Today we travelled back to the boat which has been resting at Uplands Marina for the past fortnight. We are now over five hours straight driving from home so we managed to set the alarm early and were away before 9. First we called at the Town Hall in order to register our vote in the European Elections - much good it may do in these hopelessly fractured political times. We also replenished the car's fuel tank at Asda as we passed through Bodmin.
The journey was largely uneventful and although there are two lengthy sets of roadworks, and a couple of shorter ones, we were not abnormally delayed. However, the amount of traffic is definitely greater than previous trips - but we do have to remember it is a Bank Holiday weekend coming up.
We arrived at the boat a little after 2 o'clock, unloaded the car and called at the marina office to pay £1.50 for the electricity hook-up. Not quite sure where it went as we thought that everything was switched off. At least the solar panels also helped to ensure that the batteries were fully charged.
We are heading only as far as Pennington Marina at Plank Lane on this shortish trip (just over a week) and that slot was only booked yesterday! That is no more than a couple of day's good cruising so we can afford a slow pace and some diversions.
Our slot at Uplands was only until today so we had to leave the marina but, still undecided, we only went around the corner to the moorings just before the Anderton Lift. As we manoeuvred our way out of the marina we spotted Emily Ann moored on another pontoon. She is the pride and joy of the owner of the well-known Canal World Forum, where many a boater meets to share experiences and, just occasionally, some controversial ideas and opinions!
We put off a supermarket visit - which perhaps could have been this evening - and that will probably be a priority for tomorrow. However, we have established that there should be room on the lift at some stage tomorrow - there are still plenty of slots although the chap in the admin centre admitted that he had seen quite a few enquiries - no doubt mostly misers like us who don't want to fork out the £5 booking fee unless really necessary and only when we know for sure what we want to do.
It has been another glorious day weather-wise even if, as boaters, we sometimes see forecasts of rain as 'good' news when everyone else is being gloomy about it! The real breakthrough in civilisation will be when we workout how to ensure that it always rains at night and there is sunshine by day! No doubt even that will not please some folk . . .
Anyway, hopefully by the time of the next blog we will be able to tell where we actually want to go.
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