Pescina (only three weeks left in Italy)

We realised on Friday that we only have three weeks left before we start wending our way back to the UK and home to the boat on the Leeds & Liverpool canal.  We have been expecting days with poor weather as October nears so we have been putting off any sightseeing and travelling until then and making the best of the good weather around the house.  Although the daily temperatures have dropped below 30 degrees we Brits are still in shorts and tee-shirts whereas the locals (as in all hotter climes) are already in long trousers and jackets as if it’s winter.

As mentioned previously we alternate with ‘do do days’ and ‘no do days’, although up to now we have done very little on our ‘do do days’.  To be fair, Karen goes for a run on the ‘no do days’ which, considering the steepness of the roads, puts me in complete awe as to how she does it.

Buddy still finds it too hot even when butterflying first thing in the morning

When Karen came back from her Friday morning run she was full of excitement as she had finally got a picture of a clouded yellow at rest.  It takes five minutes to walk along the drive to reach the road, so she uses that time for her warm up/warm down walk.  This means she can keep an eye out for butterflies whilst the drive goes through the meadows.

Karen’s clouded yellow

We spend the rest of our ‘no do days’ doing nothing much other than preparing and eating meals 😉

Karen catching up with her diary and me butterflying (half-heartedly)

After lunch on Saturday (a do do day) we finally made it to our local village, Seggiano, and had a good walk around. 

Seggiano

Being a hill town, it has a couple of churches at the top and is probably packed with tourists in the height of summer.  We found it very quiet and the only people we came across were sitting inside a bar at the top watching a Serie A game.  We found another bar at the bottom and, that too, was packed with men watching a football game.

Typical narrow streets

Many of the houses have mooring rings at chest or waist height; we could only assume they were for tying up horses etc. when deliveries were being made.

A mooring ring on a house on a hill

Typical Tuscan views from the top – olive groves and woodland

The only sign of activity, other than in the bars, was some work going on restoring the cisterna as part of the museum (which was closed).  I imagine the village receives mains water now and doesn’t have to rely on the water tank filling up.

The cisterna

We have found out since that there is an olive tree growing in the cisterna.  Well, its roots are inside and the trunk etc. is outside.  It means that the tree is growing aeroponically – the roots taking moisture from the mist created by the evaporating water.  Apparently, it’s the only productive olive tree in the world that’s growing aeroponically – we’ll have to go back and see it.

On Sunday morning I received an email from CRT with some good news.  With all the canal closures due to the drought period and the upcoming planned stoppages for winter maintenance we had come to accept that we would be stuck on the Leeds & Liverpool canal between Burnley and Leeds until well into the new year.

One of CRT’s statements of intent is that they would always have a route open between the north and the south during the winter closures.  This year has been different as there are additional closures due to the lack of rain which have overlapped with the maintenance closures.  They have now started opening some of the closed canals and the email explained they have created a window of one week at the beginning of November where a north-south route will be open. 

This is a route down the west side of the country which means we have to head back towards Liverpool, then branch off below Manchester, head through Stoke and Stafford then round the north of Birmingham and into the Midlands.

It does mean that we won’t get to Leeds and visit some of the navigations in that general area that would be new to us – a shame, but there’s more to life than new waterway territory.

When we get back from Italy at the end of October we will spend a few days around Gargrave and Skipton, so we can spend some time with my parents and then head off south.  The plan is to get to Aylesbury by the beginning of December.  Although we will be away from my parents in Yorkshire we will be near Karen’s mum in Wendover for a while as well as my sister who lives in Aylesbury.

So that’s 285 miles and 188 locks to do in during November which works out at about four hours cruising a day.  The crucial time is to get through Wigan and Old Trafford between 5th and 11th November when the area is open for a week for boaters to pass north or south.  Boating forums seem to indicate that there will be a lot of activity around that time as boaters escape north or south for the winter.

We are really looking forward to it as we love winter cruising and we will be ready for getting on the move again having been away from the boat since August 20^th 😊

Our cruising route for November