Walking in the sun

31st March & 1st April

NB All entries in this blog are true to the best of my knowledge and belief, regardless of date!

The night before last we took Elanor to the Crown for a belated birthday meal. The food was very good, and the service excellent, though the portion sizes of rabbit and pigeon were a bit small.

The main problem they have there is the ambience. The saloon is a barn of a room, quite like an old fashioned schoolroom, and chronically cold. We didn't take our coats off for the entire time we were there.

Nonetheless, good value, and very tasty, and a decent pint of Black Sheep to boot (or drink, rather).

We had a lazy start yesterday on a very fine morning indeed. I wandered into the village first thing to buy a paper, and later we undertook the Village Walk. The fine weather means that a lot of routes which in the winter were impassable in the mud are once more available, and we found ourselves walking past Wychnor Manor and across the fields towards Yoxall.

We got back to the George and Dragon just on one o'clock, and stayed there for some time, eating an excellent lunch and making the most of our chance to natter to Jane and Will and sundry friends.

At around three we finally tore ourselves away and came back to Sanity, if not to Sobriety for a while. The engine was run and a washload processed.

At Will's suggestion I rang BW West Midlands at Fazeley, and spoke to the Customer Support person, one Chris Thompstone. She confirmed that the 48 hour restriction had been lifted, and that there was no reason why we should not stay where we were until after my GP appointment on Friday.

As may be imagined, we had a quiet late afternoon and evening, and an early night.

This morning was so fine, I didn't bother to run the Eberspacher, nor to light the fire, and indeed it has continued sunny and warm through the day. Sadly, the forecast indicates that things may well deteriorate at the weekend, just as we are boating again, but so it goes, I guess. It is only early April, after all.

Since we won't now be moving up to Fradley until we leave to head for Birmingham, we set out to find the other three caches in the series we started the other day. A successful exercise, the main difficulty was taking care not let passing muggles see what we were up to.

This was especially the case on the approach to Hunts Lock, where BW are dredging the moorings at the moment.

Pleased with ourselves, we stopped off at the cafe, it being around half ten, and had a fancy hot chocolate (Sheila) and a decaff coffee (me), together with two pieces of fruit and nut cake: highly to be recommended.

Ambling back to the boat took us up nearly to lunchtime. Just before, I took a call from Matt at Canal Transport Services, to say that they were running a bit late with their work programme, and didn't expect to be able to dock Sanity (for grit blast and blacking) until the 20th of the month.

Fortunately, we'd not booked our planned break in the Lake District yet, so no problem, indeed it's a bit better for us as it takes us out of Easter week. We've decided to stay at the Burn How Garden Hotel in Bowness for a week, doing some walking and caching, and perhaps taking a couple of steamer trips and the like.

This afternoon we've been doing internet type stuff and generally loafing – tomorrow we must get busy on the Houdini, to get it done before the weather breaks. I'll also try and do another post to the Building Sanity Again blog: toilets this time, I think.

Ornithological note: we've been hearing a chiff chaff for the past couple of days, so the summer migrants are starting to arrive.