River Thames Path - Part 1 The Start

The Thames Path National Trail is one of the longer National Trails. It is 184 miles long following the river from the Cotswolds to the Thames Barrier. It is quite different from the other trails, it is basically flat for it's whole route (well a very gentle slope down hill all the way!) It also passes through some majorly inhabited parts of Southern England, culminating with several miles through the busy capital London.
I am not sure whether I will walk the whole trail. I will take it one day at a time over this year and see how it goes. I am interested to see our second longest and most famous river, to see how it evolves and the life, natural and otherwise, that has made it's character.
The start of my walk was in January, there has been a lot of rain this winter so I checked to make sure the path was not flooded. Despite not finding any current flood warnings my walk was cut short by about two feet of water! So it was not exactly a "flying start".