7th July 2009
We took a cruise to Banbury. We were intending to get down to Thrupp but the hot weather made us abandon that plan in favour of mooring underneath nice big trees. In fact a common sight in the week was boats moored under trees with the occupants out in the shade on the towpath.
At Calcutt locks we met an engineer who had actually worked on our boat when it was a hire cruiser. He called it Dotty, we quite liked that. He was delivering a boat from Saul to near Gayton via the Severn, Avon, Southern Stratford and Grand Union. The boat was a little wide at the back 7 feet ¼ inch but only 6 feet 10 inches at the front! This had made the Stratford locks a bit interesting!
Our first overnight mooring was near Priors Hardwick. We walked to the village which has a restaurant whose car park is enormous. The village was very tidy almost immaculate a bit too tidy for us.
The next day we wanted to go to the Bygones Museum at Claydon for lunch but the summit level seemed slow and we stopped at the Wharf for a beer instead. Then it was through Fenny Tunnel (which seemed narrower and more overgrown!)
and down the first two of the Claydon locks
Do you like this version - I painted it.
We did make the museum and had Strawberry and Gooseberry crumble with Custard for a mid afternoon snack. Unfortunately the museum is closed now.
On the way back to the boat an odd bit of pointy cloud became more pointy, then long and thin and curvy pointing down to the ground. We watched it develop for a few minutes and then it faded away! You can just see it in this long distance shot.
We carried on down Claydon locks and got absolutely soaked.
Next day we moored at Cropredy and visited the Braesnose Arms for a pint and Cheesy chips. It is a nice pub and is a bit more pub like than the other pub in the village.
The heat was getting to us and we decided to move in the late afternoon but got soaked again!
An early start the next day saw us down to Banbury, a quick turnaround and then back up to Cropredy. This time we visited the café for lunch. It was a gallery a few years ago but is now just a café. A very nice one though, with excellent coffee. Cropredy was quite busy with boats nose to tail but we had a quiet night.
The shade of the mooring below Calydon locks seemed very attractive, as was the young lady in hippy apparel I met at the locks. She was accompanying a friend down to the water point. His boat had a small moose on the roof. He explained he found following the moose made for easier steering. It seemed it had really come from a cereal packet and had been stuck there whilst the owner was a little worse for wear from the fumes from a large scale application of glass fibre! They passed us later with two boats!
In the evening we passed this boat.
We liked it.
And we moored near these ones.
Progress was so slow with the heat and we felt we would never get home so we started off at 7:30 the next day and caught up the slowest boat in the world. It was steered bay a happy soul who didn’t chugged along at just beneath out idle speed.
He never looked behind so had no idea we were there and I had to keep putting the boat in neutral to avoid him. Fortunately he turned into Fenny Marina and we were able to get off along the summit and down Napton Locks. We had the locks to ourselves and moored on the visitor moorings. A quick trip to the Folly pub was nice. It was noisy on that night with some people partying into the night on the towpath!
We got back to Calcutt in the rain the next morning. Jo struggled with the entry to the pontoon as there were hardly any boats and we couldn’t quite remember which mooring was ours! We spotted it in the end.
It was a nice casual sort of trip but it would have been nicer to have been a bit cooler.
The final thing to do was of course the loo, it found another way to get yuk on me!!!!!!!!!!
Cheers Graham
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