The Thames Path: day 3

Day 3
Kingston - Laleham

20.72km / 12.88 miles

4:11:57

1,177 calories

Cumulative total: 75.83km / 47.13 miles

It took a while to get going on day 3. I didn't sleep well for some reason and had a sluggish sort of morning, but finally left home at 11am to get the train back to Kingston and start walking again.

It was another grey day but warm, and I shed my jacket early on. After 30 minutes I had to stop to replace the preventative blister plaster on my right heel; turns out an ordinary plaster held much better through the day.

Much of today was spent having house envy. There are loads of gorgeous houses by the river, with gardens running down to the water and boats moored outside. I could live in all of them! Towards the end of the day I passed Pharaoh's Island, where residents need a boat to get to the mainland. Bliss!

I lunched a little downstream of Molesey and then meandered on, picking a few early blackberries as I walked. There was no consistency with ripeness: some bushes had lots of ripe fruit and others were only just flowering. The ones I tried were a touch sour but still juicy. 

In Walton I paused for a coffee and brownie and it rained reasonably heavily, but it didn't last long and again any rain today has mostly been light drizzle.

At Walton Bridge I crossed to the north bank for the detour through Shepperton. There's a pedestrian ferry which runs from Weybridge, upstream of Walton, and where the path picks up again at Shepperton Lock but when I called this morning to check it was running there was a recorded message telling me it wasn't. When I got to the lock the associated café was actually open and there was a guy hanging around in a life jacket, so maybe my detour wasn't required. However it would have been deeply annoying to have got to the Weybridge side of the ferry to find it not running, so I can live with the decision. 

After that it was a few kilometres more through Chertsey and under the M3 motorway bridge to the Laleham Camping Club, home for the night. My tent was easy to pitch, my stove worked and it's a fairly quiet site apart from the rumble of motorway traffic in the background. Hopefully that will dissipate as the evening draws on.

There's also now some blue sky appearing as I write so I'm optimistic of a nice day tomorrow!