When I opened
the side hatches on Friday morning I was greeted by a family of swans.
It was a
beautiful morning so we sat outside reading for a while. A family of buzzards were flying around above
us but we couldn’t get a decent picture.
We decided to walk into the local town and get a bus to Rugby and have a
look around. Here is Buddy waiting for
the bus – he seems to know when to conserve energy.
Karen spotted
a Small Copper on the driveway of the house by the bus stop but unfortunately it didn't come any closer to us to get a better look.
Rugby was
making a big thing of the world cup – I expect a lot of foreign visitors will
make their way there whilst they’re over to see some matches. When we got home we started chatting to a guy
who was picking blackberries by the boat.
He turned out to be very interesting: his main hobby is visiting post
offices and getting a stamp (franking not postage) from each. His collection of franks shows he has visited
over 11,000 post offices across the world.
He also has a claim to fame as being one of two local people who had won
£125,000 on the TV show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? His win was 12 years ago and coincidentally
he was giving his daughter half of it this week to pay off her mortgage.
In the afternoon
we cruised seven miles and down three locks to Hillmorton (south east of
Rugby). On the way we passed another
boat named after a British butterfly.
This is a
turnover bridge just outside Braunston – the towpath crosses from one side to
the other and horses could cross over without being uncoupled from their boat.
Under the
bridge was a rotting stanking plank.
This boat
followed us through the beautiful (in our opinion) Braunston turn. We are now heading north up the Oxford canal
and to the left is the Grand Union heading east and then south to London.
This is the
unusual spire of Braunston church where many working boat families were buried.
We were now
on the northern part of the Oxford canal heading for Coventry.
It really is
a very rural stretch…
…apart from
going under the M45 of course.
I rather
liked this picture of us going into the top lock at Hillmorton.
We descended the
three locks at Hillmorton but there are actually six locks there. Additional locks were built next to the originals
because there was so much traffic heading for Coventry and Birmingham. This was the second pair of locks.
And here we
are going down the third set.
At the bottom
a girl asked if I could help her retrieve her tennis ball that she had lost in
the water.
I was happy
to help her and I took the boat over to the other side of the canal so she could retrieve her ball. Once she got it I told her that all she had to do was swim back
across the canal. I’ll never forget the
look on her face – I felt so sorry for her that I had to say I was joking. It worked out well because we decided to moor
up where we were for the night in sight of the wind farm near the M1 south of
Leicester.
In the lock
flight we passed an old arm that is now used as a boatyard.
We had an
early evening walk and came across this bridge that gave warning of a lower
bridge within it – well, it tickled me.
On the way
back to the boat Karen caught me resting on some lock gates.
It was such a
warm evening that we sat on the bank watching the glorious sunset.
No comments:
Post a Comment