A Flying Visit

 

Caracol is moored about halfway home from where we spent Christmas, so we stopped there for lunch yesterday to see how she was doing.  There had apparently been about four inches of snow overnight and a rapid thaw in the morning, so there was about three inches of ice on the marina with some puddles of melt water on the top.  It had been down to around minus 8 degrees C inside the boat since we last visited, but no damage was apparent.  Glad we hadn't been planning a Christmas cruise this year though!

A change of scene

We're visiting family in North Wales for a few days, so some different walks for Annie and some spectacular weather to enjoy.  At lunchtime the tide was washing in mushy ice onto the sand, and there were still patches of ice further up the beach.  By late afternoon things were a bit warmer, and the (tidal at this point) River Clwyd below Rhuddlan Castle was just beginning to thaw, with much rattling and cracking.  I wonder how Caracol is doing in the ice - if there is a thaw we may look in on the way home to see how she is getting on.

Plus ca change

Not much chance for boating at the moment with another lot of frosty weather on the way before the ice from the last one has properly thawed.  Chatting with a friend about his holiday plans for northern France next summer led me to go back to my old photo albums to refresh my memory about a trip to Brittany 20 years ago.  It must be years since I've looked at those photos.  Digital makes it so much easier, and these days I use the picasa web album site as an online backup and to give access from anywhere, with 20GB of storage for the princely sum of $5.75, (the annual bill has just arrived).  It's very handy, as picasa indexes images on your hard drive, and if you wish automatically copies changes to the web.

Well, one album full of memories leads to another and before I knew it I was looking at pictures from a trip to New Zealand ten years ago, and wondering whether I shouldn't scan a few of the pictures in case I ever lost the prints.  The one below caught my eye, and for some reason it reminded me rather strongly of Radford Lock.  Who would have thought that boating and canyoning could feel so similar...

Winter's REALLY here

 

You can be sure the season has properly turned when the snow reaches all the way down to the tide line.  Down here on the coast the major roads are open, but the minor ones and residential streets are decidedly slippery.  So a short walk into town to buy a couple of essentials, and then home through the park in the gathering dusk.