No, I’m not trying to write a new Beatles song, it’s just that despite being a short working week, it seems to have been a hard slog getting from bank holiday monday to this weekend. It hasn’t helped that I have had a cold/man-flu and that I have had a fair bit of travelling to do. Sue did some “half-term grandchildren visiting” and stll managed to go for a tune up at the pacemaker clinic.
We decided to leave our trip to Braunston until Saturday morning so there was time on Friday evening to deliver a car boot full of pallet blocks to Jim who was moored by Trinity marina, he won’t need to burn many in the coming months (we all hope) but it’ll give him a good start on the autumn.
Saturday morning dawned and I felt that my cold was on the way out, sadly it seems to have found Sue who awoke feeling the effects of the early symptoms. Nevertheless, we stuck a few bits and pieces in the car and were on the road just after nine o’clock. We stopped off in Rugby to do a bit of shopping and then completed our journey by eleven.
We had brought and bought cleaning materials to give Caxton’s paintwork a good going over but neither of us were really in the mood for it, both being a bit under the weather.
We did, however get a couple of other jobs done in the early afternoon. Silicon spray on the brass runners to make the slide glide easily, the Desmo bases removed so that they can be countersunk into the oak floor and a proper mobile internet connection installed. We did this before on Phoenix III but in that case we had a fixed antenna. This time around, we have used an antenna with a magmount so it sticks to the roof. This has saved drilling a hole in the roof and the antenna can be brought safely inside when we are not living on board. The cable was threaded from the lounge to the cratch by attaching it to the end of a redundant tv aerial cable and gently pulling it until it emerged at the front of the boat. Once in place, it was only a matter of connecting the antenna at one end, the Huawei dongle at the other and switching on the TP-Link router. Once activated, I tested the connection and was pleased to see a very healthy 4MB/s download speed.
After clearing up and enjoying a celebratory beer, wine for Sue of course, we went for a stroll around the marina where we dumped the aforementioned redundant cable in the skip before walking up the towpath to the bottom lock. We took a quick look in the chandlers there and then returned to our boat for dinner.