Rainy Days and Mondays

The reason for this title is that for most of the holiday, it rained. Now since Bris Vegas has been in serious drought, I don't have a problem with rain - if it happens in places where its needed. But to be raining during our holiday? I wasn't that impressed. And it was that hacking it down rain too, the kind that no matter how good your waterproofs are, it will get through. And the other thing was, on a narrow canal boat, with 6 adults - there's not a real lot of places you can go to get out of the rain. Sure, you can go inside, but the lounge area is quite small, so you try cramming almost everyone in there (whilst someone is outside driving the boat). Not a great success. And its a bit claustrophobic to go lie on your bunk and read a book.

What's that got to do with the title? Well, because there wasn't a real lot to do in between the locks and with the rain, we started to edit our videos. Three of us had brought cameras and Erik had brought his mac, so he set it up in the lounge / living / kitchen area and started to edit bits of film. One of the sequences featured the rain, and this Carpenters song was used with it - hence the title.

The rain was the worst on Sunday, our first full day on the canal. We took it in turns as teams to do the driving. By about lunchtime we were pretty washed out, and cold, so to warm up we moored up along the way at one of the little pubs we came across. This was great because they were having a carvery for Sunday lunch, my favourite - great slabs of meat, a mountain of vegetables and of course, yorkshire pudding! Yum!

After lunch the rain was just sort of drizzling, so Nic and I took the helm, and off we set. Despite the rain, our spirits were not dampened. There's actually something quite special about being outside in the elements. Definitely it was cold, but it was kind of fun to be out there (weird I know) and also, there was the Blisworth Tunnel to look forward to (and also the various aqueducts we went on - including one which crossed over the M1)! Anyway, this tunnel is 2813m long, just a bit wider than 2 narrowboats side by side, and it took us 45 minutes to pass. The first time through, Agnieszka was at the helm, and I was up the back helping (we had decided that if someone was driving there should always be someone there to keep them company (plus yell out to the galley for cups of tea)). This was actually a bit of a disadvantage because all the action was taking place down the front of the boat - the guys were filming funny videos and taking funny pictures - but we were too far away to see. Erik took the speakers and poked them out the window, so suddenly the whole tunnel was reverberating to Vivaldi's Gloria, that was pretty cool. Took me back to my days at St Pauls...

Once we got near the end of the tunnel though, it became pretty windy and cold. My waterproofs were satched through, and as it was getting late in the day, and no one else wanted to drive for a while, we pulled over and moored for the night. Nic made great pasta for tea - didn't think I'd be able to eat another thing, but I managed...

The weather was much the same on Monday, rain, rain, rain, but we were really into the editing by now and plus we had a heap of board games that we'd brought to play. The best one was "Things" which Erik brought from Canada, it was very funny. And also, there were still the locks to do - in some cases a series of 3, others a series of 7, sometimes with another boat, sometimes just by ourselves... we were becoming lock pros...