We continued to head North along the Grand Union today, with a break not just for tea, but also for Paula to visit a thrift store. The goal for today was to escape Milton Keynes. Oh, I know, it presents a leafy enough face to the canal, but rising above the tree there are occasional glimpses of architectural atrocities make Barad-Dur look like an amusement park. Why does a factor need a fifty foot tall guard tower? Why is that…
After Alan Turing designed a machine to break the Enigma code, the staff at Bletchley Park had around three thousand intercepted German messages a day to deal with. To catalog and organize them in order to extract useful intelligence, they recruited librarians (generally female, as was most of the Bletchley Park staff) from all over the country. That’s right, bitches, WWII was won by a gay guy and a bunch of librarians. OK, there were other people involved, but historians…
The weather was not very good today, but we picked a gap in the drizzle to get down to the point just past the bridge nearest Bletchley Park where we could turn around. The was one lock, with a swing bridge across the middle of it, and a rise of only one foot, which Paula made short work of. There are not many places in the canal wide enough to turn a narrow boat around, and the one we were…
We started the day with a flight of five locks. Paula was working the paddles and gates, and I just had to get the boat in and out of the locks. Working lock gates is good exercise. If anyone wants to come and visit us we can promise them a workout plan as well as three meals a day and all the non-alcoholic shandy you care to drink. Talking of three meals a day, I fried up some black pudding…
The canal engineers of the 18th and early 19th Centuries were a determined lot, and they tunneled like obsessive compulsive hobbits. To create Blisworth tunnel they spent three years digging a tunnel through a hilltop by hand. The tunnel collapsed due to quicksand and killed fourteen men. They picked a different route, almost two miles long, for the tunnel and spent another eleven years digging that. That involved digging nineteen shafts straight down and then tunneling across from the bottoms…
My sailing instructor, Dennis, used to say that if you went out, and came back again, and didn’t hit anything, then you had won. Canal boating is a bit more of a contact sport, but you are not usually traveling fast enough to do any damage if you hit anything. Alex who manages this and other boats, did mention that in ten years he has had a couple of boats sink. So, I decided that if we managed not to…
It’s raining on and off today, so we are staying put for the day, unpacking, and settling in. Here’s the inside of our little floating home. Entering from the bow, we have the living room and galley. The living room has a wood burning stove, and a futon for visitors. There’s a fold up table for dining. The galley has a new propane stove and fridge. Aft of the galley is the head which is pretty cramped apart from a…
Reliable sources inform me that it is now Tuesday. I have had about six hours sleep since Sunday morning. Any random content the the following post is entirely due to jet lag and sleep deprivation, and not at all due to space aliens eating my brain. Probably. Until the musical Kinky Boots, Northampton’s main contribution to human culture was a catchy little song about aliens coming to Northampton to repair their flying saucer, commissioned by the Northampton Development Corporation. I’m…
Uneventful flight on Norwegian Airlines. We sprung for “Premium” seats and the extra room was marvelous. And they actually served real food. Dinner and breakfast. Currently in a Hampton Hotel near Gatwick. Took a walk yesterday through some horse pastures to the border of Surrey.
A unique tribute to conspicuous consumption, Hearst Castle sits like a gothic wedding cake on a hilltop on the southern California coast. Hearst Castle was a meal ticket for architect Julia Morgan for twenty-eight years, and the estate now includes the hotel sized big house and three guest cottages the size of mansions. Here’s one of the cottages. William Randolph Hearst was a collector with the artistic sensibilities of a rabid magpie. He collected coffins, ceilings, floors, tapestries, and fragments…