After our time at home we returned to the boat at Allington and headed up the Medway through Maidstone, past familiar buildings from my past and a return to more familiar boats on the river.

Most of the way was a peaceful cruise between the green banks of the river in the heart of the Weald of Kent. A couple of the villages come down to the river and have moorings of GRP cruisers with the very occasional narrowboat.

It seemed that the Environment Agency had recently had a major overhaul of the navigation as many new sluices were in place and some new lock gates. The locks were not hard but the paddle mechanisms were a low geared screw system which took ages to wind up and down – we noticed a couple of local boaters using electric drills fitted with hex drives to operate them.

We cruised leisurely up the river with one overnight stop until reaching the end of navigation at Tonbridge where we moored at the recently refurbished Tonbridge Town Quay with its new facilities block and water point. Pam's brother was over from New Zealand and we arranged for him to meet us in Tonbridge for a day trip down and back on the river.

The mooring in Tonbridge was just below "The Big Bridge" which was not that big! We might have just got under but the footbridge a little further upstream would have stopped us. A trip on the open boat that ran from below the bridge around the island and up to the limit of navigation meant we had at least reached the end if not with our boat.

A nice few days spent in Tonbridge shops, pubs and the castle before we set off back down stream to Maidstone and a mooring adjacent to the Crown Courts and opposite the Archbishop's Palace where we were joined by a couple of the other SPCC boats. An opportunity for Pam to get home for her choir and orchestra commitments while I stayed and looked after the boat.