Car Shuffle, Cleaning and Almost a Welder

Yesterday booked tickets by train to Thorne so that he could retrieve our car and also a boat key that had been left at Blue Water Marina. When we collected the boat a month ago the office was closed for the day.

He started by catching the 9:44 to Preston from Rufford station just five minutes,if that, from the boat. This is a single track line and, in part, still controlled by the exchange of physical tokens.

The journey continued through Manchester, Sheffield and eventually arrived at Thorne at 14:24! All of the trains had been on time, within a couple of minutes, and so all went according to plan.

After a brief chat with Sarah who runs the marina, the return trip by car began. Apart from making a mistake at the first roundabout out of Thorne, and so missing the quickest access to a motorway, again all went to schedule and he arrived back at Fettlers Wharf within a couple of minutes of the ETA given by Google Maps at the start. However, almost all of the M62 had been tedious and very little was without some form of speed restriction below the normal maximum. There is a certain irony in slow traffic over an extended distance for road works to install so-called 'smart motorways' claimed to improve the traffic flow. In reality, such provision is usually an admission that the motorway is already at capacity for much of the day.

Meanwhile, Christine had been doing a thorough clean of the boat and doing some preliminary packing for our brief return home next week. She also made several attempts to locate someone who can repair the side hatch - the lower hinge will need welding (the easier bit) but also the upper hinge is bent (which is not so easy to deal with). However, the person who came was really interested in doing electrical work - he had heard on the grapevine that this was the reason we had come into the marina yesterday! 'Heavy' engineering is not really his thing. Still, Phil - who looks after the marina when Richard the owner is away - has promised that he will find us someone very soon!

She also spotted that the migrating birds are beginning to gather to form the community that will start to fly away again before too long. The boat closest to us seemed to be a popular place for them to line up, the smaller ones still hopeful that their parents will feed them rather than having to go out and forage for themselves. These pictures were taken when they inhabited our roof for a while.