An Autumn Visit to see MM's Bottom!

Thursday 21st November, 2013 at Aston Marina.
It's a Kingsground Day! Well, an Aston and Many Meetings Day actually. At the moment, we are up in the Lake District at Hope Farm in the Vale of Lorton; we are staying with Christine England for the two weeks of our wedding anniversary.
MM is moored up at Aston Marina near Stone and this Monday she was pulled out of the water into their workshop - after two years, we were finally having our baby's bottom cleaned!
We started out from the farm early in the morning and drove the three hours down to Aston where we checked in with Alex, the Marina Manager, and then had a coffee in the lovely Bistro. Our friend Catherine served us; she was very excited to hear that MM was out of the water and asked if she could come with us to see her since she had never been down to the workshop nor had she ever seen a boat out of the water.
So we set off across to the workshop with Catherine and Alex.
MM looked fantastic.  And she looked HUGE!  We are used to see her from deck level so to see her from ground level looking up gave her almost Titanic proportions!  A young man called Aaron was putting the second coat of blacking on the hull; the green strip below the gunwhale (which inevitably had a number of scrapes from two years and 1,100 miles of cruising) had already been repainted. Catherine peered curiously down into the engine compartment:

 R climbed on deck to see the work that they had been doing in the engine compartment, while Alex and Catherine looked on from the ground.

It brought back such happy memories of the build process at Kingsground. We felt inordinately proud of our lovely 19 ton baby, who looked as good as new. She will go back into the water over the weekend.

We made our way back to the Bistro for a delicious lunch. We are booked into the Bistro for Christmas Day lunch and we are looking forward to spending this Christmas on MM for the first time!
We will drop in at the marina again on our way home from the Lakes next week; in the meantime, we set off back up to Hope Farm.
We have many long drives on our travels and over the past two years, we've become "Eddie Spotters" i.e. we've started to collect "Eddies" - the ladies' names on Eddie Stobart Lorries.  It's great fun and we are just a small part of the legions of Eddie fans all over the country.  Today, we saw dozens of Eddies going in the opposite direction (going too fast to read the name) and overtook four going in our direction on the way down and another four on the way up! M noted down the names in her notebook and was very pleased as on some drives, we've failed to spot any. At Exit 15 on the M6, where we turned off, there is an Eddie Stobart Depot full of dozens of lorries.  Bliss!

We only drove past, we didn't "cheat" by taking the names of the lorries parked in the yard!
We arrived back at Hope Farm after dark after a very long but very special day.