Saturday 8th June
After our week long stay at various moorings in Hawkesbury, today we have finally moved to a new location. We have travelled 11 miles and just the stop lock at Hawkesbury from there to Newbold. We are moored at Falls Bridge just before the tunnel. It is really quiet here after the hub bub of the last few days at Hawkesbury.
We had a chilly but pleasant trip and were surprised about the amount of baby moorhens we saw along the way. In previous years we haven’t seen many baby moorhens. Today’s ones ranged from ‘just out of the egg’ little balls of black fluff to almost fully grown. We also saw a very newly hatched brood of ducklings nestled up with mum on the bank. It was pointless trying to take any photos while we were passing on the boat, as my last effort in the gallery demonstrates! It’s a pity you never see them when you’re moored up, well I don’t anyway.
We had intended mooring at All Oaks Wood but it was absolutely chocker there so we had to carry on. I say it was chocker, with a bit more considerate mooring there would have been room for a couple more boats at least but never mind.
We arrived here at Falls Bridge about 1-15 pm and as I was on the phone to Penny at the time I did a wonderful job (if I do say so myself) of mooring up with one hand! I have spent quite some time on the phone recently, speaking to Barbara yesterday, they were at the top of the Wigan flight and to Penny today, she is in Banbury. Cathy has also been phoning daily to let us know how Mick is getting on after his op, to pass some of the time between visits and to get sneaky crossword answers!
After I came off the phone to Penny we walked to the pub along the tow path and it was a fairly muddy affair even though the last discernible rain we had was over a week ago, on 30th May when we did the Atherstone flight! We sat outside the pub and were entertained for a while by a couple of kids trying to get their football down from a rather tall laburnum tree in the pub garden! Neither of them could manage to climb high enough to get it although they were trying for ages. They also tried shaking the branches they could reach and throwing sticks up at it but to no avail, bless.
We came back to the boat via the road to avoid the mud. Tomorrow we are going to Braunston and hope we can get a mooring there so Ant can come on Monday and do our gas test point etc. If we can’t get in there we don’t really know what we are going to do.
