Adrian came up to the boat last night, and with it being Friday the journey took longer than usual. I worked a night shift, and came up this morning. The first thing we did was a car shuffle, so there's a car at our end point tomorrow.
It was fairly cloudy when we left the marina at around 10am, and there was a brisk breeze which made the turn towards Stoke Bruerne harder than usual. We hadn't been going long when the clouds cleared, the sun came out, and the temperature went up. We started meeting boats almost immediately, and had one behind us too. The scene outside Kingfisher Marina was pretty busy.
After the usual hour and a half, we arrived at Stoke Locks, and moored up at the bottom on completely empty visitor moorings. The main reason for stopping was to empty the loo; when that was done we had lunch. We could easily have stayed there, but decided to go up five of the locks. As we set off, a Wyvern hire boat was just arriving so we shared with them. At the third lock up we had to wait for a boat to come down, but otherwise we did well. The hire boat had enough crew that Adrian could go ahead and set the next lock, and we could go straight in.
The long pound was busier than we've seen it for a long while, but we found a spot to moor for the night. We had showers, then walked up to the village, knocked on Kathryn's door, and all went across to The Boat for ice creams. It was really good to see that her new hip is doing well -- and so much better than the previous repair. As we sat outside Kathryn's house, blog and Canal Boat reader Mark came by, having already been to the Cosgrove Canal Festival today.
We walked along to the tunnel mouth, talking to some of Kathryn's Byfleet Boat Club friends on the way, and Mike from the trip boat, Charlie. Adrian made a chili earlier, so we'll be having that this evening, and as I've now been up for 24 hours, I'm expecting to sleep well tonight.
5 miles, 5 locks.
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