Acton Bridge (the boat is now our only home)

Well, that was a long time!  Two months away from the boat and now we’ve returned it’s like we haven’t been away at all.  Here’s Buddy lording over his stern deck as soon as we got back.

Our friends David and Victoria (on Pas Mèche) recently returned to dry land after six years living on their boat and like us they posted a blog entry most days they were travelling.  Their final entry was made two months after they left the boat and I have to quote their opening paragraph as it made us chuckle, especially as we have been away for two months too:

It's been exactly two months since our last blog. It's reassuring to know that our loyal blog readers have better things to do than worry about why the blog hasn't been updated. We have been overwhelmed by a wall of silence and precisely zero enquiries along the lines of "Where are you? Have you sunk? Have you been washed out to sea?".

We haven’t stopped for the last two months; firstly there was catching up with friends we haven’t seen for months and then there was Christmas.  We always have our family Christmas on the first weekend of January so we can get all the children and partners together.  As usual, we had a day of curries on the Saturday and played plenty of games (euphemism for drinking in our family).  It is also a family tradition that I have to wear an orange tee shirt all day.

 

Since Christmas we have:

• Cleared the house out
• Moved some of our belongings to Yorkshire, Wendover and Reading
• Moved the rest into storage in Maidstone
• Let the house out to a lovely couple who have signed up for at least two years

So letting the house out means our only home is now the boat but looking at our schedule for the next few weeks it seems we won’t be living here continuously for a while.  We are visiting Lauren (my middle daughter) and Lewis in Reading for a couple of nights later this week to help them decorate their new home.  A week later we stay with my youngest brother Richard and his family in Edinburgh as we are seeing the opening six nations game at Murrayfield – we will also take the opportunity to catch up with Joanna (Karen’s youngest) who is at uni up there. We then spend the following week in the Canary Islands as we feel like a break in the sun.  

I have booked our holidays via the internet since it was possible and, like my DIY, always end up with some calamity.  This time I booked our plane tickets to Lanzarote only to find out the following day that the villa I had booked was on a different island!  This is the sort of thing that happens to you when you’re retired – I put it down to lack of time rather than age of course.  But it always makes holidays more fun.

Anyway, today is a planning day as we need to work out where we are cruising to over the next few months but hopefully we’ll get time for a little cruise in the afternoon too.