No bells or whistles

There's a very real danger of this turning into a Morris Dancing Blog, so to try and avoid that here's a bit without bells on.

Upton-upon-Severn is a delightful little market town, very much on the river with GRP river cruisers, narrowboats and wide beams moored on the bank. There are shops that remind you of your childhood and enough good-looking pubs to satisfy anyone. It was only on Saturday afternoon that we realised we’d been there before – probably eight or nine years ago we stopped off on the way home from a 2CVGB National Meeting in Worcester, as there was a boat festival on the August bank holiday weekend. Back then, as we looked at all the beautiful craft on the river we thought that boat living was just a pipe dream. Now, if you’ll pardon the pun, an awful lot of water has passed under the bridge and we’re well on the way to making it a reality.

Just a brief re-cap to let you know where we are. We’re both still working and will continue to do so until we find a buyer and the money is in the bank.  Ann-Marie needs to give a months notice, but has got a couple of weeks holiday that can come off that. Dave only needs to give a weeks notice. There’s a campsite not far from where Ann-Marie works, so our first two weeks in the Kon-Tiki will be spent just down the road. After that we're really not sure; we might jump on a plane to Australia, we might take the van to Spain, if it's next year we might go boat hunting. If Ash is still for sale we might put a silly offer on it. We'll probably toss a coin at the time. We’re still doing car boot sales and putting stuff on freecycle, plus trips to the tip and the scrap yard, although we’ve just about got rid of all the metal now – another tick! Stuff that we can’t fit in the van but will want on the boat is going into Dave’s sister’s cellar, or into a friend’s spare room. The little blue van is going into a barn near Winchester; we’re going to keep it until we’ve been to the World Meeting in France next year. After that we’ll decide what to do with it.

Other than that we’re just keeping it all tidy, or trying to!