On Monday, though still cold, the day was bright and sunny so Dave spent some time washing the boat of all the mud splashes and then doing the brasses. The wind was very strong so we were relieved we had returned on the Sunday. At one point a kestrel flew down into the trees about 70 yards away. I had to zoom right in to get these photos and had a bit of wobble trouble as you can see, but they are my best yet.
Then we finished packing up and went home. The weather has been a long way from ideal, but all being well there’ll be plenty more opportunity from next month. As Dave needed to call in at the marina office on our way out I walked round the other way, via the bridge over the marina entrance, and stopped to zoom in and take this snap of our mooring. My new camera has a much better zoom than the old one. You can just see our stern to the left of ‘Empty Wallet’.
We had seen a boat moored near Napton with its name written in an unusual script and I thought I’d have a go at decoding it back at home (with a decent internet signal, as there is practically none on our mooring). It reminded me of the runes in the Lord of the Rings. JRR Tolkien actually invented the languages of the Dwarves and Elves in his books, along with their associated scripts, and based them on real runic scripts which were used to write various ancient Germanic languages before the Latin alphabet was adopted. Wikipedia says this had happened by about 1100 AD.
After floundering around past sites purporting to show how runes can be read to foretell the future, I found serious ones describing ancient runic scripts and a massive Wikipedia site devoted to JRR Tolkien’s invented languages. I even dug out my old copy of the Lord of the Rings. But nothing I found would help me transliterate into anything resembling actual words. Perhaps I need to learn Dwarvish or ancient Norwegian to understand them. It could of course be something invented by the owner or one of those puzzle scripts. Too late, it occurs to me that I should have noted the boat’s registration number as that would be easy to look up and I think CRT would require a version in normal letters!
Trip stats;
23 miles 1¾ furlongs narrow canals, 1m 3¾ furlongs broad canals; 18 narrow locks, 6 broad locks; 6 days on board, 4 cruising days.
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