As companies go Uber may be the devil’s spawn, but at least they are better than traditional taxi services. I’ll skip the taxi horror stories and get on to the fun stuff. Yesterday we went to the Tring Natural History Museum again. All together now, I’m a Gnu… … A gnother Gnu… … call me bison or okapi and I’ll sue! It’s a great place unless you think that no gnus is good gnus or are wary of the cassowary….
We have just a couple more days on the boat, and we have finished moving it. This summer we traveled 613 miles and went through 566 locks. We are at Marsworth junction where a branch of the canal goes off to Aylesbury through far too many locks for us to want to visit. However, Aylesbury is famous for ducks, so here are some duck pictures from the local reservoirs. There’s a tufted duck and a common pochard. Oh, they may…
As Andrew’s noted, I’m the only member of Wharram Percy’s crew who’s ever been excited to cruise through Milton Keynes. This is the result of much criss-crossing of the canal here from above, as a traveller in the hyperspatial web of non-Euclidean weirdness that is the hodological manifold of MK40 (it’s no coincidence that its postcode sounds like a Messier object), thanks to the presence of the Open University campus – site, over the years, of many a conference, PhD…
Here we are at the last mooring in Leighton Buzzard, the one with the uneven canal side and fine view of the garbage skips. It does make me thing that there aren’t enough towns named after birds. Where are you Skipton Parrot? Why can’t we moor up at Long Cassowary or Lower Ostrich? What happened to Nether Vulture and Cuckoo-on-Sea? What sort of parties would they have in Bishop’s Pipit, or Chippington Spoonbill? Do you know the way to Coot’s…
Today Nick, Margaret, and I made a pilgrimage to Bletchley Park. I’ve already blogged about Bletchley, so I’ll just add a few things that weren’t there or I missed this time. Somewhere deep in the WWII Ministry of War, was there a military sock department? Why only jungle fighters? Didn’t our boys in the desert need something to cushion their feet from army issue boots as well. What about the navy? Your feet can get pretty cold in the North…
A couple of days ago we went past a boat called Out Of The Blue. It was green. Today there was Red Red Wine. Guess what color that was? We even passed a TARDIS that was mostly green. I don’t care if it’s bigger on the inside, you can’t call it TARDIS unless it’s blue with white trim. TARDIS Abject Failure in the TARDIS Department This morning we cruised down to Wolverton, stopping in Cosgrove for water. A boatload of…
We had another beautiful day today, so it was almost refreshing to be plunged into the cold, damp, and darkness of the Blisworth Tunnel. It’s one and three quarter miles long. We met two oncoming boats, neither of which were piloted by anyone who understood the Venturi effect. Happily we were prepared for this. Paula was able to push the prow of the boat back into the middle of the canal using a pole, or as we call it, the…
We are back in Weedon Bec, the village where Saint Werburgh banished the geese. However, these days a stained glass window of goose banishment is not enough to pack the pews. Modern christian outreach also includes free WiFi. Anglican churches are doing all sorts of things just to get people in the door. Coffee shops, comfy chairs, amusement park rides, brothels. OK, I made it up about the brothels but it’s probably only a matter of time till the Church…
The August holiday weekend is nearly here, the weather forecast is good, and the canals are crammed with boats, especially the stretch from Napton to Braunston where the Oxford and the Grand Union are the same canal. Most of them are OK, but a few of them are driven by beginners who don’t know how to steer. That’s by way of explaining why we were hit twice today once by a boat coming the other way round a corner who…
Today was another day with lots of lock. We had planned on doing ten locks and stopping at Long Itchington, but we had another boat to share the work and it was still early, so we headed up another ten locks before stopping for the day. I noticed a rare bird of prey overhead today. I haven’t seen many this year, though there have been lots of squirrels and pigeons around. It was, I think, the Hudson Bay Company that…