Friday 15 May 2009

Mega-shopping, then back to Hillmorton

14th & 15th May

Yesterday saw us make an early start, as we had a lot of shopping to do at Brownsover, and had gathered from our trip through the other day that it was likely to be empty first thing. This proved to be a touch inaccurate; indeed, we only just found a space on the offside, by the park.

In fact, we tied behind Smudge, Braidbar 60, and had a chat with the Fergusons later in the morning. They said that they'd had a quiet night there, which encouraged us to think of doing the same, so as to have plenty of time to shop.

A first trip to Tesco got a lot of essentials, including the stuff we needed for lunch. Back at the boat, I put it all away, then made a coffee. Refreshed and restored, we crossed over the canal, then down onto it and under the road to the retail park on the other side, to seek out a new cordless drill. I found something of what I wanted in Wickes, but the Homebase had only a poor selection.

Expecting to have to go back to Wickes, we went into Halford's just for the sake of completeness, and were glad that we had.

They had the very thing, an 18 volt cordless hammer drill for less than £40. It won't have the rugged, use it every day quality of the Wickes job, but I don't need that in a tool I'll use just a few times a year at most.

Halford's also had a polishing bonnet kit, which takes us back to the where we came in with all this, the plan to spare my protesting shoulder rotator cuff by power polishing the side of the boat. I must admit to a rather tetchy response from Sheila last year as we slogged down the second side with the polishing cloths.

She commented that it was all right for the guys at Braidbar when they prepared a boat for showing, as they had powered polishers, and I said cheerfully "Well, we could always stick a polishing bonnet on the drill".

She seemed to feel I might have mentioned this a little earlier, before we'd spent four years, twice a year, polishing Sanity by hand.

After lunch I put the new battery on charge, and we went shopping to Tesco yet again, this time getting a load of fruit and veg, and some more alcoholic beverages. Once this lot was put away, the cupboards and fridge were full to bursting, so we are as well prepared as we can be for the next couple of weeks journey into darkest Northants and Leicestershire.

There's not a lot in the way of supermarketry along the Leicester Section.

Later in the afternoon, Isambard (Braidbar 83) turned up, but as they tied on the towpath side, there wasn't a lot of opportunity for chat.

I rounded off a busy day by doing a Building Sanity Again post, a catching up one about a load of things like portholes, prisms, cookers and so forth.

It was a really wet night, and continued damp into the morning. Sheila steered us to Hillmorton, where there was plenty of room on the visitor moorings. We've washed the starboard side of the boat, run another washload and then generally loafed and lazed about.

One piece of good news: a stoppage notice said, inter alia:

On Tuesday 19 May please also be aware that there will be short delays for boat traffic on the navigation opposite Crick Marina as the temporary footbridge for the Crick Boat Show and Waterways Festival is installed over the canal.


That will make so much difference to our work at Crick when folk want to see both the show boat and the ones on the towpath.

Tomorrow we'll work up the locks, then tie somewhere between Hillmorton and Braunston, going on into the latter for Sunday and Monday nights.

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