Banbury – middle of nowhere

Sunday 9th October 2016

Up very early, we have decided to go for it today. We have Pat, Marian Martin and Russell arriving in Northampton on Saturday, we are not sure if we can make it or not! We have 49 miles to do, which doesn’t seem a lot, but we only average about 8 miles a,day.

Today I woke at 7am, and decided that we should get up, move boat and fill up with water, and then have breakfast whilst we are doing it, again we set the washing machine, so that we could get maximum water.

We left the water hole at 8.30am, and faced our first lock and lifting bridge, these locks have two doors at the beginning, but the far gate has only one, so harder work, as you have to walk further, and the gate at the end, is usually harder to open.

As we were travelling along, we noticed we did not have the extendible ladder, we know we had it yesterday, which means someone must have stolen it whilst we were in Banbury yesterday, very annoying as it was secured to the roof, what are people like! Geoff used stronger language.

It’s a beautiful day, blue skies, and plenty of sunshine, but it has started to get colder now. The trees are gradually turning golden, and there are so many red berries around at present. The birds will not starve this year.

We didn’t stop for lunch we kept going, so no pub today, we climbed the Claydon flight of locks, only five this time, and we were lucky with a couple of them, as other boats were coming out, enabling us just to go in, without having to do anything. Today we did alternate locks, as Geoff wanted to do some, I actually prefer to do the locks than drive, but have to be fair!

Altogether today we did fifteen miles, fifteen locks, and two lifting bridges, the

canal was very twisty, so we had lots of bends in the river,
and apart from the last half an hour, when it started raining, it was another lovely day. We stopped as soon as we could find a suitable mooring place, in the middle of nowhere, watched Strictly and Poldark.