IWA Festival – August 27 – 30th 2004

I must confess that having discovered that I had failed to register for the Festival until very late in the day it was no surprise that our allocated moorings were far from the festival site. Each visit thus required a walk of about a mile and a half each way from where we were moored near to Branston Lock. In fact the Bridge Pub (Marstons) was very much closer. I had the folding bike which was useful if going alone, or for shopping trips to Morrisons Supermarket near Branston. I even used it to go to the local Rover dealer looking for spare 12v bulbs for our internal boat lights which I found for a fraction of the price charged in the local chandlery. But we visited the Festival site several times on foot, sometimes in the evening for the beer tent and entertainment, but daytimes for the exhibitors. We found that having the dogs with us was a bit of a problem, nothing serious, but just that lingering was always problematical and I would have liked to attend some of the workshops. They were just interested in food – and with all the food outlets around that can be troublesome. We were unhappy about leaving them alone on the boat all day. We watched the Mayor arrive on the steam narrow boat PRESIDENT. By Sunday we had had enough and with time constraints over Mike’s need to be in London for the 2nd September we had booked out for early Monday morning. (Boats are booked out for departure in 15 minute slots so that the traffic is smoothed out at the nearby locks.)