We are in the Milton Keynes area. Before we went anywhere Shane’s phone rang. It was a nurse telling him the pathology results and that he has an appointment with oncology next week. We felt this dovetailed well with his other appointment but now in stead of feeling we had a long time to choose somewhere to leave the boat and organise our trains, there was a bit of a rush on. Shane set to looking for train tickets. I still felt there were a few mooring options in Milton Keynes and they couldn’t be far away. Shane got train tickets and we headed along to where there were better shopping options for lunch and also a station where Shane could collect the tickets.

Both jobs were quickly achieved and now we had lunch near this sculpture. We had seen another on the way to the shops by the same artist of a woman made of iron train tracks holding a steam engine.

There were spots of rain as we returned but luckily it was time to eat lunch and it had all stopped by the time we had eaten. my idea of the distance to the marina was wrong on several counts.The canal is not a straight line and was meandering and nearly all past moored boats and as it is required that we pass moored boats slowly we took along time to get to one that Shane wanted to look at. It started raining just as we reached, so good timing to moor. We could see no way to get into the marina by foot and at the entrance it said to ring to find out about availability. That will be a job for tomorrow. 

We are a long way from home and it takes longer to go 7 miles by boat today than it should take to get all the way to Edinburgh. The advantage of going slowly is the opportunity to see the names of boats easily. There were a lot of double width boats along here and some of them were also moving. We moved to the side to let this one past as it was passing a widebeam and was particularly big. We could not think what had inspired its name.

Apart from women’s names and place names the inspirations are usually  songs, films, many boaty puns and lifestyle choices and combinations of these (e.g. earlier this week we saw Rumblefish and Smoke on the Water. But some do still elude me. Most are proud of their boats with names like Perseverence but we did wonder if the owner of a boat we passed in the morning was proud of his little boat “Yogurt Pot“!

Some had notices on them too. I felt this family had to cope with their child being anxious that a moving home would confuse the magical creatures.

I took so many photos today that my tablet seized up. It seems to be in a dire state like the boat above.