Returned home.

Well - isn't it great just to get away for a while! I was only out for 5 days but thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. A very interesting trip down the Grand Union to Norton Junction and back home again. The weather ranged from glorious sunshine to freezing cold, flat calm to howling gale and pouring rain thrown in for good measure! I have attached a picture above of us passing a Willow Wren hire boat with a somewhat over-animated group of kids dancing on the roof who then decided to spit atthe ducks and throw the centre rope over the side of the boat in an attempt to hit the ducks with it! According to Willow Wren, it was a party of school children who had been told not to climb on the roof while the boat was under-way!?

One of the most memorbale occasions was the lady we met at Hillmorton locks. A boat had just risen and left the locks and so I positioned the boat to use their water downhill. My father went ahead to be ready for me only to be met by a large woman who insisted that this was HER lock. My father looked around thinking we must have queue jumped but the only boat around was one at the bottom of the lock waiting to come up. A BW engineer was present so my father looked across to him and calmly said, 'have I missed something here?' to which he smiled and replied, 'no, you haven't missed a thing!' The BW engineer then attempted to explain tot he lady how the boat whose favour the lock is in has right of way rather than whoever gets there first! My father then overheard her saying that they were complete novices! - what blind ignorance to be so adamant that you are right when you know nothing and how about an apology once she had been explained too?

A little later on, we were approaching a narrow section and clearly had the right of way as we were almost into it, when an approaching boat manouvered himself out into the middle of the cut to push through - being polite, we backed out and let him through which caused the wind to catch us and we then had a hard struggle to re-gain control of our 55 foot vessel while the old codger on the 30 foot vessel that had pushed through simply sailed on by smiling at us - even a man working on his moored boat who saw the whole thing simply threw his hands up in the air in dismay as we looked back at him!

Is it me, or are there more and more people coming onto the waterways who haven't got a clue and why oh why does the ignorant rudeness of the shore based world have to be rapidly spreading like a disease onto the waterways?