| Ten Bob Note | ||
Thursday 19th July 2007 Location: Brewood, Staffs Today: 18 miles, 24 locks. Total distance: 253 miles. Total locks: 230 Lovely weather, hot, almost like summer!! A real busy day today as we wanted to get to the other side of Wolverhampton and out into the countryside. We are moored at a lovely spot, nice and peaceful. Fired up the BBQ in the evening as it was almost like summer. Heavy rain with possible flooding is forecast for tomorrow. We stopped at the basin in Wolverhampton to take on water and had a chat with one of the BW staff while filling the tank. He advised getting down the 21 lock flight without stopping and not to leave the boat unattended – all common sense really. He told us that muggings are common place along the flight, but boaters are rarely bothered, I guess it’s because boaters generally only carry a windlass while locking. It took us just over three hours to get down the 21 locks. We could have done with cooler weather as it was very hot when we arrived at the top lock at 12:00. Still, sun and heat is better than rain. I don’t think we will travel via Wolverhampton again by choice, it’s not a very nice place (our opinion, other may love the place) and there are a lot of unsavoury characters wandering along the tow path with cans of beer in hand. I bought some new toys last weekend and have now started using them for this web site. I have a new hand held Garmin GPS loaded with the Garmin TOPO full Ordnance Survey maps for the UK. I also bought the full GB Memory-Map Ordnance Survey maps for loading on the laptop. I am very pleased with the GPS and the Memory-Map PC maps but the Garmin TOPO maps of GB leave a lot to be desired as the detail is no where near as good as the Memory-Map maps. The GPS logs our journey which I down load to the Memory Map software which plots the log on the OS map. I can then print the journey to a PDF file that can be displayed in a web page. I am no longer dependent on the Street Map web site. I do like toys!!!
Friday 20th July Well, the weather forecast was correct, it has been raining all morning. Not bothered really as we are having a nice rest after the very busy day yesterday. Rhonda has defrosted the fridge as it was caked with ice around the ice box and has not been working very well of late. There is an LED on the front that flashes to indicate problems. It has been flashing several codes of late, one to indicate that the pressure in the system is too high and another to indicate that the motor is having problems. No idea what is causing the problems but don’t want to have to buy a new fridge as they are around £350!! Will monitor it and see how it goes after the de-frosting. Just remembered a comment from my dear son Glenn the other evening. He was laughing at the accuracy of my spelling – I will have to try and do better!! I explained to him that I tend to rattle off these diary entries very quickly and don’t tend to read them back to check the spelling as I have better things to be doing most of the time (like playing with my new GPS and mapping software)…… I will try harder in future but no promises :-)
Saturday 21st July Lots of heavy rain during the night and again this morning. Has eased off a bit this afternoon. Walked into Brewood this morning for the papers and some shopping. It’s a lovely village, shame about the weather. Will probably move tomorrow to take on water. Previous page -|- Next page -|- Index page |
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Material Copyright © 2007 Ernie Williams |