Most of the festival crowd
set about leaving on Sunday but all the breakfast venues were packed during the
morning. This was the canoe club, in full
swing, next to where we are moored:
We took it easy during the
day and stayed on the boat or wandered around the village to find the scarecrows
we had missed over the last few days.
The competition winners had been announced so we also checked out the
three winners. At lunchtime we went to the pub to listen to the last fringe event of the weekend and in the evening, we went to
Mike and Lesley’s for dinner – it’s always good when someone else does the
cooking and entertaining 😊
On Monday, Karen worked
from home and I got on with the househusband chores. I was obviously really busy all day but if
you asked Karen she would say I seemed to spend most of the day laying on the
bed resting my back.
As you may know we tend to
plan our cruising pattern around upcoming events and now Cropredy is over it’s
time to plan how to get to the next event.
It seems crazy that, as continuous cruisers, we have to have a plan as
we can just go wherever the fancy takes us.
Indeed, before Karen went back to work, that is exactly what we tried to
do. What actually happened was that
there was always something/somewhere we wanted to get to, e.g. children’s
graduations, family gatherings and concerts.
We knew we were going to
Cropredy this year but seemed to leave the final push until the last few weeks
which, in retrospect was not a good thing, especially as my back went into
spasm near the end so I couldn’t cruise on my own whilst Karen was at work. Keen to avoid that happening again, I have
been working out where we will cruise until Christmas.
We are getting to that
time of year where cruising plans may be affected by the winter stoppages when
sections of canals are closed for maintenance for up to a few months at a
time. Our next event, boat-wise, is to
get to the centre of Birmingham by November 17th. We are going to see Deep Purple who are playing at the Barclaycard arena
and we plan to moor right outside. Jake,
my youngest son will be coming up to stay and go to the gig too.
I know that if we were on
holiday it would only take a few days to cover the 60 odd miles through about
90 locks but, as we take it slowly, we have to plan in where we will take on
water and get pump outs, on top of beating the stoppages. As well as that we need to find mooring stops
where Karen can park the car near the boat and get to work easily.
Although there are several
routes we can take from here to Birmingham, there seem to be a lot of stoppages this coming winter in this area so making the plan has taken a
while. Over the next few days I’ll get
it refined but we’ll probably head up the Oxford, join the Grand Union, then up
the Stratford to the Worcester & Birmingham. We have to join the Worcester & Birmingham
canal by the beginning of November as the swing bridge at Shirley on the Stratford
is being closed. We will still have a
fortnight to get to Birmingham so we will probably head south on the Worcs.
& Birm. and stay in the country at Tardebigge before the final push into
Birmingham.
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Our likely route to get to
Birmingham by the middle of November
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To finish today, here is a
montage of some of the scarecrows Karen photographed during the festival.
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