Holiday ended.

Well, I have now returned back home from a very pleasant bank holiday weekend visiting my father 'down south'! Had quite a relaxing weekend of walking and doing various other bits and bobs. Today we went for a 7 mile walk around Guildford and my brother joined us which was good. Simba had Tally to play with and apart from one sharp shower, it was quite a pleasant day as the pictures above show! A good run back home this evening with a very clear M25 and M40 which was amazing took just about 2 hours. My engine was started immediately I returned as the battery banks were down to 60%, (the fridge and freezer shut down at around 40%!!) and I am still running the engines now - over 3 hours later. I don't think I'll get them back up to 100% this evening and will have to run the engine a little longer each evening this week until they return to their normal cycles - another weekend next week running back and forth to Rose Narrowboats carting 100+ gallons of diesel! Only 3 weeks until I go for my weeks hiking holiday in the Peak District and my brother and niece borrow the boat for the week. The weather looks set to be considerably colder this week and I only hope it's just a 'blip' rather than a downward turn for any length of time. My father cleared out some of his ponds over the weekend which resulted in him having a lot of small cuttings of lillies and various other lovely pond plants so I travelled home with Simba squeezing himself in between a boot full of pond plants which I planted in the lake here in the marina as soon as I got home. They're small currently but once established in a year or two will look fantastic. If anyone has sent me an urgent email which needed lookign at this evening sorry, I won't get it! Some twit has sent me 10.2MBof email which I am attempting to pull through my internet connection which currenlty is averaging 52kbps! Unless it speeds up soon, I'll have to abandon the idea and wait until work tomorrow when I can get them through a true broadband connection. PLEASE don't ever send me anything over about 3MB at best and then only once you have told me it's coming so I can be warned. It cans up my whole systema nd I now can't check any of my email- home of work, until I have somehow cleared this great fat elephant trying to get through a hosepipe! Anyway - enough time wasted, now I need to go and check the engines again and carry on with all my work that I really should have doen over the weekend but didn't!