john6767

A weeks hire would be 6 full days plus the first afternoon, not 5. At least that was what is was when we were hiring, eg leave Saturday mid afternoon, back for 9:00 AM the following Saturday. Still a busy trip for a week though. We did Bunbury to Llangollen (and return) in a "hire week" in August with no problem though.

The nearest canal is the Grand Union and Catherine-de-Barnes by the Boat Inn is probably the nearest point about 4 miles away from Meriden.

Yep that annoys we too, but for most thing you can set Win7 up to work and look like XP, well NT really, stuck in 1995, not me! I user Win7 Enterprise on my main work laptop, and Win 7 Home on a netbook, and to be honest I don't really have a problem with it. My son and daughter both have Vista on theirs and that is horrible. I think Win7 addresses much of Vista criticisms. But at the end of the day nothing wrong with XP at all.

See this post which suggest it may not be on, or at least it is not decided on yet.

I agree sounds strange, £41 for 4 drinks I do find really hard to believe, unless it was something really exotic. The weekend before last we ware at Twickenham for the Help for Heroes rugby match and we stayed at the Marriott in the south stand. So a very expensive hotel in an expensive location, and at £9.70 for a pint of Guinness and a Pint of Stella (I know), I thought that pricey, but still less than half the price being quoted here.

I would second that, for insurance what matters to them is where the car is kept, and how it is kept ie. on road/off road/in garage etc. You need to own up to the SP30's of course, possibly they will not make much difference anyway.

I was looking good until I saw the wallpaper in bedroom 4.

Not done much with ours yet, pump turned off as we always do when leaving the boat, removed the shower hose and opened all the taps, and have 2 oil rads on frost setting. We are planning to do on a jaunt to Braunson this weekend, bet it snows on us, and after that will probably turn off the water at the tank and blow as much water as I can out of the pipes. That is all we did last year and survived with no damage, so hopefully will be no worse than than that this year. Just hoping no to be frozen in for so long this year.

Only have experience of the Thames above Oxford so not directly relavant, but what the heck shoot me down.... . This August there were loads of great secluded mooring places that no one was collecting money for (we did pay £4 in Lechlade though) . Very few boats moving, much quieter than the canals in the Midlands that we are used to . More that 50% of the locks were self service, initially a disappointment, but they are great locks to work, so really enjoyed them . The lock keepers that we did meet were fantastic, made you very welcome . In the summer at lest there was no flow to speak off, nothing like the (Warwickshire) Avon we did at Easter . Try to use a 14 day license, shorter than that (like we did) is quite expensive per day All in all loved it, and the Oxford felt very small afterwards. Hope to do downstream for Oxford, but probably not this summer have other plans forming, but that is a different story.......

Don't get it, why is this locked to a mobile network. The dongle would be locked true, but why is a router locked? If that is the case why would not not just buy a generic router, what is special about these router that make them worth the trouble?

Alan Fincher gets my nomination.

I think it is key that we get a short list of people who would want to be nominated. To me this is more than people saying he would be a good guy etc. To do this first off the person has to want to do it, second they have to have the time to do it, and thirdly they need to have the appropriate skills. Therefore is seems to me that we need people to put them forward an say a little bit about why they feel qualified to do this. Once there is that short list then there has to be either an informal or formal process of selecting one candidate from the forum.

I got the letter today as well. I think it would be great if this forum nominated someone (I am not volunteering). I would be happy to be one of the sponsors though. If you have not had the letter yet ,the voting will in February via a web site , SMS, or post, and is being run by the Electoral Reform Society.

I am managing to resist the beard so far. Alcohol is a different matter . However you must get yourself a leather drovers hat, they are mandatory.

That is a interesting point. We used to have a static caravan, and they certainly do have to have a minimum spacing, something like 5m, as a fire break. You are also not supposed to have combustible materials around the caravan for the same reason. I would expect that the presence of all the water feels like it makes a difference in the 2 situations, but it certainly would not stop file spreading between boats. In our marina the boats are in grousp of perhaps 20-30 with a promontory separating each group. So fire on one, unchecked, would certainly take out a whole group.

Just your average trip out then So ignoring getting there, would you take a narrowboat on the Caladonian Canal, Loch Lochy and particularly Lock Ness seem a bit big and scary to me.

I suspect the overall cost will not be that impacted by where you go from/to really. Much will be in the crane out/crane in, not the truck mileage. What sort of boat is it, I assume a narrowboat is not suitable for the Caledonian Canal.

One thing I did not see but possibly implied, is to know how much you want to spend taking into account survay and other immediate up from costs, like modifications and equipment. I suspect with the market as it is you can expect to knock down the asking price a bit, so pitch the boats you are looking at accordingly.

The BCNS seem to be doing a poor job on web sites currently. The site that you have linked to is the "old" site, which basically seems to have been abandoned. What you are referencing to is about the 2011 challenge, as you point out, so you can see how out of date it is. The "new " web site is here, on a different domain name. That has the 2012 diary of events, and the Challenge is not mentioned, so was a bit surprised to hear it was on.

Yes Planning on entering again. Where did you get the info from?