Radford Semele (complete with police escort)



Not a lot of boating in this blog entry as we will be staying here for a couple of weeks before moving on.  

To start with, the weather has not been very good for butterflying over the last few days but I did manage to get to see a female Brown Argus on the Offchurch Greenway on Friday.

Female Brown Argus (Argus was a many spotted creature from Greek mythology)

It’ll be interesting to see if we get a communication from C&RT accusing us of overstaying at this spot.  We stayed here for just under two weeks (the maximum allowed) and then cruised to Warwick and back last Thursday (eight miles and two locks).  Technically we are OK as we are now facing in the opposite direction and continuing our journey towards the east rather than west.  Trouble is the recorders don’t take note of the direction of travel.  We did a similar thing on the Trent and Mersey in February this year where we stayed at Croxton near Middlewich for a couple of weeks and then travelled to the end of the Bridgewater canal at Runcorn, turned round and stopped at Croxton again.  We were recorded as overstaying at Croxton but had the record removed when I explained that we had travelled and changed directions between the sightings.  Seems mad, as we travelled over 1,400 miles through more than 1,200 locks in the last year.

Over the weekend we went out to Hradec Kralove in the Czech Republic to visit Matthew, Karen’s son, who is studying medicine out there.  As we booked rather late and it was the start of English half term we ended up flying to Wroclaw in Poland, hiring a car, and driving to see Matthew – it was much cheaper and the border country is quite stunning so we got to see that too.

We left to come home at three on Monday morning and I got confused trying to find the road to Poland (I had only driven to Prague from the town before).  By the time I had circled the main squares a couple of times I was stopped by the police.  Fortunately their English was good and they escorted us to the right road.  Mind you, they breathalysed me first (my first time ever); fortunately, I was clear – Czech Republic is one of the growing number of European countries that have reduced their alcohol limit for driving to zero.

It was back to normal on Tuesday; Karen went to work and Buddy and I took in a couple of walks between showers.  At one place a fisherman had caught a rather large Zander and was beside himself with joy.  I don’t hold with fishing myself but took some pictures for him.

Poor Buddy was too frightened to walk past until the fish was back in the water

In the evening we met up with a couple of the girls from the bridge club and had our first of what should become a regular weekly bridge evening.  This should help keep us in practice during the summer months before lessons start again in October.

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