Two glorious October days

20th & 21st October

It’s definitely a case of “winter draw(er)s” on, though actually it’s more vests just now. Saturday was the coldest morning so far this Autumn, and I used the excuse to get a good fire going in the Squirrel. The safety websites advise making sure you have the stove raised to a good temperature at least once a month, especially if you burn wood. If wood burns too cool, it deposits creosote in the flue, with the potential for a chimney fire eventually. Getting it properly hot regularly avoids this getting out of hand.

Going for a walk to buy supplies, we were surprised to see gulls that we thought might be kittiwakes fishing above the lock. We didn’t know that they came this far inland.

It was a brilliantly clear and sunny day, so having left the shopping on the boat, we went out again across the Shugborough Park and, by following the signs for the Staffordshire way up the road on the other side, came to an area of woodland called Coldman’s Slade.




I took a set of photos of the sun striking through the trees, but we were beginning to feel hungry, so saving further exploration for another day, we went back for lunch.

In the afternoon, whilst running the engine and doing a wash load, I spent a bit of time sorting photos and preparing some for upload to the blog. I did go back out to see if I could catch the kittiwakes on a photo, but they’d gone (of course).

This morning was less cold, but even mistier than before. I took the camera with me when I went to buy a paper, and was rewarded with the return of the gulls:




Then it was on to the water point to fill up. It’s just beyond the junction, so afterwards I pulled Sanity back and turned under the bridge onto the Staffs and Worcs.

It was misty enough to have the tunnel light on, and boating across Tixall Wide was very atmospheric. We saw New Dawn tied on the wide, and exchanged greetings with them – hopefully on a our way back from Penkridge we’ll have more of an opportunity to chat.

As the mist burnt off, it became another glorious day – in many ways Autumn is my favourite time of year for boating, especially when the light is just amazing in the morning as it’s been this week.

We did the steady chug round Stafford and past Stafford Boat Club to moor at Acton Trussell for the night.

This afternoon we got on top of a lot of IT type stuff, since we’ve got a fast connection here.