Rowkin Rovings Blog

So today is the start of us taking Ange De L’eau out on our own for the next 16 days around the Warwick Ring. We have more than enough time to do it comfortably plus add on a bit of Grand Union – Northampton arm where we will pick up Marlene and Wolfgang on the 18 September.

After a very leisurely commencement to the day at 9.00am we had a scrummy breakfast of scrambled eggs courtesy of master chef Wolfgang. The guys did their final pack and then were out the door to the bus station to catch ther 12.10 bus to Stansted airport for their 5.00pm flight to Bremen.

Whilst back in Germany they will catch up with family and friends but the trip is primarily aimed at two birthday get togethers for Marlene’s 60th. One will occur in Bremen and the other one in Munich. Wolfgang will also be doing a bike ride (that’s a motorbike ride) down the Moselle River with some of his mates during the break.

So fond farewells to the guys and then we were off to the water point to top up the tanks and the fun job of emptying the elsan (pooh bucket). It was then onto Tesco to do a pretty big shop as the next week is mostly in the countryside with not a lot of options available for shopping – bugger says Di!!!

It’s always fun going to a new supermarket in a foreign country as you get to see lots of different offerings. In this case it was very cheap indeed. Probably because of the area we were in.

We had aimed to get further down the cut but with doing all our jobs we didn’t get very far except back to Hawkesbury Junction. The evening has been spent going over our daily plan for the next fortnight as we have 62 hours of cruising to do. You just can’t wing it if you are on a time frame. Our journey will see us go over a little bit of canal that we did last year but mostly it is going to be all new for us.

Our other job was to move from the guest room into the master bedroom where we now have a Queen bed. The rule of thumb on Ange De L’eau is that the younger ones sleep in the guest room even if it means Marlene and Wolfgang are the younger ones. The guest room is actually the kitchen table area which makes into a bed each evening and is more than comfortable. At least for the next fortnight we will not have to turn the boat upside down to set the bed up.

We popped back to the pub again for a quickie and to meet a few of the ladies Cale and have a chinwag before returning by 9.00 pm in time to watch Series 2 of Victoria which has been a huge hit over here.