Newbold to Nowhere

We stayed in Newbold for 10 days, discovering the two pubs, the Barley Mow and The Boat during our stay. The pubs are ok, not that great. One night we had a meal in the Barley Mow which was quite nice. Staying behind us was a friendly woman called Alison. She was on her own and had M.E. so Dale helped her with a few little jobs. She was waiting for her son who was going to accompany her to her new marina in Devizes. She had a long journey ahead! The weather was good while we were there and one day we were standing outside with Alison and another woman walking her dog, whom we nicknamed 'the gatherer' because she talked a lot about foraging for food. She told us there was a dump nearby where we might find some cheap bicycles, so that afternoon Dale walked to the dump. There weren't any suitable bikes there that day, nor the following Sunday when we visited again unfortunately. Most of the people that moored up on their boats in Newbold were holidaying and were very cheerful and pleasant. One day we caught the bus into Rugby and had a good old look round. We concluded it must be quite a poor area because there are a lot of Poundland type shops there. One day Dale accidentally switched the water heater on and left it on all day, and it left our batteries flat. Thus followed a panicky day of using the generator to charge them up again, and hoping we hadn't wrecked them. It turned out that all was well, however. The main happy memory of Newbold was of several hot evenings where we sat at the bow of the boat watching the sun go down, chatting and drinking cider. On the 31st of August I finished work at lunchtime and we set sail again. It was drizzling but not unbearable. We went through some beautiful countryside around Brinklow. We arrived at Rose Narrowboats in Stretton Stop, filled up with diesel and water and emptied all the toilets, which were perilously full! After that we were looking for an out-of-the-way place to moor so we could use our generator and do some washing. We certainly had a lot of washing by then! We stopped in a noisy place right next to the high speed railway, where nobody else would want to stop and set to work doing our washing. I looked out of the kitchen window which was up against some long grass and some of the grass was moving twitchily. I knew there must be an animal there and sure enough spotted a tiny field or harvest mouse eating in the midst of the grass. Not all views on the canal are pretty....