On holiday and the kids are back at school

One of the few benefits of getting old is that your kids get old(er) with you. So our first holiday this year is being taken outside of the kids school holidays which is smashing.We eventually moved off the Fradley visitor moorings Saturday afternoon after a justified overstay (since Tuesday) and there were still three boats there that were there before we got there. All in all we were off our moorings for 18 days. I'm not sure if it was the fact we were a local moored boat that the yard knew was off its moorings because of the dredging that meant we did not get a notice. I fear the notices are not given out very often based on some of the other boats we noted were overstaying.

Anyhow we are off.........

We cruised down to just before Hopwas after leaving Fradley at 2. I only realised after moving off that Grey Nomad and Ralf Freeman was our neighbour, last time our paths crossed was 18 months ago when I helped him lock up junction lock while we were on our way to a four counties ring trip.

Having planned for a trip to the Ashby it was still the half term and we expected the canal to be busy so the first couple of days were to be slow .....

We moored up just after Hopwas wood bridge which took us three hours, we don't cruise quickly !

Next hop was to just below the Atherstone flight as we thought it would be busy - it turned out not to be the case but we still planned bigger hop on Monday. We moored up just before Atherstone bottom lock. We opted for the liveaboards strategy which was to move early and moor early - I have to say I like this way of cruising. We moored up at just after 2pm having left at 9ish and had a very lazy Sunday afternoon.

The pic is from my camera phone as guess who left the SD cards at home !

Rachel entering the first of the two Glascote locks.