Back to Banbury

Thursday 29th October

We made a good start just after nine and set off down the Claydon flight - twelve locks to Banbury. Alice was in good form and helped with most of the locks. She was able to open one of the bottom lock gates on quite a few occasions.

When not helping with the locks, Alice spent a lot of time on her drawing. She built a collection of little sketches which she stuck onto a card to take home to her Mum and Dad! This included: her parents, including her Mum in a dress (!), a boy in a rock band, Take Five narrow boat and Chester the cat.

We called at Cropredy to use the usual services and also to visit the Canal-side shop, including buying a newspaper.

After Slat Mill lock we stopped for lunch but only took half an hour as we wanted to make certain of our three o'clock target for Castle Quay in Banbury. We were just a few minutes over time, largely as a result of having to go very slowly passing all the moored boats. Castle Quay itself was very quite - at least in terms of boats, only three over-nighters moored at the usual place.

Shortly aftere tying up we had a mobile phone call from Joanna to say that she was in M&S so Mike and Alice set off to meet her. Joanna was quite happy to let them take Jessica to the boat whilst she explored a few more stores. By the time she arrived at the boat she had bought a number of items of clothing, both for herself and for Ellie. (We are forbidden to mention the name of the shop where Joanna found several items for herself!)

After tea, the three left us to return home and for us to complete the journey back to Lower Heyford.