Day Three - Kelmscott to Bablock Hythe

Day Three We had decided it better to try and set off a little earlier since another 17+ miles lay ahead. We had a early breakfast and were the only guests doing so and as a result had the pick of lots of breakfast items. Dropping the cars off at the start and end of the day took us a good hour so we were glad to be on our way when we left the car in a lay-by in Radcot and near the Swan hotel. We decided we couldn't use their car park all day.  The walk out of Radcot was as pretty un eventful. Fields and fields of green grass and rape crops a plenty. As usual in the baking sun.   We walked through Radcot lock which was remarkably similar to all the other locks. The next interesting place was Tadpole bridge. One of the more attractive of the 200+ bridges that cross the Thames.  Chimney meadows nature reserve came and went and around 1pm we arrived at Newbridge, named so because of its bridge which is not new, but infact built in 1250 by monks after two other bridges had been built by order of the king. We chose the pub on the north of the river, The Rose Revived, to have our lunch. There were two pubs here but since the second, The  Maybush was closed, it wasn't a tough decission. The queue for food was LONG. It was really really LONG! I sought out a table in the busy beer garden in dappled willow tree shade, whilst poor Colin stood in a hot pub for half an hour. Even after that, we had to wait another forty minutes for our actual chicken club to arrive. Fortunatelly it was worth the wait and the ambiance was relaxing. A little too relaxing. It was hard to get going again after two hours and with 8 miles to go. Bablock  Hythe was our next destination and would have been our stopping point but we decided to push on to Swinford to try and take some miles off the next day.  Swinford is the location of one of the two remaining toll bridges on the Thames. The Penny toll bridge charges an astronomical 5p for a car and watching the poor teenager frantically collecting them from two lanes of traffic was exhausting enough for us to walk the last few steps to the car.  As we left we drove over the bridge back to the hotel, and collected a receipt for novelty value. We wondered how much they actually make in a year charging just that. The house attached and the bridge sold for a million pounds in 2009 so it must be a bit of an earner.