Rain was forecast for this afternoon, so I only wanted to go a few miles to Napton Junction, where the Grand Union and the Oxford canals part company. We tuned down the Grand Union heading towards Warwick, and then moored up just before the Calcutt locks, a flight of three. After Paula’s Big Adventure, which she can tell you about herself, we went down the locks, and moored a little past them. The rain was still due in an hour…
So, there I was alone on Pegotty. We were moored and Andrew had toddled off to view the locks we had planned to do tomorrow. He was Just about a city block away. I was playing a game, not focused on the outside. There is a fair amount of swaying involved as other boats go by. Sometimes boats get too close and thud into each other which could be bad news if these weren’t steel boxes. So I ignored the…
To fully appreciate this post I suggest reading it while listening to some Ralph Vaughan Williams, perhaps Lark Ascending, or Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. We just moved the boat less than two miles this morning, but this mooring has a completely different atmosphere. We are away from the hustle and bustle of the Braunston towpath and the road noise from the busy A45, and out in the country with a fine view of the rolling English countryside….
Have been enjoying Andrew’s blog posts but thought it time to add my tuppence. (See what I did there?) Life on Pegotty has affected my quotidian endeavors. Much less time on line, basically no option to stream any videos, haven’t dealt with my phone in two weeks. Not a big phone fan, it interesting that I even miss it a bit! What I do focus on: where to get groceries, helping with mooring, dealing with the locks, trying to put…
This morning we headed back to Braunston to drop Mary and Chris back to their car. Some of the fields we went by still show the remnants of mediaeval farming. Look how the buttercups are growing better on the ridges of slightly higher ground in this meadow. Those are the strips that would have been farmed by different families. One family might have several strips over several different fields. Over several hundred years, the lands that were held in common…
The game of rugby was invented at Rugby School in the town of Rugby, when a member of the privileged class decide that he shouldn’t have to kick the football like everyone else, so he picked it up and carried it. After all, it’s not as if the game had been called FOOTball since the Fifteenth Century. Well, it had, actually, but that wasn’t important to someone who went to to right school. Rather than admit that he had committed…
We started the day with a flight of seven locks, including the one that had been out of action for four days. We paired up with another boat to go through the locks, and the skipper reminisced about the time they had waited sixteen days for a lock repair on the Kennet and Avon Canal. Locks involve a fair amount of physical labor hoisting paddles up and down and opening and closing gates. Paula does all of this. I just…
Our Internet connection consists of a pay-as-you-go SIM chip in my phone with tethered WiFi from that. I’ve worked out what the little letters next to the signal strength indicator mean: H: slow as Hell E: takes for Ever LTE: Less Than Expected 4G: For God’s sake this is slow We are out in the country at the moment, so have zero bars of H. That and the fact that it was cold this morning mean fewer pictures today. The…
Today was cold, overcast, and drizzly when we got up. The winter in San Francisco is pretty much like the worst parts of summer in England, while the summer in San Francisco is like the best parts of the summer in England. Undaunted, we continued north, back to Stoke Breurne and its flight of seven locks. Here a volunteer lock keeper called Leo helped us up the flight while coaching us on our lock technique and sharing details of canal…
It was a beautiful morning, sunny and bright, so we decided to stay put today and explore the local countryside. I checked in with Clive, who said he could be up around three in the afternoon to fix the leaking sink, so we set off down the towpath. There are a number of geocaches in the vicinity, but I haven’t found any yet, mostly due to my unwillingness to go poking around in hedges full of hawthorn, brambles, and stinging…