Bradford-upon-Avon

A peaceful 2 days on our mooring......I am managing to do such a pot of reading.....bliss.  In between the bouts of idleness on Monday we took a stroll into Bradford and noted that at 10.30am several boats had moved leaving plenty of space both above and below the lock.

Another interesting liveaboard?

Accordingly we set off just before 10 this morning to discover that everyone was having a lie-in......at first we thought there was not any space at all above the lock but eventually managed to wriggle into the last space available.  These are only 24 hour moorings but that is all we wanted.  However there are several obvious overstayers of the liveaboard variety.  One of these is a small ramshackle boat whom we are told has no engine and never ventures far afield.

The basin itself is in a pretty setting.  We were disappointed to find that Granny Mo's cafe had disappeared.  When we came through here 3 years ago she had a wonderful cafe in the building seen slightly left in the above picture...........now Oxford narrowboats are operating here and have taken over what was her cafe.
However there is a K&A Trust cafe on the other side so we could still sit and watch the world of boats go by.    It is very busy on this stretch of canal with hire boats.
It is also busy along the towpath with bicycles and has been since Devizes.

The town is a short stroll away and very pretty.  Crossing over the last bridge before the basin also brings you to a convenient Sainsburys.
We decided to stroll to the pub for a pre supper drink and do some more gongoozling.

We managed to find a table in the shade.  It has been extremely hot again today but luckily where we are moored most of Petroc was under trees.
En route to the pub Geoff checked out the sani station only to discover that the Elsan was unusable.  So I called BW on the number given in the building.  I had two options to choose from when connected...Emergency or non emergency...I chose the non-emergency only to find at 5.45 that although they said the opening hours we until 6pm, I could only leave a message for the following day.  So I tried again and took the emergency option..this time I had a human being, however not initially much better as she said she could only leave a message for the engineers the following morning.  I stressed that it was overflowing and a hazard to Health and Safety!!!!!  Miraculously a couple of hours later a big white van appeared with something ROD on it's side...looks very promising.........
0.96 miles, 0 locks, 33 minutes