I've got a new toy!

16th & 17th October

It's been a great couple of days, and not without its interesting aspects. Before I get into that, I meant to say something last time about the William IV pub in Alrewas, the base from which we start and finish the Willie Walk. It's changed hands recently, so please disregard any previous assessments of its catering standards.

The new owners seem very pleasant, and the beer continues very good, well kept and with a variety of interesting guest beers.

The food is much more of a curate's egg. Prices have gone up a shade, and some of the portion sizes, especially for the pasta dishes, have gone right down. Best options on the menu at the moment seem to be the sandwiches, which come with a decent serving of chips and in decent, artisan style bread. I get the impression of comparative novices both behind the bar and in the kitchen.

Things may well improve, and if they do I'll say so here. Meanwhile, I'd be more inclined to go to the Crown in Post Office Road than the Willie if I wanted a meal in Alrewas.

Yesterday we set off in relaxed style from Fradley to go to Whittington in time for our meal with Des and Gill. My recent birthday present from Sheila was a gps unit, a Garmin eTrex Legend HCx, in fact, and I spent the trip steering and playing with it at the same time. Sheila says not, but I suspect she got a little tired of me saying things like "Now we're headed south east!" and "Now we're doing 3.2, no, 3.3, no, 2.9 miles per hour!"

We actually got to Whittington in time for lunch, and after I'd phoned Des to say that we were there, I got his address and put it in the Garmin and demonstrated that it would set a route to take us to his door.

Dinner with them was great as always; Gill is a fabulous cook (I wish I was half as good) and they are both great company. But there you are, Braidbar Owners (Farne, number 82), you see. Des had insisted on coming to fetch us from the mooring to their house, but we walked back by ourselves, me wielding the Garmin to ensure we took the right turnings.

For those anoraks like myself who are into the techie stuff: I've got round the weak support by Garmin for Macs (though it's improved recently) by getting Sheila to buy the HCx model that takes microSD cards, and getting the TOPO Mapsource software for the southern half of the UK preloaded on a card.

This works very well in the unit, with lots of detail at large scales, but you can't back up the data from the card to your computer, be it PC or Mac. This seems to me to be a major drawback of getting the mapping this way. If you did it the usual way of buying it on a CD-ROM and then uploading it to the unit, you have the data in three places, always a more comfortable state to be in. Also, you can then use the mapping on the laptop to design routes and then upload them to the gps unit. Working with the detailed mapping only in the unit, you have to do all the waypointing and route drawing on the small screen of the gps, not nearly as convenient.

If the new Garmin software for the Mac turns out to work well, in future I would recommend going the standard CD-ROM route.

Back to the boating! Today was another fantastic day, weather wise, bright but cold. We had another easy start, and some great boating to Sutton Road Bridge by lunchtime. We've been shopping this afternoon, and I've carried on playing with my new toy.

We had thought of going on to Kingsbury Water Park tomorrow, but we want to be back at Alrewas on Monday to do the Willie Walk on Tuesday, so I think we'll give it a miss this time. We'll go to Fazeley Mill Marina for a pump out, then probably come back to Hopwas for the night, then Fradley for Sunday, and an easy saunter down to Alrewas on Monday.