Steve's Ramblings

So much for the plans for Easter.

We knew that the weather forecast wasn’t good for the weekend but we thought we’d give it a go. I picked Kathy up from work at 4pm and then after spending nearly twenty minutes at Sainsbury’s putting 60 litres of petrol in the car (thanks in part to a complete moron who decided to pull in front on me when I was paying my bill and blocking me in), we headed off for the boat.

Our plan was to use the motorway as far as possible. So we actually made it upto to Worcester North before bailing out and heading cross country. The going was good until we hit Kidderminster (Ah such a surprise to be stuck in Kiddoi!) where we spent 20 minutes sitting a queue where we did about 200 yards upto the ringroad round about.

After that it was pretty plain sailing and we actually arrived in Market Drayton at about 6:30. After unloading into the boat we headed off to The Talbot – a mere 2 hours and 40 minutes after we’d left Cheltenham. Its been a long time since Kathy and I visited to the Talbot – in fact the last time we were there was on our honeymoon back in 2002 when we both got rather merry and nearly fell in the canal on the way back to the boat (The next day has to go down in the History of Mintball as one of the shortest days cruising – I think it was about 1000 yards!)

The weather was pretty crap by the time we left the pub but the clockwork torch Nick bought worked very well so at least we weren’t staggering along the towpath in total darkness.

So we got back to the boat and went to bed.

Then the weather turned really rather unpleasant and the boat was rolling from side to side in the wind and kept slamming against the jetty and backwards into the concrete banking …. we’ve actually carved a very nice chunk out of the bank side so I guess we need to get some extra fendering down there. Neither of us got much sleep and morning arrived rather too soon. I decided to be lazy and stay in bed for a bit – partially supported by Kathy telling me that it was not only blowing a gale but it was also actually snowing, and certainly was not the sort of day that you actually wanted to be boating.. OK if you were out on holiday and you had to get somewhere you’d be boating but if you’re out for a few “fun” days then you’d do what we decided to do and NOT move.

So we had a very relaxing day doing absolutely sod all, which is probably what we both needed. We connected the laptop to the stereo and watched a couple of movies – which works remarkably well considering that its not something the we ever really thought of when we put things together a couple of years ago.