The June Rose: Thursday 23 - Saturday 25 July 2015

We had a nice meal and evening at Hilly and Rob’s in their beautiful house (I should have taken a photo!) on Wednesday night and Thursday morning Steve and Rob went off to play golf and Hilly pampered me – back, neck and shoulder massage and an hour of reflexology – it’s good to have friends that retired young and did courses to learn how to do these things to save getting bored! We then have a swim in the pool and a sit in the hot tub, quick shower and wait for the boys to come back from golf to have some lunch....only they have already had lunch at the golf club! So Hilly and I go into Marlborough have a lovely lunch in Polly’s Tea Rooms and do a quick bit of shopping in Waitrose then Rob kindly drives us back to the boat.

Friday morning we have a boat engineer to come and check the batteries and diesel tank in preparation for our next adventure. We have decided that instead of getting to Bristol and turning round and coming back up the Kennet & Avon we are going to take a pilot and go out onto the Bristol Chanel up to Sharpness and back into the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal. More tidal waters – you must be mad I hear you say!

As you know it just rained all day on Friday so we hibernated and just got some washing and other boring things done.

We were supposed to leave the Marina on Saturday but whilst Steve, the boat engineer, was here on Friday we agreed with him that he would weld a new T-bar onto the centre of the roof! Doing this trip has made it very obvious that our centre line is nowhere near the centre of our boat so when we jump off and try to pull it in the front just takes off to the middle of the river. So we booked to stay another night.