england #15 – walking around long eaton. and back.

I don’t know how I could have forgotten to include a Curly Winged Swan picture in the last entry. Before we leave the canal and go wandering around town, here’s the very pretty Curly Winged Swan (I’m sure they have a more technical name than that):

Or maybe it’s just a normal swan and they have the ability to curl their wings??

Long Eaton has quite a lot of interesting old buildings.

And some just plain odd ones. Cooperative Funeral Care??? I especially liked the color scheme.

I was amazed at how Boots is everywhere — they even have their own pharmacy! I like Boots stuff, but I never see it anywhere except Target here.

Oh, and this was SO COOL — I’d called Baker B while we were walking around Long Eaton, since I didn’t have a very wide time window to call him. We were five hours ahead, and I tried to call him while he was at work so I’d be sure to get him. So when I call, and tell him where we are, he finds us on Google Maps. And duuuuude, follows us around as we walk!!!! Okay, of course he couldn’t see US, but he could see exactly where we were. For example, he found the Barge as I stood right in front of it:

His Google Earth street view was a summer scene – there were flowers on the picnic tables — but it was just incredibly neat. I don’t even want to think about how much THAT phone call cost, since it was so much fun following us around that he couldn’t hang up.

SO we walked ALL over the place. And just happened upon an Asda, AND a Tesco. Side by side!

And, OMG, Asda sells LIQUOR in their stores — like pre-mixed mixed drinks in cans, liquor included. You sure don’t see that around here.

I was all thrilled with Asda, saying I wish WE had Asda and not damned Walmart which I loathe… then something (I don’t even know what now, it’s been hidden by the vast disillusionment I was overcome by) clued us in to the fact that Asda is OWNED BY WALMART. How disappointing!! I loved it anyway. We bought a bunch of supplies for our Canal Boat stay. And then we walked across the street to the Dueling Tesco. They both sell groceries and general merchandise — I think they must be like our Walmart and Target. Tesco seemed a little fancier —

I loved their door sign in the parking area –

Well, so am I, now!!

We bought some stuff at Asda and some more stuff at Tesco. It was SUCH fun! I know, how sad – thrilled to experience British versions of Target and Walmart. But hey, EVERYTHING was a thrill in England. Because everything was similar, yet very very different. Everything was an adventure!  We’d seen Tesco around in London, but had not gone in one, being too busy running here and there, and not needing food or sundries while we were in London. We bought some wine and Kim got a big bottle of mixed drink (I have TOTALLY forgotten what it was now, oddly — something similar to Pina Colada, I THINK-) and bottled water and snacks and stuff for breakfast. Then we headed back towards the marina with our supplies. Our bags of supplies that got heavier and heavier the longer we walked and walked. And we walked and walked and walked. Before realizing that the stuff we were walking past — old warehouses, run-down apartments — was not looking all that familiar. And the canal had completely vanished.

Why, yes – we were, of course, lost once again. Honestly, I think we spent half our trip lost, to one degree or another. And although we weren’t all that worried, and felt like we were going in the right direction (thanks to the big smokestacks that we could see were still in approximately the right position for us to be headed back towards the marina and not completely away from it),  it WAS getting late in the day and we were getting tired. And we were carrying groceries, although at least we had a nylon shopping bag I’d brought with me, and another reusable bag I bought at Tesco, AND Kim had her backpack too, so it wasn’t impossible. Just tiring. (After we got back home I realized my GPS will probably work for walking as well as driving. Never thought about that at ALL during all the time we were wandering around London then Long Eaton lost).

Long story a LITTLE shorter, we finally passed a housing development, and saw a woman out walking her dog, so we stopped and asked her if she knew where the marina was. And sure enough, she did – and we weren’t THAT far off track. She gave us excellent directions, and we soon found ourself back in familiar territory. So we stopped at Harrington Arms again, had some beer, had some dinner, and went back to the cute little boat for the evening.

And since we were now fully stocked with wine and a bottle of fancy tasty pre-mixed liquor drink, we decided it was time to watch the Canal Boating DVD. And make a decision about the wisdom of the two of us attempting to navigate a canal boat. Down a waterway. With other boats and locks and stuff.

SO we pour some booze and stick on the DVD and settle in. For an evening of hysteria. Okay, it starts off telling you — SEVERAL times — that if you are NOT planning on leaving the marina, you just need to watch the first of the three sections of the DVD. Which featured a guy who looked like he’d come straight from the Crop Circle videos Baker B has been watching, explaining stuff like pumping out the shower water (i.e. holding down a switch until it drained, which took about the same amount of time as brushing your teeth, handily enough, so could do both at the same time). And how to work the heat and the microwave and living-on-the-boat stuff like that. No problem — none of that was beyond us, dippy as we generally seem to be. We refilled our glasses andcontinued to the second part of the video. Which was all about actual…. boating.

The Moonlighting Crop Circle Guy proceeded to tell us about all the ways we could destroy our cute little boat. All the many, many ways. And all the complicated procedures that we needed to follow daily, in the correct order, or risk, oh, blowing up the engine. “Flip this switch after you turn this key after you slide this lever after you twirl around twice after you recite Jabberwocky sideways and then do it all again in reverse order and don’t forget the Downward Dog as you dash madly from the bow to the stern fifteen times each direction!”

There were things to start and things to stop and stuff to put oil in and bile pans to empty and if you get things caught in the propellers you’ll break the boat and these switches must stay up and those switches must be flipped at alternate phases of the moon and oh, yeah, not only do you have all this complicated stuff to do in order to get through the locks, you also may encounter bridges! That you have to raise up and down yourself! And tunnels where you’ll probably run into other boats and have to pay for both of them! And oh, yeah, pretty much nothing is covered by that substantial deposit!!

And we couldn’t even find our way around the marina on foot, nor could we manage getting in and out of the many footpath gates inside the marina, whose padlocks had already baffled us WAY more than two grown women with college degrees should be baffled by directions and keys and padlocks. Plus we were lost every time we turned around, plus we’re both really scatterbrained plus we’re both so non-mechanical we can barely operate a corkscrew.

So basically we sat there drinking and laughing hysterically at the Moonlighting Crop Circle Guy and in the end we decided FORGET canal boating — why would we want to spend our England Vacation time doing something so stressful and likely to result in disaster? We’d just head on down to Wiltshire to see the mysterious white horses and prehistoric stones and cool mystical stuff! And Bath, of course. And judging by how many times they reminded us that we only needed to watch Part 2 and 3 of the DVD if we were taking the boat out, we were not the only would-be boaters making that decision.

I don’t even remember what Part 3 was about now. But it certainly was an entertaining DVD.