The final day of our cruise, back home in the breezy sunshine from Paddington egged on by the aromas of BBQ sauce at Alperton, cakes or biscuits baking and the samosa factory at Greenford, then coffee roasting from Nescafe at Bulls Bridge. What a fragrant trip!!
Herbie now lies nestled up against Lady Elgar at Iver while we reflect on our cruise. We had amazing weather and hardly used our raincoats. We had good moorings at every one of fourteen nights, and not a hint of trouble.
The stats are interesting:- Six different waterways, three different guest crews, 133 miles, 88 locks, 4 tunnels and 10(small) aqueducts. The actual cruising (engine running) time was 64 hours. That's about 2 mph or 3.45 lock-miles per hour. Easy peasy.
Amazingly, in 16 days we only visited 10 pubs and ate out only 4 times (plus one takeaway).
The only small downside was frequent need to visit the weed hatch. Why are plastic bags round the prop so often blue ones?? Perhaps as downside we should add doing so badly in pub quizzes, but we enjoyed them anyway.
The icing on the cake was meeting up with Herbie’s previous owners Roy and Val and the fact that places we remembered (e.g.the Anchor & Hope, the moorings at Hertford) all lived up to our memories on revisit. On top of that we now have a new sofa bed and some new curtains thanks to Kath and her sewing machine. What more can you ask?
For contrast, read the amazing tale of the cruise of Lucky Duck on their blog. I'm full of admiration for how they overcame huge obstacles in getting their boat to Cambridge. It makes Herbie's cruise look very tame indeed.
HERBIE! Journeys on our narrowboat and the trials and tribulations of maintaining her.
1 comment:
Hi Neil and Kath, I've come to your lovely blog via the other lovely blog Saltysplash. I'm wasting far too much time when I should be working just reading your posts. I live on a Dutch Barge, called Vereeniging in Rotterdam, but we don't get half the opportunities to go cruising that you seem to. There's so much commercial traffic here and the rivers and canals are like super highways, so unless we are really on holiday, we tend to stay put. I would so love to bring my barge to the UK and so some 'faring' (as I call it) there - that's my corruption of the Dutch word Varen. My other half is the son of a commercial barge skipper, and we are both fairly obsessed with the water. I hope you don't mind but I've put a link to your blog on mine. My blog is about my barge mainly but also about other stuff I do in life and other thoughts and observations as well.
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