An easy day, and a gentle day's boating

4th & 5th May

After a solid night's sleep (so that's the answer to insomnia, do more than 20 locks in a day...) we woke to a cool and cloudy morning, with light showers drifting through from time to time.

At eight, the Black Prince hire boat that had been tied behind us set off towards Hatton. We made a more leisurely start, leaving the boat at around half eight to explore Warwick. Despite often coming here to hire boats from Kate Boats in the eighties, we'd never actually been into the town centre.

We found the Castle after about 15 minutes gentle walk from Bridge 50. They were preparing for a Bank Holiday extravaganza, so we didn't go in, but maybe next time we will. Then we had a wander round the town itself, which was, as may be expected, very quiet.

On the way back to the boat, we called in at Sainsbury's and bought just enough stuff to keep us going for the day. By the time we were back on board, it had decided to rain in earnest, so we had a good excuse for a recovery day, loafing about reading the papers, catching up with emails and generally chilling.

Well, it was a Bank Holiday.

This morning we had another relaxed start. We worked down the Cape Two, and filled up at the water point at the bottom. Then we plodded on to Kate Boats in search of diesel and a gas bottle.

As I've said, we used to hire from Kate regularly, when it was being run by Eric Simmonds, a decent man and with a great sense of what we'd now call customer relations. Sadly, things aren't so good now.

They insisted on charging us a 60% propulsion split, in direct contravention of the relevant Revenue and Excise brief. I wouldn't sign the declaration as it stood (it was pre-printed) but crossed out the 60% and inserted 30%, this being my estimate for the next tankful. In the circumstances, I only took 50 litres off them, so they could have sold me around 60 litres more if they'd been playing the game.

I also asked for a full VAT receipt, but was only given the till roll receipt stapled to a compliments slip. Just to round things off, they would only take cash or a cheque from me, although there was a chip and pin card reader in plain view on the counter. Maybe they've lost their merchant status with their card company...

Muttering gently to ourselves, we boated along to the Tesco moorings at Emscote, where we were joined by Kyle and Sabrina. We all walked down to the store, though Brian and John had finished long before we did. In fact, I had to go and get a second trolley to take the overflow of goodies.

The great thing about this store is that you can take the trolley right up to the boat to offload it, so we've been able to replace all the stores we'd run down before leaving the boat, and start building up stocks for catering and drinking at the Crick Show at the end of the month.

After lunching on board, we pottered along to a mooring near Radford Semele village, just short of Radford Bottom lock, the start of the climb up to Napton. It's a very pleasant mooring, just clear of the twin conurbations of Leamington and Warwick, and deservedly popular.

To complete the day's exercise, we walked on to the lock, and had a look for a geocache nearby. We didn't find it, partly because we'd forgotten to take gloves with us, and the nettles are now quite ferocious when hunting for the cache, and partly because it's clearly very cleverly hidden.

We'll have another look for it tomorrow after we go up the lock. On the way back, we noted that Indigo Dream is safe and sound on her towpath mooring – Radford's obviously a better place to tie than Banbury!

Back at the boat, we had a cup of tea, and I sent an email to HM Revenue and Customs, explaining what happened this morning, and asking if there's any way I can recover the overpaid duty on my diesel.