When we left Halstead, it was a typical English summer's day, as we remember it. There was a leaden sky and slight drizzle, with about 18C temperature.

The first stop was the village of Reed, on the northern edge of St Albans. It's interesting that some of my forebears come from St Albans; so that's probably where they fled from to reach New Zealand.

The Reed village is a small settlement of about 250 people. We were told this was the same population as in 1086 when the Doomsday Book was written. Of course there were ducks in the village so we knew it had to be a Reed home. We checked in at the local church and Lynette had a good chat to the lady cleaning the place. The church is of the Anglo Saxon era and is a very good example of one which has walls about 1000 years old.

The black powder shooters will be interested as the walls are constructed from flint rocks. Some of the rocks were whole, but many had been knapped (pieces knocked off). I immediately thought of wandering black powder shooters, knocking off bits of the rocks to use in their flintlock rifles.

Then we went on to Bletchley Park, the home of the decoding of the German wartime traffic. It was an interesting series of displays. It's turning into a WW2 museum, with some decoding and cipher kit. That's mainly because there's not much to see when it comes to seeing bits and pieces around decoding. The audio visual displays were great. You can borrow, at no charge, a portable A/V unit and headphones, and wander around the Park, getting information as you go.

There's also an RSGB (Radio Society of Great Britain) display at the National Radio Centre building there and I dropped in to say Gidday to them. It's a small museum with a fully operational ham radio station. We had a good chat and they were kind enough to load me up with a couple of the more recent RSGB magazines. They also told me that there was a special event station operating up in the Nation Computer Museum (NCM).

The NCM, is outside of the Bletchley Park complex, so I had to exit the Park and walk up the road. The guys at the special event station were participating in a museum radio station special event, but said that conditions were very poor and they hadn't made many contacts. That made me feel much better about the three contacts I had made yesterday.

Lynette and I were sitting outside the museum having an ice cream when one of the hams came out (for a cigarette.) We got chatting and happened to mention canals and boats. He told us how to get to the Union Grand Canal and we managed to stumble upon Lock 22. We had a pleasant time there, assisting opening the lock, swinging the bridge out of the way and generally having a great chat with the boat operators. There were a couple from Chicago, who were on their canal boat for a week, just going up and down the river at a comfortable speed.

While I was waiting for Lynette to cross over the canal, I happened to chat to a Welshman. He had just finished watching a rugby match between England and New Zealand. He had come out to NZ for the Rugby World Cup and had stayed on board a liner and cruised up and down the South Island going to matches. It really is a very small world.

From Bletchley, we cruised down the road to Speen in Newbury. During the day, we covered about 160 miles, and other than the last 33 miles, it has been a very “Roundabout” day. I'm sure we went around 100+ roundabouts in the course of a day. Milton Keynes was terrible! We were told that when they were building Milton Keynes, they had a map of the town out and the supervisor (Project Manager) used to come along and put his tea mug on it. That left a nice round ring. The builders, took this to be a roundabout, so that's why there are so many. The PM must have had a zillion cups of tea!

By then end of the day, the sun was shining, the temperature had risen to 20+C and we had reached the Hare and Hounds pub, our stop for the next two days.

Farm buildings on the way into the Reed village.

The church at Reed.

Above and below.  Fore and Aft internal views of the Reed church. 

This door dates back to the original building.

The corner work on the building is known as Long and Short construction and is typical of Anglo Saxon buildings that are 1000 years old.  The black marks on the wall are where the flint has been chipped away. (By errant black powder shooters?)

Above and Below.  The Reed School and Chapel.  It's no longer in use.

The Reed village hall.

This was on the sports ground.  Presumably it's something similar to a logo. 

An Enigma type machine at Bletchley Park.

The traditional view of the Bletchley Park mansion.  This was used mainly for administration purposes, but there was a monitoring station there originally, and that was called Station X.

Above and Below:  A reconstructed "bombe."  An electro mechanical nightmare that weighed one ton.  This was used to determine the code configuration start points for the Enigma traffic.  Once these points were resolved, operators typed in the received messages, and hopefully decoded, plaintext German, came out the other end. 

The RSGB boys on duty in the National Radio Centre at Bletchley Park.

When you go through a lock, with a bridge, the first thing to do is open the bridge.

Then you open the lock gate, one or both halves.

Next, the canal boat enters the lock and you close the rear lock gate and open the one in front of the canal boat.  You have to make sure that both locks are shut and the bridge is returned, before you head further down the canal.