Worcester Droitwich ring

 We have had a lovely time catching up with friends, sorting out doctors and dentists, new shoes and I have joined a new band.  We have had several train trips to Birmingham and Malvern, also Cheltenham Spa, and have had many visitors to our boat, which continues to be a delight.





Band playing in the park in Malvern




I also snuck off to Mallorca for 5 days to visit my brother, Phil



This is a leisure mooring which we will keep so that we can come back and drop off Double 0 at any time, eg Winter!!  

We are rediscovering our hometown and have had fine weather.


This week, however, we had a break in the social calendar and took off to do the Droitwich circuit.  this involved our very first River experience.

After working up the confidence, we set our of our protected marina and motored into the locks.


https://youtu.be/ic1J6fXrJ9Q?si=IDNLzztC7ws-4qdt

We continued up the river for half an hour or so and turned right into the Droitwich arm.  This used to be closed and has only reopened since 2011; as a result, some of the locks are extremely tight and stiff, and the tunnel under the motorway bridge was so low we nearly lost our chimney.  Apparently, when they built the M5 motorway, they didn't think this part of the canal would ever reopen, so sometimes if the water levels are high, you can't get through at all.









Fabulous weather in England in June however, mixed in with untouched countryside, means massive Hay Fever.  There was nothing either side of this canal except for thick common reeds, wafting out pollen, and there was no-where to stop for 5 miles.  Even if we could have stopped, i would have died of anaphylaxis, it was so bad.


When we finally got to Droitwich Spa it was such a relief to find moorings, beautifully placed amid the town park,  a quick hop to the Chemist, and a huge Waitrose (very nice supermarket indeed),  Nose running and face itching, we ambled across and took the waters.




We were going to stay a couple of days, but we had a dinner date with Andy's daughter and her partner in Barbourne the next night, so we made the wise choice to move on. 





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stockton locks

Image
 Lost track of time, but on Sunday it was 26 degrees and we did 10 locks in the heat. Lucky for me we shared the locks with another boat, but the following day I made sure to do all the manoeuvres so that Andy could do some winding!  We are now in Leamington Spa, moored right by the town. At last we have some accessible shops! Raining today, but our boat is cosy.  I got my clarinet fixed in a fabulous music shop, and Andy got his watchstrap repaired. Nice town. We’ll stay a couple of days. 
Read more

Worcester!

Image
It would take more than one sleep to recover from Tardebigge, and we still had the remaining 7 locks, plus some more individual ones after that, before we got there . We shared the driving and lock work as my body was screaming at me to stop winding lock  gates.   The rain set in as predicted, but there were some gaps. Deceptive sunny spells lured us into thinking we wouldn’t need to wear our waterproof trousers. You can guess the rest.    We got soaked a couple of times for sure, but the Worcestershire countryside kept our spirits up. Everything was starting to look familiar. We tried to moor up. We didn’t want to arrive just yet, we were having so much fun, but we couldn’t find the right spot.  Finally, we motored into Worcester’s canal side suburbs and found a lovely new mooring place with rings set into the concrete to tie up to. We love mooring rings!      Note this humpback bridge. When I first met Andy, he lived near here and we used to com...
Read more

QM2 Sydney to Southampton

Image
 Hello to anyone who’s interested😃 As you know, Andy and I took a long voyage on the Queen Mary and had a lovely time getting to England. It was great at first, but like all good things, it wore off, particularly from Capetown when a boatload of guests with a cheap deal brought a bunch of viruses on board (Capetown water not good) and made it all a lot less pleasant.  But we met some lovely people and had some good moments, and the ship herself is magnificent.  So, we were picked up by Aunty in Southampton from the ship, and a whirlwind of visiting relatives followed. The next 48hours was exhausting but gorgeous. We were lucky enough to visit Nikki on her boat and their sheep had just had some lambs the day before But by the third night we were comfortably sleeping on board our new boat, Double 0… We were lucky enough to borrow brother-in-law‘s car, so several trips to Sainsbury’s and Habitat enabled us to kit out the boat with duvets, teaspoons etc. Enough to live comfo...
Read more