Thames, towards the ocean to Kew Gardens. We set out during an incredibly low tide (the low tide makes the river between 20-26 feet less deep!), and so we had to keep to the middle of the river so that we didn’t ground the boat. You can see that these boats are actually beached if you look very, very carefully


We also all had to sit in the front of the boat – they claimed this shaved off about 10 minutes from our journey. Maybe someone can explain this to me, otherwise I will continue to think this is a "bait the tourist" kind of thing. We saw many interesting sights on the way down the river; I have included only a few here. There was a nice old church where Benedict Arnold is buried



And many nice bridges





Including the Albert bridge, which makes me think of a cake with its pastel colors



As you can see, you soon journey out of London into the countryside



It took almost two hours to make it down to Kew Gardens. The pier is only a 10 minute walk to the gardens, much closer than the underground station. The Thames here is quite unspoiled



Coming back in the early evening, it only took about 1 hour 20 minutes because the tide was back in. There were many rowers out along the way - it was a beautiful evening!





A separate post on Kew Gardens is coming next. Do you wonder why the Thames looks so muddy? It's because it is - there are two tides per day! So it almost always looks brown because of all the mud moving back and forth.