We are still heading south on the Oxford Canal, through beautiful countryside. There are fairly frequent locks, but they are scattered, so you go through them one at a time with some motoring in between. We went through one of the deepest narrow locks on the system today, twelve feet. Any deeper than that and the paddles would be under too much pressure to crank up easily and the gates too heavy to move. The old lock keeper’s cottage is…
Last night we moored in the same place we stopped a week ago, close to the Tesco and a few minutes walk from the center of Banbury. Beside the towpath there is a large and pleasant park, Spiceball Park. The River Cherwell runs through it, and there is a significant engineering effort under way to make the course of the river more natural, including a custom built backwater for the newts to breed. However, there is a strange mystery surrounding…
We’ve been too busy having fun to write in the blog, but here’s a quick summary of the best of the rest of the festival. The surprise hit were the Pierce Brothers, twins from Australia. One plays guitar, and the other plays didgeridoo, harmonica, and a minimal drum kit, which includes using his brother’s long-suffering guitar as a drum. They started out busking on the streets of Melbourne, and this was the last gig of three months in Europe, traveling…
Overall, wonderful experience. Fun to watch the Brits let their hair down. Much of that hair was grey and thinning but the younger generations were represented as well. In fact, we met a 31 year old guy who has been at 29 Cropredy Festivals! Musically there was diversity. Fairport Convention get labeled Folk Rock which is a term not in much use in the States as far as I know. (Open to corrections, though; so many years with my favorite…
The festival opened with a short acoustic set by Fairport Convention. My favorite song was a parody of Steeleye Span’s a cappella hit Gaudete, which they called Crudité. I’ve been a fan of Gryphon since they were active in the 1970s. They reformed in 2009 after a break of forty years. They play a mixture of medieval and modern instruments, with a distinctive crumhorn, recorder, and (electric) harpsichord sound. Favorite song: Kemp’s Jig. Will Kemp was a clown, who played…
A few boats from us on the canal is Cakes on the Cut, a pop up canal side cafe. That’s a fairly obvious business to set up where there are a lot of people moored. The boat next to it also does food (toast and ice cream) but has a sideline in hand airbrushed T-shirts… and a range of mugs. Close to them is a boat making art out of old gramophone records. I went by and the guy was…
Well, shinier than they were, anyhow. I spend a lot of time looking along the roof of Pegotty while steering, and there is this row of brass ventilators along the top that has probably not been polished in ten years. So today I set to with Brasso, and failed, so upgraded to abrasive cleaner and then Brasso, which sort of worked for the mushroom parts with lots of elbow grease. There were still the stem bits to do. A bike…
We’re back in Cropredy, and moored up for a week now. Another aspect of the slow nature of narrowboating, is that it took about an hour and a half to turn the boat around this morning. That’s because the nearest winding hole was a mile and a lock away from us, and since there were moored boats most of the way we could not politely go faster than 2 miles an hour. A winding hole is a place in the…
We have tickets for the Cropredy Music Festival, too, but we needed a grocery store run first, so we set off through Cropredy to Banbury. Something of the leisurely pace of narrowboat live can be expressed by the fact that a run to the nearest Tesco Extra is a two day round trip. It was sunny but windy today, and in spite of the canal meandering this way and that I seemed to have the wind in my face all…
It’s Paula! Surprising things English groceries are cheap and nice. Many more drinks options, zillions of cheeses, nice meats, decent produce and breads. Not big on organic options. Sleeping on a 4 ft wide bed is doable! Same length as at home (80″) But Andrew is on the inside, though. Hardware in hardware stores is lovely and nice quality. Things I don’t often see at home. More racial diversity than when I first visited +/- 30 years ago. Not uncommon…