Meeting 'old' Friends

Heavy rain greeted us on Tuesday morning so we had very slow start. We were due to meet 'old' friends Matt and Wendy in Wellingborough later in the day so once the rain eased a little we made our way through 3 locks just hoping the rain would keep off. It didn't!
We found the moorings in Wellingborough almost empty, which, was hardly surprising as we had seen very few boats during our trip from Northampton.

Tesco is close by so a quick top up of provisions took place before Matt and Wendy arrived.  Much chat and catching up took place having not seen each other for over 5 years, before we were driven, by Wendy, to the Stag in Great Doddington  for a most enjoyable meal with a few beers.

It is always so good to see friends on our travels.

Wednesday was a day for making progress downriver in order to meet up with more friends towards the end of the week.

This really is a lovely, relatively, narrow river which winds it's way through the county of  'squires and spires' named presumably because lots of squires live here, which we can't  attest to, but  around every bend of the river a different church spire comes into view. In fact it is reputed that from the hilltop at Wollaston 27 churches can be seen, on a clear day!

Some of the spires

On the stretch of river between Wellingborough and Thrapston we encountered our first manual guillotine locks. The lock works in exactly the same way as the automated ones except, someone, namely Jenny has to lower and raise the guillotine gate by hand, to be precise by turning the lifting wheel 90 rotations to lower the gate and another 90 rotations to lift the gate. Muscles Jenny managed the 3 manual locks encountered today  and the other 6 automated ones before we found yet another beautiful mooring for the night .

The wheel on the manual guillotine