Plans
We decided to move on Tuesday morning and get our 2018 trip underway properly. Our original plan had been to start by heading into Birmingham by way of the Coventry canal and then the Birmingham & Fazeley with just a short diversion to The Greyhound for my birthday lunch. Over the weekend we decided to give Birmingham a miss completely and head off in the opposite direction. This isn’t as dramatic as it might as first seem, Plan ‘A’ would have taken us from Birmingham to Stratford and on to the river Avon. Plan ‘B’ will bypass Birmingham and take us to Stratford on the Oxford, Grand Union and Stratford canals – assuming that plan ‘C’ isn’t hatched along the way.
Our day had to begin relatively early because our change of plan meant that Caxton was pointing in the wrong direction and so we had to reverse back to the junction. Needless to say, we weren’t early enough and as I reversed the boat slowly towards the narrow section, the bow of another narrowboat appeared under the cast iron bridge and turned towards us. Luckily the large gap at the water points gave plenty of width to the canal and allowed us to pass without incident. Once past the junction, we pulled in to use the facilities but with the water tap being a good contender for the slowest on the system, we left an hour later with just half a tankful. The tank was filled an hour later when we stopped temporarily at Ansty. We were soon underway again and enjoying the sunshine as we travelled through the Warwickshire countryside. It was a perfect boating day really, sunny with light winds and not too hot. We reached Newbold on Avon in the early afternoon, tied up and had some lunch.
After lunch, we decided to walk along the towpath to Tesco at Rugby. We didn’t need anything but it gave us a good reason to go for a walk. Part way along, we made a detour and followed the Great Central footpath which is of course a redundant railway route.
The path ends at the new Elliot’s field retail park, we stopped for coffee and browsed in a couple of shops before crossing the road and visiting Tesco. The return to our mooring only took us half an hour, straight along the towpath to Newbold where we settled in for the evening.
Blue skies greeted us on Wednesday morning, we wanted to move but delayed our start in the hope that we would improve our chances of finding a mooring at Brownsover’s Boughton Road park. The water point was empty when we arrived and luckily enough, the boat which was tied next to us was about to leave, so we pulled back and made use of our long hose pipe to top up our tank.
Only an hour had elapsed since we had left Newbold so with the afternoon ahead of us, we decided to explore the retail parks nearby. This included what could possibly be my last visit to a Maplin store. The retailer is in administration and everything is being sold off at a discount. There wasn’t a lot left on the shelves, awful really, to see this one-time Aladdin’s cave stripped almost bare. Fair play to the staff, they’re still sticking to their task even though it must be difficult to generate any sort of enthusiasm for the job. I bought a soldering iron and a couple of connectors before leaving, feeling a slight tinge of sadness at the demise of this once great retail emporium. Eventually we returned to our mooring and wondered what the following day would bring us. This side of the canal only allows a 24 hour stay so we knew that we had to move, the question being – how far would we be going? We wanted to spend a few more days in the area so we were keen to find somewhere close by, perhaps around the corner where we moored last September.