Hurleston

 Today's Canal - Llangollen

Today we returned to the boat which we had left in Swanley Bridge Marina (again!) The reason for this short visit home was that both of us had an appointment with our dentist. We had managed to arrange them for first thing and in between fitted in a visit to the library to swap some reading material and to pick up one or two items for boat maintenance. We organised ourselves to load most things into the car last night and then set the alarm to give us enough time to complete it before we went to the dentist.

As we had hoped we were 'on the road' by 10:45 with an ETA just three hours later. Alas this was not to be. As we reached the bypass around Swindon, Christine offered Mike a small piece of flapjack for elevenses. At this point is suddenly dawned on Mike that the dentist had not returned his lower denture which she had removed whilst taking some impressions. He was not keen to be without it for two weeks so we came off the main road to phone the dental surgery and check. There was no option but to turn around and go back to where we had started. OUCH!

The trip then was very straightforward with no unanticipated delays and, with just a quick comfort break at a service station. we arrived at the marina in three hours ten minutes.

Unloading the car was straightforward but it always takes longer to stow everything away than we keep hoping.

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In the end we were able to cast off and leave the marina around half past four.

We were not in any case expecting to go down the four Hurleston Locks tonight and hoped to find a space on the last of the generally excellent Visitor Moorings provided by the Shropshire Union Canal Society. As we tied up there was no other boat for company but a little later one to join us. We have been very surprised to find very few of the VMs where we could not easily slot in, and many entirely empty even this far into the day. We guess that with the traffic being dominated at the moment by hire boats, there are only one or two places that commonly fit in with the distances from the hire bases.

As is often the case, by the time we return home we are straight into a packed agenda and do not get around to blogging about the final day of each trip. Fortunately, this means that we do not have to describe the embarrassing reasons why the car journey took over an hour longer than it should have done!

1.0 Mile - 0 Locks