20th May

Up really early today. First things first, Birthday presents in bed for Mick. I'd bought him a set of walkie talkies for the boat and another Pearsons guide to add to the collection. These went down better than the roll of foil that Houdini had got him!
Then whilst Mick made sandwiches for the trip I sat down to re-draw the plan of the boat. Thank goodness I'd said we'd be with them after lunch as it was a frantic start to the day as it was.
It took us about three hours to get to Market Drayton only stopping for a comfort break. It was good to be by a canal again even if we wouldn't be on the water this time.
The chaps were in good humour and we interrupted them packing up the weekends sales from their online chandlery. We produced the model and plan. Kevin was intrigued with the model, don't think many people turn up with one of those! We chatted through the layout and after some discussion decided to turn the bedroom round, it would give the boat a better flow. It means that I'll still have to clamber over Mick to go to the loo in the middle of the night, but he'll be nearer the kettle in the mornings.This affected the layout of the bathroom, but that was fine.
We had a little look round the boats that were in the workshop at the moment. This was useful as everything was really fresh in our minds about our layout and the boat that they were fitting out had enough in it to help us envisage ours. We came away saying that we'd update our plans and list of extras, now to include solar panels to trickle feed the batteries, but we would hold off sending them back until we'd been to Crick boat show at the weekend just incase something altered.
A little walk along the tow path and an opportunity to take a photo of a visitors mooring sign to send to my brother, so that he can locate suitable places for us this Christmas near his house. Then we were on our way back home. We decided to head home on a country route so headed towards Buxton and then Bakewell where we stopped for a Birthday Pizza. Home for a glass of wine by 10pm, to be greeted by strange squealing noises from an upstairs bedroom (Mick's shed). This turned out to be the walkie talkies that had reached full charge and been left on! Not sure how impressed Houdini was with this.

19th May

Today was spent altering the galley and working on the scale model I'd started at Christmas. Mick spent the day looking for cookers, dishwashers etc so that we could pass on the information to the builders.
I managed to finish the model, but didn't have time to update the plan of the boat, so an even earlier start tomorrow to get that done.