Kinver

The settee I broke is mended.

Last week I broke one of the struts when I knelt on the settee to reach behind it. I forget how heavy I am.
I have also broken the one at home in similar circumstances.

Ralph Wilson met us in Kinver and provided 3 replacement struts and 2 mountings and then supplied invaluable information about how to fit it. And all for £3. Best buy of my life.

We also had a good day cruising with 7 locks today.



We are now in Kinver but as the canalside Vine has gone up market and closed the bacon butty shop we have explored the town instead and arrived at The Olde White Hart.

Interestingly the gluten free menu was extensive but not gluten free!

I have complained to Marstons and await their reply.

To celebrate the settee being fixed I have gone for Meat the Beast.


Perhaps I'd better not sit on it let alone kneel on it for a while.

Back to usual

Last night was nice with little light under the trees we could sleep until late. That's 7.45 boating time. 3 boats had part us by then.

The views from our mooring follow.






We have made it to Swindon and found a Sunday lunch for tea. We are not pedantic and joyfully consumed it.

A long days cruise including The Bratch

And many other locks. We will sleep in tomorrow despite the early morning light!

On the move again

We are fixed and I have a signal so I can post a blog.

Ian arrived on time and did his stuff yesterday. We now have a working facet pump and therefore a working boat.

And none of the problems from the last RCR work when the wires had been

connected to the wrong terminals of the smart meter shunt.

I took pictures of the engine so we knew how it had been connected.










Today is sunny and we have made it to Breward. I was too busy steering to take photos but did spot this unusual duck when we moored.



Now it's time to explore.

We're walking in the rain

With nothing firm planned until the engineer comes we went walking yesterday.

We discovered this amazing bridge.



And am even more amazing canal side pub that has been in the same family for over 150 years. A great place. 2 pumps on the bar and very little else. A real throwback.



The only entrance is from the towpath.



Today we walked an hour to catch a bus to Telford. For some reason I feel I have been sent to Coventry as it's a concrete jungle that I'm not going to photograph. We may well go to Newport on the way back as we have a day rover. That should have something worth seeing.

Slow day.

It has been a miserable day for weather today, all day, so perhaps not a bad day to be not cruising.
We finally decided to walk into Gnosall and had a fantastic fish and chips there. We will go back to that shop, as it was gluten-free as well.
I have spent a lot of the day on the phone. I tried to asked the canal and River Trust if it would be ok to stay on the five day moorings a bit longer as we have broken down, but the person I needed to speak to was meant to ring me back straight away, 3 hours ago, and I am still waiting.
RCR have been a bit better after two or three phone calls they gave us the option of having an original vetus part direct replacement and free on our cover, but it wouldn't arrive until the middle of next week. The other option is an electric pump fitted in line but we would have to pay that fitting charge as they obviously have to alter some of the connections.
We talked to Gordon, whose advice as always was superb, and he advised us to go for the electric pump so that is what is happening. All we need now is a date for it to be fitted and hopefully RCR will let us know that today.
As we walked down the canal, in the brief bit of fine whether I took this photograph of a typical shroppie bridge and also the cast iron fitting that was used to stop the horse ropes going into the stone.

Broken Down

Yesterday we made it to Norbury Junction.
It was a nice cruise of 5 hours and we are enjoying the Shroppie.
We got a lovely mooring.



Even better followed as we heard a steam whistle and wonderfully NB President was coming towards us.







What a great day. Moored up by a pub open all day that has a play area. And then .......

When cleaning the bilge I noticed the fuel pump was dripping fuel. I tried to get the people at Norbury Wharf to have a look but they were unavailable until Wednesday morning. So it's a call to RCR.
They attired within 2 hours and condemned the fuel pump. Today we will find out what is going to happen to replace it and how long we will be at Norbury Junction.
No phone signal and having to stand outside the pub to use their WiFi add to the complications.

Boating is slower paced but I would never despite it as stress free.

On to the Shroppie

Today we made it onto the Shropshire Union Canal. Initially it is not how I imagined, I had thought it would be a very old contour canal, but quite the opposite it is a Thomas Telford canal therefore lots of straight sections with embankments and cuttings. Originally built to go to Liverpool.
It is also very difficult to moor at the side. The concrete construction has a below waterline shelf which means you cannot get into the side. We have found somewhere and are really pleased about that but someone who tried to more next to us couldn't get in. We shall have to remember this spot.



We have cruised for about 10 hours today, and very varied it has been too. We started off in Gas Street Basin at 8 o'clock and cruised through Birmingham out on the new mainline. Highlight of the trip, though it didn't photograph very well, was passing under Smethwick Galton Bridge.



I had to go down the weed hatch on two separate occasions, the first time removing plastic bags a kagoul and goodness knows what else. It was a horrible job. The second time there wasn't much there but we had significantly lost power. We had a couple of incidents of this but after some hard thrusts in reverse everything seemed back to normal for the rest of the trip. Quite worrying when the engine normally goes to two and a half thousand revs but on this occasion would only go to about 1000. We were barely making forward progress.

We came down we came down the Wolverhampton 21, which was hard work as two of the bridges needed Alison to pull the boat right over to the right hand side to maintain our chimney being in contact with the rest of the boat.



We thought once we were off the BCN that all of our problems with rubbish would be behind us. However at the first bridge on the Shropshire Union we came to this.



Tomorrow must be easier.