Another Break in Cruising

OK, so we have been a bit absent with the blog for a few days. On Friday Andrew and Mike undertook the car shuffle - both cars had been left at Nantwich. To save quite a bit of money, they took the slow train to Crewe - for less than half the fare for a quicker trip, they spent a couple of hours on a stopping route through Northampton and then up the Trent valley to Stoke and Crewe.

This part of the journey went as planned (although there was a ten minute delay resulting from signalling problems) things went down hill at this point! Only a short hop remained and the single carriage unit pulled into the platform at the end of its previous trip and the waiting passengers soon boarded.

However, nothing much happened until we saw a number of worried-looking crew who subsequently announced that they were waiting for a fitter to deal with a fault on the radio communications which are required to be working before the train could depart.

Eventually, they further announced that the service had been cancelled and we were advised to take the next service which arrived soon after.

Somewhat later than expected we reached Nantwich and walked through the town to the boatyard where we collected our cars. Andrew spotted that Google was now estimating well over three hours for the return trip instead of the standard two hours. Mike continued down the planned route and indeed did spend quite a bit of time in slow moving queues. He arrived at Milton Keynes Marina about 15 minutes after Andrew, we had re-routed along the A50 instead of the M6/M1 - but he did stop for a short coffee break as well!

Mike left his car at the marina and then went with Andrew to PC World to replace the mouse on the canalboat laptop which had turned faulty a few days ago. Finally, they returned to the boat where Christine had not only cleaned inside and out but also had a meal nearly ready.

Next morning Andrew left shortly after breakfast and, having checked that it would be OK to arrive a day early, we took the boat down to the marina where we found our berth for the next couple of weeks.

After a long lunch break we took a bus into the city centre a chance to wander around the shops with limited success!

Back at the boat we decided to have our evening meal at the Carvery alongside the marina  - the associated hotel seems to be closed at the moment. Although both cheap and simple, it was tasty and provided exactly what it offered. Saved cooking, anyway!

Sunday morning we were up early as we planned to go the the Cornerstone Church for the early service - we had to be at Windsor for lunch time to take over looking after the three grand children for three days whilst both Joanna and Adrian are away on business. We met up with one or two people still there 22 years after we left. Some even remembered us!

We returned to the boat briefly as we wanted to empty the water tanks. We would not normally have done this at this time of the autumn but we were concerned because there had been an overnight frost and the outside of the boat was very icy.

That done we locked up and drove down to Windsor.

On Tuesday we popped up to Packet Boat Marina to pay for our winter mooring and to establish which will be our mooring in case we arrive when there is no-one in the office.