Friday 17th May
After the lovely warm weather we had yesterday, being able to wear no coat and sitting outside the pub, today came as rather a shock. It didn’t seem too bad in the shelter of Braunston but as soon as we started open country cruising it became apparent we weren’t wearing anywhere near enough clothes! I had to take over the steering while Ken went in and put on another coat, gloves and a wooly hat! After which I swapped my crocs for boots and put on a gilet under my coat, added a scarf and gloves!
It was pretty chilly and sometimes drizzly during the 10 mile and 3 lock trip from Braunston to Newbold. I was perturbed to find, when I went in to stoke up the fire, that it had actually gone out! I got it ready to re-light but decided not to do it while we were travelling in case I enveloped Ken in a pall of smoke, thus rendering him unable to see where he was going!
We nearly stopped at Hillmorton (as we had previously said we were going to) but when we got there it was only just after 10-30 am and we thought (as it had stopped raining) that we may as well carry on a bit further. We want to be at Hopwas to meet Mick and Cathy next Thursday. We also want to have a couple of days at Hawkesbury – one consolidation day (ie. have a lie in, then clean and touch up the recently applied paint) and another so we can go to Bedworth on the bus to stock up at Tesco’s. So we’re figuring we can get to Hawkesbury tomorrow, consolidate on Sunday (as there are no buses), go shopping on Monday and continue our journey on Tuesday.
Anyway, back to today, I like Hillmorton locks, they are really easy to operate and the fact that they are paired means there is very little hold up as you can have one going up and one going down at the same time. We made short work of them anyway, only having to wait for a boat coming out of lock 5 to come up lock 7 (there was already a boat going down lock 6) before we could start. At the bottom locks there were 2 volunteer lock keepers which was a bonus.
When we arrived in Rugby we thought about mooring in the park but the free space was not long enough. Then we made an attempt to moor near the footbridge, just past The Harvester, but after a little while of shunting up and down we decided we couldn’t be bothered to put up with the shelf and being about 2 feet from the bank and moved on again. Shortly after this we were at Newbold, where we thought we were going to be unlucky with a mooring once more as all the boats seemed to be very well spaced. If they all moved up there would have been room for several more. However, a really nice chap saw us eyeing up a very tight space and offered to move back a few feet, so we got in easily in the end.
Our next move, of course, was to go to The Barley Mow and we were delighted to find they had Old Speckled Hen, one of our favourites. When we came out of the pub we met Bruce and Sheila (nb Sanity Again) lurking about in the car park. They were waiting for an Ocado delivery apparently. We had quite a long chat, they told us they had been to Norbury for blacking and are now on their way to Crick for the show at the end of the month. We were finally interrupted by Bruce receiving a call from the Ocado driver, who was about 15 mins late by this time! We’ll see them again in November when we go back to Mercia, if not before.
Tomorrow we are going to Hawkesbury.
