Andy, Michelle and Ralph Visit.

 Sunday 1st October 2023 in Milford.

A beautiful early morning for the first day of October. Can it really be October already?!

We left early as we had arranged to meet our friends Andy and Michelle who live locally in Baswich. They walked back towards us, so we picked them up, along with their very cute border terrier, "Ralph", and moored up just past the Staffordshire Link for a coffee and catch up.

Ralph seemed quite happy to be on board and was very well behaved. He was very interested in everything that was going on.

It was great to spend some time with Andy and Michelle, and we discussed the idea of getting together the three "lads", Andy, Scott and Adrian, who all grew up together and went to school in Daventry. It is so rare to get all of them in one place.

As they left, we walked with them to their car and then we went on to the local Co-op for a "few bits".

We had moored just beside the Staffordshire Link, a renovation project to restore the original canal link into the centre of Stafford. Great progress has been made recently in restoring the basin that will eventually connect to the main canal and link to the lock that will carry the canal down on to the River Penk. The river will then need to be dredged to carry boats into the centre of the town. Even such a short length of restoration (less than two miles) is incredibly complicated and expensive.

Returning to MM, we decided to move on a bit further. This turned out to be a mistake as the heavens opened and it began to pour with rain. This line of fishermen, huddled under their umbrellas, illustrates how wet it was. Despite the awful weather, they all waved cheerily to us as we passed by.

Eventually sanity prevailed and we moored up in the first available open space that was not under trees. It turned out to be very shallow and MM ended up at least 18 inches from the edge, but at least we could go inside and get dry. As we moored up, the Pride Train sailed past on the railway line, very colourful! We see it fairly regularly up here.

Today: 4 miles, 1 lock and 2.3 hours.

Trip: 307 miles, 133 locks and 164.0 hours.