Lockdown day 42 - Revisit this day, May 3rd 2019

I had another welcome reminder from Google Photos yesterday. We didn't do a lot of cruising last year, though it was probably more than we'll be getting this year, so the memories are still fresh. Still, I'll rarely turn down their offer of a revisit via my photos.

We're on the Grand Union, headed north. We left Marsworth Bottom Lock that morning.

From a greater distance, this really looked like a pile of narrowboats!

You know what that is, right?

The weather was pretty good, but there was an inclination for it to precipitate from time to time.

On to Soulbury Three Locks. There was no-one else there, not even in the pub, except for a man in the car park, on the phone, who looked for all the world like Vladimir Putin!

I didn't want to risk taking a photo of him.

Okay, that wasn't the most interesting little collection of photos, but I'll value them more and more as my memories get fuzzier. Blogography is great!

*******

Lockdown day 27 - A picture's worth a thousand words

Google Photos has its uses, but it has some really annoying features too, doesn't it? I think my biggest gripe is the way it keeps track of everywhere I go, then emails me and asks me to write a review of shops, pubs and so on that I've "visited" - except that, a lot of the time, I haven't. I almost always decline, but I will gladly tell interested parties (and Google frequently tells me how popular my reviews are!) that the Roman remains in St Albans' Verulamium Park are "a lovely little wall, though it's showing its age a bit", or that Beaumont School's playing field is "a very nice playing field. I'm sure it's excellent for playing on." In the first of those cases I had walked past the short section of ancient wall, about a hundred metres away from it; in the second, I had literally driven past the playing field without even noticing it. And my reviews are useful? How, and to whom?

One thing I do like about Google Photos, however, is their frequent and regular emails asking me to Rediscover this day in (year). So today I was offered 17th April 2017. And this is what it showed me,

plus all of the other photos I took that day, reminding me that we were at Foxton Locks on a short excursion.

I've taken nearly 26,000 photos over the years, and my cameras have been especially busy since we've been on Kantara.

I often spend time looking at them, reviving the memories of places we've been to together. This is all the more true now; now that we're confined to the marina, now that we have no idea when we'll be able to cruise again. I love looking at the pictures, but it's a bittersweet experience.

These are from this day in 2014,

just a few days before we set out south towards Stoke Bruerne, where we picked up our friend Michelle and took her on a week's holiday. It all came back to me.

Oh, the power of the photo; pictures worth thousands of words, eh? What did we do before digital cameras?

========