Facing home

It's odd to be re-tracing the route we took south a couple of weeks ago. You see the same sights, albeit from a different perspective, and take the obligatory picture of Braunston church spire above the trees.

You pass the places you stopped for the night, and decide on alternatives. You calculate whether the pump-out regime requires you to pop in for one where you did before. Underneath it all is the vague feeling – we've been over this already. Four years ago we would probably have gone north through Warwick, and braved the flights of locks in the Birmingham conurbation, but our lock-handling abilities are not what they were.

There are still some surprises along the way. Yesterday, coming through Napton Junction, we saw this at the entrance to the Wigrams Turn Marina.

Great Haywood, near Stafford, is our base. We bought Erin Mae through Great Haywood Boat Sales nearly eleven years ago. We'd heard that the company had shifted its centre of operations, but hadn't expected to find it, name unchanged, in Napton. We thought it was all a bit unfeeling to remind us, in no uncertain terms, that we are now facing home.