We have spent the last three days at the Cropredy Festival. This is organised by Fairport Convention and features mostly  Folk and Folk-Rock type music. Highlights for us were: Joe Broughton’s Folk Ensemble The Churchfitters Benjamen Folke Thomas Blackbeard’s Tea Party Fairport’s closing set and of course the wonderful Richard Digence.  

At last, after over four months being re-painted we now have the boat back. There are still a few odds and ends that need tidying up, but at least we are on board. Just a short chug back to the marina where we’ll stay for the next few days.

Bob called to say the boat would be ready today. So we drove up to Fenny Compton, but when we got there it still wasn’t quite ready! There were various odd little things that still needed to be done,but we agreed to go out for a few days and then return back to the boatyard.

We are now getting rather frustrated at how long the paint job is taking. Each time I ring Bob he has another reason (excuse) why it’s not finished yet. It is now about 2 and a half months and it could be another week before it’s ready. Obviously we dont want a ‘rush job’, but

We delivered the boat to Bob Mitchell at Fenny Compton on 24th March. He was due to start the paint job on 27th. We expected it to take about 3 weeks. But unfortunately the job for the boat in the dry dock before ours overran by 2-3 weeks. So now we dont expect ours to

We started the day at nine o’clock with a wonderful cooked breakfast before setting off to meet Bob at 11:30am. The repaint date has been set for March 27th and colours have been agreed, apparently we were the most organised cutomers he’d ever had! We left Bob and went for a walk round the extremely

Just here for a couple of nights, mainly to go to see Bob Mitchell about the repaint. We have grandson Josh with us. On the way here we called in at the West Midlands boat jumble at Throckmorton airfield. We bought some rope and a new rear fender. The weather today has been really good,

Just a short chug down to Banbury, going back tomorrow. The floods seem to have gone down a bit, though there is still a lot of water rushing down the by-washes. We arrived here about 3 o’clock and popped into Castle Quay for a bit of shopping. Back to Cropredy tomorrow.  

The  weather was appalling as we drove to Stourport, with the spray on the M40 making for very poor visibility. Lunch was served soon after we arrived at Andrew & Shiela’s. We worked off the lunch by taking Dylan the dog for a walk as the rain had stopped. The evening was spent nattering, consuming