Last post 2018

It's taken quite a while to get to this post, you can probably appreciate that it gets very hectic towards the end of the cruising season for us with lots to do. In fact I'm writing this after being back in Australia for nearly three months.

Getting back to our marina is just the start of things! We leave ourselves at least a weeks leeway just in case we have issues on our way back to our home mooring. So, again for the fifth year in a row we did have plenty of time on our side when we arrived back to the marina to do some exploring around the local area. As soon as we got back we picked up a hire car from Enterprise mainly because they will pick you up and take you back to the depot to do the paperwork.

Now with wheels we headed over to Stoke on Trent for a pottery tour of the Wedgewood Pottery which had changed a lot form our last visit. We stuck to the free part of the tour which gave us plenty to look at anyway.

We finished our visit in the cafe eating lunch off replica crockery from the 1700's. After lunch it was over to the Middleport Pottery, I wanted to try and catch the poppy display I had seen advertised.

We were just in time, they were beginning to dismantle the display.

The boat was packed up and we packed up too, trying to fit all the new purchases, mainly clothes for the grandchildren into our cases. Getting home means meeting the usual aircraft load limits. We still had a few weeks holidaying to do before heading south, this year we headed to Venice to pick up a cruise of the Mediterranean.

Just some of the sights we have taken in on our cruising this year, first down the Oxford Canal and upstream on the Thames and then on to the Shropshire Union Canal for a leisurely few months.