Hot weekend in Braunston

Just recently, with the weather forecasts being so unreliable, and it being a six hour round trip, we've not had so many weekends away as we used to.  However, things looked good on Friday, despite a forecast of heavy showers.  The website that I looked at, despite saying heavy showers for the area, offered a forecast of only a hundredth of an inch of rain.  So that's 99% chance of missing the showers or 1% chance of a soaking.  Good enough.

The frustration of a long, long queue on the M1 was soon despatched on reaching the location of the cause.  As we crawled towards the flickering clusters of blue lights, (four fire engines, three ambulances, several police cars and a helicoper), it was all too easy to be glad just to be delayed.  It's hard to think how traffic moving at 50mph in a single isolated lane in a contraflow could have achieved this level of carnage.

Saturday saw us Braunston bound, and arriving in time for lunch we decided to go up the locks and through the tunnel and back.  Some of us were finding it on the hot side.  Usually at this time of year we meet a few boats full of young folk who behave as if they have been the first to think of the idea of dressing as pirates and hiring a boat for the weekend. 

This time it was sailors...

On to Norton Junction and back into Braunston, where we settled on a mooring near the Marina entrance by about seven in the evening.  Judging by the foot traffic on the towpath that we heard through the evening, the event at the Admiral Nelson, (recently reopened), was a great success.      

On Sunday we passed an old wooden motor, just opposite the boat that sank a couple of years ago on the puddle banks, that looked somewhat lower in the water than the day before.   Yesterday the wind turbine on this boat was turning, and a bilge pump was running and spitting out an intermittent stream of water.  Today the air was still and the boat was tilted further over, and perhaps sitting on the mud.  I hope they can recover the situation.

After that, a slow trip back to the marina with lots of traffic but no real delays, bumping into some new neighbours, preceded a rather less eventful journey home.