Howard picked us up from Warwick last night and drove us to his home in Rugby, about half an hour away, for dinner with him and his husband Gord. Also present were three dogs, one other roommate, and an escaped tarantula. Probably. Nobody knows exactly where in the house the tarantula is hiding. It’s a sort of invisible conversation piece. Now I can’t stop thinking about vintage James Bond movies. Gord will soon be starting a new job working with…
Today we visited the Warwick Market Hall Museum. You’re never quite sure what you are going to find in a local museum in England. Perhaps it will be a fez… … a stuffed bear… … or even a battle swan. There will usually be a hoard of Roman coins. Thank you whoever invented the metal detector. Sometimes there will be Saxon jewelry… … teddy bears… … a chance to dress up… … or a beehive. The Warwick museum has lots…
This tomb in the Beauchamp (pron: BEACH-um) Chapel in the Church of St Mary in Warwick is usually referred to as the tomb of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and favorite of Elizabeth I. It is really more the tomb of Lettice Knollys, his wife. The tomb was created for the two of them at her request, and she outlived Dudley by 46 years. It was a second marriage for both of them. Lettice was first married at the age…
That’s pretty much how we feel after slogging down the twenty-one lock Hatton Flight. They are heavy double wide locks, so the gates are hard to move and the paddles take a lot of winding with the windlass to get them up and down. The weather was generally good apart from two brief rain showers, lasting about one lock each. The wind made it hard to manage the boat. Though the locks are double wide, we were only opening the…
It’s becoming a tradition that we try to arrange our schedule to go and see my old friend Howard performing every summer in whatever touring outdoor show he is in. This year it is Gangsta Granny, the heartwarming tale of a boy who discovers his grandmother is an infamous jewel thief. Howard (in the silver vest above) plays the boy’s father… … and an obnoxious neighborhood watch busybody. You may notice something strange about some of these pictures. That’s right,…
Yesterday evening Paula wanted to go out for a walk, so we headed along the tow path to a bridge, and up onto the road. A few yards along the road there was a sign pointing into the soggy countryside saying Nature Trail so off we went in search of something natural. Paula spotted a pheasant. Not exactly natural, not in this country, but it will have to do. The common pheasant is has spread from its asian home across…
We trundled down six more locks this morning, pausing to fill the water tank and empty the toilet cassettes, and then said farewell to the Stratford Canal and joined the Grand Union. The Grand Union runs all the way from Birmingham to London, and was built as a faster way to move goods than the meandering Oxford Canal and unpredictable Thames. Most of it was built for double wide barges, so the bridges have plenty of room and the locks…
We are now starting to lose all that altitude we put on at the Tardebigge flight. There was a gap in the downpour today, so we took advantage of it to continue along the Stratford Canal until we start going downhill again. Although there is a lot of urban development around here, the canal remains for the most part a leafy sanctuary. After four locks we moored up for lunch. We checked the weather radar and forecast. There were still…
If this weather continues we will be taking on pairs of animals. It rained most of yesterday, while we were waiting for someone to repair the alternator, and it started out raining this morning. When the rain stopped we got the boat moving, but it started raining again. Happily I had full foul weather gear on, and even more happily there was a nice long tunnel to hide in. The Wast Hill Tunnel is just over one and a half…
It seems like there are a disproportionate number of Tudor buildings turned into fish and chip shops. There is another one in Alvechurch. There are several other black and whites in the town center. I liked the way the wall and window bulge out on this one… … and the incredible imagination that went into naming it. The people up the road have more imagination. It looks like a wall to me, not a shrubbery, but if you redefine moss…