Boxing Day to Boat

We are having a week on the boat - mainly because we are meeting up with three grand daughters on Saturday for a visit to War Horse in Oxford.

 We managed a good getaway, leaving not long after 10:30! It was a very misty day - foggy, even - but not enough to cause problems as we drove up to Swindon. The Sat Nav, before we left, recommended the route via Newbury but by the time we were in the car it had switched to the route along the Oxford to Swindon road.

Thus far no real delays but the ETA started to slip a little as we neared the A34 Oxford bypass.Whilst there were some slow patches it was rather better than we feared from Google. However, as we neared the junction with the M42 we could see that there was a speed restriction and most of the time until Junction 11 was slow moving.

Nevertheless, we were only about 15 minutes longer than the first ETA and were at the marina before lunch time. We speedily unloaded the car (we still had a surprisingly full load, but it did include two bags of fuel for the stove). 

We had arranged with Black Swan, the resident marine engineers, to do several items of maintenance but had not heard when they would do it - we had said that it was not urgent. So it was a pleasant surprise to find that at least the obvious bits had been done. Later we saw the chap who works for them and lives a couple of boats way from our mooring - he told us that one of the other engineers from another base had been assigned to the work.

We gradually packed things away, combined with getting the inside of the cabin up to a working temperature. In fact it was not too cold when we arrived.