9th July
It's been a day of rest, and a day to get things done. We've spent it on the pontoon at Newark, and after a good night's sleep, began by sending yet another stroppy email to Birmingham Midshires about the fact that I've not been able to access my internet saver account for over a month now. We'd thought it was settled once, when we actually got a letter of apology from a manager, but they still hadn't sent the magic "access token" needed to regain the power to operate the account.
Having launched this missile, we went to Waitrose for the second time, only to discover that they didn't open until half eight, so a little hanging about was required. We also popped into the BW office here, and bought an electricity card, so that we could hook up to the power supply post. It cost £5.08 for a 12 credit card, each credit being worth 5 kWh. So far we've used just the first credit, so that's around 42 pence, including doing a wash load, rather than run the engine for around three hours and burning between three and four litres of diesel.
It's also good for the batteries to have a long slow charge from time to time to reduce sulphation of the plates.
On our return to Sanity, we checked the email to discover, hurrah hurrah, the access token had magically arrived. It's amazing what copying your complaints to the Financial Ombudsman will do.
Off we went again, this time into town, where we visited a string of shops, Newark being fairly comprehensively provided with most of the stores you'd expect, including a Julian Graves and a Marks and Sparks.
Back to the boat for coffee, and Sheila spent some time online, closing the BM account now that we have access to it again, and opening an Egg savers account instead, Egg currently offering one of the better deals for an instant access internet account.
It came on to rain for most of the rest of the day (I think the official phrase is "risk of showers, some heavy and prolonged") so we've not done a lot else, bar read the papers and magazines, do bits and bobs on the laptop and watch a variety of boats come and go.
This included a huge, Tjalk style Dutch Barge called Howling Gale.
It's going to be a quiet evening again, then the plan is to go on upriver to maybe Gunthorpe tomorrow, and Nottingham the day after.
Ha Ha
55 minutes ago
