Where did September go?

The time is just whizzing by and it seems as if autumn arrived suddenly on 1^st October. The fire’s been on for quite a few days now. The mornings are crisp and mostly clear with some magical misty ones throw in for good measure.

September was a busy month with two sets of friends coming to stay for just under a week each.

We has glorious weather when Lyn & Kevin came. I went on my first canal holiday with Lyn more than 30 years ago and it was Kevin’s first narrow boat cruise. We went up the Bingley 5 rise with

them and ended their trip at Skipton. Sadly Kevin’s not been at all well and was in hospital when they got home, however, Lyn’s reassured us his ‘episode’ wasn’t anything to do with being on the boat and he’s slowly getting better.

Yvonne & Mike joined us for their first narrow boat experience a few days after. Their trip revolved around going to the ‘Yarndale’ festival held in Skipton. We put up our bright knitted bunting with fairy lights on for the festival and yarn bombed the ice cream boat with bunting & pompoms too and stupidly forgot to take any photos of either. Cheryl and her daughter popped in for bacon butties and then strolled to Yarndale with us. Although I really didn’t need a new spindle and fibre to spin on it, I accidentally brought some!!!!!! We dropped Yvonne & Mike off at Gargrave last Wednesday.

All in all we’ve spent about 3 weeks in Skipton over the summer. It’s a vibrant little town and it’s healthy bird population along the tow path continued to eat a whole feeder & a half of seed each day. We helped the floating 'shed' through the swing in Skipton.  We've met the chap & lad before.  He's pulling the shed that floats on a couple of canoes and the lad has a bath tub strung to some large 25 litre tubs that he paddles along.  They are raising money for a theatre.

We are heading back to West Lancashire so we can spend the whole winter on the Rufford Arm of the Leeds & Liverpool canal right by the Overells. We are stopping off at some different places, Silsden, Barboldswick (pronounced Barlick) and Barrowford. In addition to our favourite spot on ‘t’ Yorkshire Moors above Gargrave where we did a spot of walking along the Pennine Way.

We asked Edmund to help us down the Wigan flight and another 5-6 people have offered to come and help too, plus the 4 crew from our boat & nb Emma Maye (who we went up the flight with way back in July). Let’s just hope it’s not pouring down.