Bridge 6 / 8 to Basin Bridge 22

Three boats had the right idea this morning and cruised past us before 7am, one boat was particularly wide awake giggling and joshing with each other. We stayed in bed for some more shut eye.

Good news from Scarborough arrived as we finished breakfast. Poor Val who works for our letting agents has spent much of the last year contacting us with problems regarding our house, we wince when we see an email for her. Recently a water leak had been found in the front garden and last week a gas leak was detected under the kitchen floor (a large proportion of which was dug up last year!). Today she had good news for us for once. The garden would need digging up, but Yorkshire Water are trying to meet targets so they are paying for this. A plumber took five hours to pass a new pipe through the flexible one under the kitchen floor solving the gas leak without having to dig the floor up again. Not much rent next month, but at least our tenants will have a kitchen in working order again.

Our delayed start meant we didn’t push off until late morning, the sun already doing it’s best. We pootled on for nearly three miles stopping on route to fill the water tank and then pulled up at Nutts Bridge. The wine cellar empty of white wine we needed to stock up. We’d studied google maps this morning and found that Hinckley has a choice of supermarkets, just about all the usual ones, they just happen to be a distance from the canal.

Sainsburys seemed to be the closest at just over a mile so we took a bike with us to act as sherpa leaving Oleanna in full sunlight. There were handy signs to help people arriving on foot, just a shame we missed the bike racks! We hope to find somewhere for a delivery in the next few days as the shops in Atherstone had let us down, this also means we didn’t need to overload the handle bars too much.

We pushed off again just before 4pm, the heat starting to get to me. Give me cold weather an day, you can almost always wear more layers and keep moving to get warm, but heat like this! It’s staring to get a bit claustrophobic and the horse flies that come with it are a pain literally!

The hunt for shade commenced and we pootled on for another three quarters of an hour until we found a line of boats by tall trees, there was a gap, so we filled it.  With next to no breeze there was no cooling off even sat in the shade on the towpath. Thunder bugs were landing on us and wiggling round in their tiny way. For much of the time this goes un-noticed until they give an extra big wiggle! After an hour we gave up and returned to the cabin leaving Tilly to continue to hunt out ants. Luckily she didn’t find any.

0 locks, 5.09 miles, 1 kitchen floor in tact, 3 bags shopping, 2 boxes wine, 1 cheese twist fought for, 1 shady spot found, 346783974965665757489 thunder bugs (just where do they come from, how do they get there and when will we have the thunder and rain?), 1 noisy kennels, –6C would be wonderful right now.

https://goo.gl/maps/YT3uRC7Zwzx