Up Foxton...

... is one of those phrases that could mean a variety of things, but in this case only the good ones. After I'd collected my pre-ordered paper and loaf of bread from the shop, Sheila steered along the last of the Arm to the bottom of Foxton.

A volunteer lockie was just working a boat down, but the guy with the booking-in book was at the top of the flight, a good example of Sod's Law. Sheila was hovering in the basin, not in a happy mood. She'd been nicely lined up to come onto the lock landing when the lockie opened the bottom paddles. The resulting gush of water blew her out into the basin again, where the wind took her and made sure that she couldn't get back across.

It would never have happened in the days of Mick and Crystal ;) .

I zoomed up the flight, found the real lockie and he told us to work half way up the flight. By the time I reached the bottom again, Sheila was in the lock, having really struggled to get Sanity Again lined up. Off we went, making steady progress to the half way basin, where the lockie pulled us across into the layby.

A CBC boat came down, and we set off up the top half. There was plenty of room on the visitor moorings, so we were soon settled down for the day. We've been pottering about, ambling up and down the flight just to gongoozle, checking out the top car park for Elanor, and then spending some time nattering and drinking beer with some very pleasant Kiwis (are there any other kind?) off a CBC boat tied in front of us.

In the end, we showed them through Sanity Again, just to say thanks for the beer, and to get our hand in for Crick.

Speaking of which, we started to worry that the usual temporary footbridge wasn't shown on the site plans. They missed this out one year, and it was murder slogging to and fro to the site round by the road bridge. I tweeted about it, and I'm pleased to say that I had a reply from Andrew Denny, aka @grannybuttons, confirming that the bridge will be there.

So there's just the problem of the random allocation of mooring spaces to deal with now...