Back to the Boat Festival

It is a cold and wet day today, even though it is June and supposed to be the summer.  Although we say 'Boooo!', because we can't go out and have Small Bear Adventures, it is good in a way, because it encourages me to write up the adventures we have already had.

We bears are glad that it wasn't like this last week, because we went to the Etruria Boat Festival again.  We were going to help out on the Inland Waterways Association stall but first, Polar wanted to visit her friend Shug's new food stall in Stoke Market.

Before we even went into the market, our keen little bear noses picked up lovely spicy smells coming from the stove in the colourful stall.

'Yay!  Samosas!' cheered Hanley Bear.  He persuaded Grizzly to buy us one each for our lunch and some chicken curry for tea, which came with a naan bread so big we could all have sat on top of it.  We could hardly wait for lunchtime!

Polar promised to bring us back one day, so we could have a cup of Indian 'Chai' tea and some cake but today, we had to run as we were needed at the boat festival.

As always, there were lots of brightly-painted traditional boats, as well as canoes for hire and lots of craft and food stalls.  Grizzly and Polar's friends were under a big white gazebo with the Inland Waterways logo on it and had mugs, mats, books and pens to sell.

We decided that the red brick pattern would suit Hanley Bear, as he is interested in industrial history and likes red as it is Stoke City's colour.  The green leaf pattern would be for Endon, as he loves nature (we all do, of course) and the blue water pattern would be for me, as I was found by the River Thames.  Unfortunately, we hadn't brought our pocket money with us, but next time we want to get a notebook each so we have somewhere to write about our adventures when we are out on Uppie.

There were lots of other nice things on our stall, most made by our clever friend Mrs Anne, including a whole box of knitted cats and loads of little lucky dip presents for human cubs.  She had even made some bookmarks with pictures on - and some were of me! 

During the morning, some film people came to talk to the volunteers.  They interviewed Grizzly and Polar, who told them about my articles in our Knobsticks magazine, and how I met the other bears, so they filmed us too.  I wonder if we will be famous bears?

After we had been filmed and helped to sell some things on the stall, we wanted to see the boats and find out what else was going on.  Polar said it was too busy for us to explore on our own, so we went with her, in our bear bag, to have a look around.

I did get out to watch a boat going through the very deep top lock and, on the way back, Hanley Bear saw a sign for the Oatcake Boat.  'Can we have oatcakes now?' he asked.  'I'm hungry!'

'We've got samosas, Hanley,' Polar reminded him.  'Anyway, Mrs Kay is very busy so it will be a long wait to be served.'

Mrs Kay told us later that she had made five hundred oatcakes for that day and had sold them all before the end of the day, and we heard that Mrs Shug had sold all her lovely Indian food too!

Some of the boat people let us climb on their boats to look at the lovely painting on them.  Polar wants to learn how to paint castles, so we looked for some really good ones for her to photograph.

The music tent was right at the top of the field this year, which was a good place for it as people could picnic outside while they listened to the bands, or buy tasty things from the nearby food stalls.  Smelling food again made us all hungry, including Polar, so we went back to munch our delicious samosas and then had naps curled up in Polar's coat while the humans carried on looking after our stall.

It's exciting to think that we will soon be enjoying another boat adventure - on our boat!  Hurray!