Snarestone is quite, but my week has been anything but!

10th-16th Jan – Congerstone to Snarestone, Ashby Canal, 4.75 miles 0 locks

When the curtains are opened in the morning and I see the birds bobbing on the feeder filled with nuts, which I put out each time we moor, it means that No Problem has settled a while.  They won’t use the feeder for a day or so, not trusting it.. I can watch them come close.. investigate, and fly away.. but they return and give it a closer look, then closer, then they dare jump on it.. straight off it, then eventually brave enough to stay a while and have a bit of a feed.  Well it’s been raining you see, so I have been inside.  Walking is very difficult when it is sodden underfoot, I end up with tons of soil on my boots from the freshly tilled fields to such an extent that it tries to rip my boots from me!

We moored at Shackerstone for a few days last week before moving on, here the church viewed from across the towpath..

The food at the Rising Sun there is quite expensive though, but a lovely village non the less.  There are a lot of horses in Shackerstone.  I could tell that because walking was almost impossible along the bridleways, even the dogs were moaning!

Now one of my comments last week said….

I read that you have a GPS. Do you Geocache? www.geocaching.com or www.geocacheuk.com I've seen a lot of caches showing up along the canals recently.

Jane it was who wrote that, and oh boy she certainly did cause quite a stir!  I had no idea about it.  

I then spent hours looking at how to do this ‘game’.  I thought the idea of finding ‘treasure’ would be great fun, surely there would be treasure all over England near to places that I walked… Soooo Annie, from NB Moore2Life, me, or should it be ‘I’, and the mutts decided that we would go see if we could find one that happened to be not far off the route we had planned to walk one day last week, and guess what!!

We found the buried treasure!  Now I cannot reveal where this was found, because geocachers (that’s us now) mustn't let ‘muddlers’ (those that aren’t geocachers) find the treasure.  To fully understand you do need to study the geocachers site, but a quick description of a geocacher is one who trapses over the countryside with given clues to a secret hiding place of a box or other receptacle containing goodies which can be swapped for goodies of your own.. there is also a log book and pencil to enter your visit.  Sometimes there are ‘travel bugs’ which, as the name suggests, like to travel to other places, they sometimes have a mission too like wanting to visit a certain county.. It took us ages to find this one.. buy hey we are newbie geocachers!

Thank you Jane we both had great fun that day, and I think it is something we will both enjoy in the future.

Away from that…. we have had a major engine problem, a major diesel leak.  Thank goodness for Call Assist who sent out ‘The Boat Doctor’ AKA Peter Jordon from Derby who took part of the engine away on Saturday leaving us with batteries that were quite low, meaning that total energy saving was on the cards for the weekend.. its hard to do the washing up with just the one light on in the saloon!!  By lunchtime today though, he had us up and running again having had the part repaired in Burton-on-Trent first thing this morning.  Well impressed I was, and it wasn’t the arm and leg of a price I thought it might be.. well an engineer from Derby.. return to Derby, over to Burton back to us.. 76 miles he told me.. phew only half the price I thought it was going to be!

So apart from all that, oh and the stampeding horses while crossing a field, it’s quite quiet here at the end of the Ashby Canal in Snarestone!!