We, at long last, left the marina. We were well and truly ready. Marinas are not for me; I prefer to be out on the cut. We had a lovely cruise to Braunston; it was so lovely being back cruising, watching all the nature, seeing the lambs and the plants trying to burst out from winter into their spring blossom. We saw a beautiful kite soaring above as we slowly meandered along the canal.
We arrived in Braunston just after four o’clock. The weather had started to cool down, so we moored up, quickly put the pram cover-up, and stoked the fire. It didn’t take long for the boat to become toasty. We popped into The Boat pub for dinner. It was delicious; we returned and caught up on some vlogs we had missed over the weekend.
Monday morning, Mexi and I went for a morning walk along the canal; seeing different scenery was lovely. Mexi found a small animal’s house and wanted it to come out to play, it kept squeaking at her, and I had to move her along. We had a cup of tea and popped into Braunston to the post office, then back to the boat. I had an hour’s work to do before we could set off. At just after one o’clock, we set off. We only had a few locks; this was the first time we had seen these types of locks; they were tough and heavy to work. The weather was not too bad; we had a bit of drizzle. As we cruised, I prepared a tasty Beef & mushroom casserole for tea cooked on the wood burner. The smell was wonderful. We kept going until we started to get too cold and moored up in the middle of nowhere which was great. There was a lovely view over the fields and nothing around us so that Mexi could play on the towpath without annoying anyone else.
Tuesday morning arrived, and we set off by ten o’clock. Today, we had lots of heavy locks to do. I was still not confident enough to take the boat through, so I had to find some extra strength from somewhere. It was a nightmare doing the locks. The pounds were empty, so we had to keep filling them up and releasing water into the next one before going further. By the end of the flight of ten, I had enough, I was shattered, but we still had more to do. We ended up completing sixteen locks in the end. My eyes were extremely heavy, as were my arms. We moored up again in the middle of nowhere near the last lock. I made a cheese sauce between locks and cooked the cauliflower. So we had a quick, tasty tea of cauliflower cheese and sausages. I fell asleep watching tv and slept like a log.
We only had four locks to do on Wednesday, which made me happy. We were heading to Warwick, where we planned to spend a few days before tackling the Hatton flight. The weather was not great. It kept raining, but we knew we didn’t have far to go today, so it wasn’t too bad. We stopped at Lidl just outside Leamington Spa, and I bought far too many goodies. We then cruised onwards to Warwick. As we arrived, we started to look for a mooring. There seemed nowhere we really fancied, so we decided to go through the other two locks. This is where we had an epic FAIL. We had missed a closure when planning the trip. I walked up to the lock. It had a padlock, and eventually, I found the closure. Oh great, we are not stuck at the bottom of the locks until the 17th of March. Hey-Ho looks like lots of knitting and earring-making for me, and I’m sure Mexi will get lots of walks, and Steve will enjoy pottering about and keep checking on CRT to see how the work is going.
Never Two Late Our Journey 