An extra day at Alrewas and then on towards Rugeley

27th & 28th July

We had a change of plan yesterday morning when Sheila woke with her sore eye looking and feeling much worse. It was clear she needed to see a doctor and so she repeated my trick of being on the doorstep of the surgery when it opened at 8.15.

This worked even better for her, as she got to see our preferred GP at half eight. Dr Mager Jones took one look at the eye and prescribed chloramphenicol. From here on things appeared to go less well. The pharmacy doesn't open until nine so she came back to the boat for a bit, and then we both went out to get the script made up and to buy some more meat from the butchers.

Despite chloramphenicol being a very common eye ointment, the pharmacy was out of stock and would not have any more in until five o' clock. Fortunately, we had already decided it was now too late to tackle Fradley with so much traffic about, so we made the best of a bad job by giving the boat a thorough clean inside.

These apparent reverses proved to have an up side in that we were able to have a long chat in the afternoon with the folk off Shiraz, and then have Elanor come to the boat with our post. It then transpired that Autumn Years with Graham and Carolann on board (and grandson Sam) had meanwhile tied just off the end of the lock landing.

When Elanor left us, therefore, we went back and had a glass of wine or two on Autumn Years and a substantial catch up session with her crew. In fact this session went on so long it was too late for me to start cooking when we returned to Sanity, and dinner had to be obtained from the chip shop.

This morning we made an early start, planning to tie at Kings Bromley. We'd had a phone call from Peter Mason at Braidbar last night and it seemed likely that we would be meeting him sometime this week, rather than next.

There was less traffic about than we expected this morning and so we made good time up Fradley locks, passing Leonard, Braidbar number 96, at the top. Whilst we were doing so, Peter left a message on our voicemail to say that tomorrow lunch time (i.e. Wednesday) would be the best time for him to meet us. It seems likely that this will be at Rugeley. We were making such good time that we've chosen to come on almost to Handsacre, so as to have a shorter run in the morning to Rugeley.

We've tied just before bridge 56 so as to have a quiet country mooring. Checking the geocaching website before lunch identified one cache just a little further back on the towpath and three near the village of Mavesyn Ridware. We did the first one to fill in time before lunch and have visited the other three this afternoon.

This last involved rather more road walking than we'd have liked but it still made for some very pleasant exercise.

Sadly, somehow in the middle of all this gadding about we missed a visit from Chris and Lizzie off Shim Shams just before lunch, which would have made a nice addition to our collection of Braidbar crews this week

We are now looking forward to a quiet evening and an early night after the exertions of the last couple of days.