Sad day

Sad day we have signed the sale documents for Sybil today it was a difficult decision to make but after a trip from Poynton down to Nottingham we decided that the locks were now too difficult for Hilary to work ( the wide locks on the Trent mean that around six tonnes of timber has to be moved each time we went through a lock ).

Tulips from Amsterdam

I can`t believe it is  nearly a year since  I last posted but last year not much boating was done  due many things including our decision that total retirement was a  bit boring so we took on the  project of a house that  had been  pretty much untouched  for many years and gave it a total refit and only boating for long weekends .Anyway that`s out of the way now and we are on our first trip out up to Bugsworth for a few days , On the way up whilst moored we are trying a highly recommended paint restoring treatment called Polytrol this involves dewaxing the whole side of the boat then applying the Polytrol (looks and feels like danish oil!) the initial result seems pretty good .Before we came over here we took a trip to Holland to see the bulb fields but in a much larger boat , the  "Pride of Hull" fantastic travelling , as much as you can eat and then rocked to sleep ,to awake in Holland.

Above is one of the very high class river boats  in amsterdam and below one off a slightly lower class, the one that we were on was somewhere in between   !

We thought that there was a problem with bikes on UK towpaths .This is the bike park on the canal side near Amsterdam`s main station

Below a couple of pictures of the fantastic flower displays that we saw