This morning’s mooring was quite close to the railway station where I last saw my hat.  We decided to get the tandem out and see if there was any sign of it.  The route was half off-road path and half quiet road.  As a bonus it was slightly uphill and upwind on the way there, so coming back was going to be very relaxing.

We started by asking at the cafe.  They were very friendly, but hadn’t seen my hat.  Next we went over to the ticket office.  A very friendly clerk invited us to see their large collection of hats.  Unfortunately these were all costumes for previous decades.  The clerk then dialled Loughborough (using a phone with a dial!) to ask if my hat was in the lost property there, but still no joy. Oh well, we’d enjoyed our interaction. and went back to the cafe to commiserate with coffee and scones (which rhyme with stones).

Suitably refreshed we headed back, this time going through the middle of the village of Quorn and a minor shopping stop. We found our way back to the small park with stone carvings.  I had seen a sign mentioning Quorn Slabs and assumed these were they.

It turned out Quorn Slabs was the name of the path we had used.  Now tarmac, it was originally laid in slabs to keep a local huntsman’s boots dry on his walk to the railway station.

After lunch back on board we moved slowly on up river, taking our time through four more large locks.  The moorings on the river are more limited than on a canal.  We stopped for the night on rings on a canalised section just past the lock bollards.  After dinner we went for a stroll across fields to the nearby village of Cossington.  In the last of the sunlight, skylarks were singing in the sky, but many more of them were startled out of the fields either side of us as we walked.