Settling in

We’ll be here for a while now, but I still plan to blog each day — partly because this blog is a record of every night one or both of us has spent on board, and for completeness I’ll carry on!  This morning was really sunny and not windy, so after breakfast we wanted to sort out the bow rope.  The pontoon is shorter than the boat, so to make the bow line reach back to the T-stud, we used a chain through the ring on the pontoon.  It was also clear than this pontoon is often unused, as it was covered in duck, goose, and swan poo — so I got the mop and cleaned it all off so at least we can walk down it ok.

We went out for a walk to explore the local area.  There’s a gate from the marina out onto the towpath, and as we went out, a boat also emerged from the entrance.

We’d looked up the walking route to the nearest station, Lichfield Trent Valley, but I’d been looking at the maps and thought there might be a better way than Google was suggesting.  So we walked down to Bridge 84, went across it, and took a path through a couple of gates.  The path then cuts across a big HS2 site.  This part is apparently still being built, as it’s near where the line re-joins the West Coast Mainline, although there doesn’t appear to be much going on.  Maybe it’s different on a weekday.

Once across the site, the path goes under the A38.

Then there’s a level crossing over a railway line, which seems to have almost no traffic on it.  It’s just a link between two busy lines.

Once we had crossed the railway, we went out onto Burton Road and followed it to the station, about 35 minutes walk in all.

On the way back, we were almost at the marina gate when we could hear an engine that was either a very rough boat or something else.  It turned out to be a diesel train, pulling a London Northwestern train along the rarely used track.  It had most likely been off for maintenance, and was on its way back to the main line.  This afternoon we have done very little, although Adrian has given me a haircut.  Oh, and last night the sign writer, Andy Russel, put some photos on Facebook of what he’s done on Kingley Vale, so I’ve done a post on that blog.

It’s quite a nice marina, although there is a bit of background noise from the A38 and you can hear the trains on the West Coast Mainline, which crosses the canal down by Huddlesford Junction.  There are a lot of hire and share boats here too, so there’s quite a bit of moving around of boats, usually at high revs!