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| Final score! |
We got back to the boat on Tuesday morning after nearly two
weeks away. Poor old Buddy had never
been in kennels for so long – he was so excited when we picked him up but
Sophie reckons he looked like he just wanted to kill us when we sent her this
picture of him in the car.
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| Buddy in the car after being picked up from the kennels |
Our first few days away were spent visiting Jo in Edinburgh
and also my youngest brother Richard and his family in Linlithgow. One of the highlights was our visit to
Murrayfield on the opening day of the Six Nations. This was the first time Karen and I had been
to a rugby match together and the result was worthwhile!
Before the match we visited Aberdour with Jo and I was
thrilled to see the word ‘outwith’ on a sign in the car park. I have only ever heard Scots use this word
and it always makes me smile as to me it is a spatial version of an onomatopoeic
word.
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| "Outwith" in print |
It was a very windy day as can be seen here as we looked
across the Forth from Aberdour to Leith and the rest of Edinburgh.
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| A choppy Firth of Forth |
After our visit north of the border we jetted of to the
Canaries. I booked this up in the week before we let the house out and it took
a few days to realise that I had bought flights to the wrong island but we just
counted this as part of the whole adventure.
Mind you when we tried to drive onto the ferry to get to the island
where our villa was we fell foul of our dreadful lack of Spanish. When I booked the ferry online I didn’t know
the registration of the car so made it up.
Mr Ferryman wasn’t happy but fortunately the girl in the ticket office
understood the problem and sorted things out for us.
When we go to a country where we cannot speak the language I
always fall into a stupid mixture of French and English and Karen goes all
American and speaks louder in English. Our
villa was in a tiny village in the middle of Fuerteventura where very little
English was spoken. This made our daily
trips to the Panaderia fun as we never really knew what we were going to get
and always rushed out in embarrassment before looking in the bag handed to us
by the baker lady. Our children did point
out that we never seemed to have problems ordering beers at bars though.
As you probably know, the Canaries are volcanic islands and
this is the view of one (la caldera de Gairia) from our villa – it became ‘our’
volcano as we never saw anyone near it or on it…
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| La caldera de Gairia |
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| The cater of la caldera de Gairia |
Once settled back on the boat we decided to set off on our
trip to Chester. It was good to be back
on board and smell the stove as we cruised along.
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| Trent & Mersey - heading north from Bramble cutting |
As we were facing the wrong way we had to head north for a
few miles to wind the boat at Billinge Green Flash (yet again).
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| Winding at Billlinge Green flash |
There were a lot of boats on the move but we suddenly
realised that it was half term so families were taking time out on their boats. Buddy was back to his normal tricks of
squirrel watching on the wrong side of the cut – one day he’ll forget and go
crashing into the water.
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| Buddy squirrel watching |
We moored up at Middlewich and made sure we were secure as
strong winds and heavy rain are forecast for all day Wednesday.
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