A short cruise

Well, not really, we took the boat all of about 500 yards to the pump out point and back again yesterday, and yes I know that I promised at the beginning that I would not write of such banalities, but what can you say - I know that die-hard cruisers go out in all weathers, but perhaps we are not of that ilk.

There have been many other distractions as well, with the finalising of our house purchase in Rugby (the course of which did not go well, but after a stressful time concluded satisfactorily). What followed of course was a lot of tidying up, moving in of stored items of furniture and belongings etc. There is an incredible amount of paperwork, changing of address etc involved with this.

I am glad to say though, that mail situation is much better now that we have moved from a post office box to a street address - I did rather enjoy having a BT line to the boat though (a bit of a luxury for when we were alongside). BT didn't think much of it though, and I could never get a broadband connection there for some obscure reason. I continued to and still use the 3G+ system.

This latter has its ups and downs for example, a short time ago, I hung my dongle out of the window only to have Tally, Shila and Bandit lick the thing soggy, before I could get it back in through the dinette(!) window.

The subject of retrieving stored items reminds me of another adventure, where we went up to Belper in Derbyshire to fetch items that were kindly stored by David and Doreen Cashmore (NB Beaurepaire - see blogs passim). Of course there was far too much to pile into the hatchback Megane, so David lent us his LD Discovery to transport everything back in one go.

It isn't that I haven't driven Land Rovers before (I've owned three of them), but my gammy foot was playing up and wearing sandals instead of proper shoes - heaven forbid, I might have been wearing flip-flops! S0, the first ten miles of the trip were a nightmare of missing the clutch, hitting the brake pedal with the wrong foot and then having the said sandals catching on the floor. All this was also rather painful, so once in fifth gear and trundling down the M1 at 80, I decided to rid myself of the port side sandal and chucked over to Jeeves in what would have been an admiral Rugby pass. After this things improved markedly and subsequent visits to the house, garden centres etc went very smoothly.

Even to the extent that Jeeves no longer has a prejudice against 4 x 4s (well Landrovers anyway), and wants one. . . . as do I. You see from this that to win over the heart of a gentleman's gentl - no, lady, is the capacity of the vehicle to transport goods purchased in garden centres. In this example it was a tree and . (I think you've gone far enough with this subject - ed).

Pictures? Well, there aren't any this week apart from this one of Jeeves and a view of the back garden. Nobody really wants to see a picture of the pump out procedure do they? I do have one on file, of course.

Again, the Met has forecast good weather for the coming four or five days, which is smashing news and will be capital if, for once they get it right, because our friends Clive and Delia Taylor are arriving on Friday and we are looking forward to some excellent boating. Now, which way shall we head???