Old and New

The boat has moved off the new water point at Brownsover and one thing became very apparent.

This ‘new’ waterpoint is the old cast iron upstand model which I thought had been made obsolescent on H&S grounds.  They are being replaced with a new stainless steel model.  Change of heart; old stock; local policy; or has the ‘new’ model proved to be less than a success?

Jan and I wandered back along the towpath and under the A426 bridge before turning left on the new footpath down into the ‘new’ Elliot’s Field’ Retail Park.  It was still under construction last time we passed this way.  Jan had a good look around M&S before we crossed back over the busy A426 to the adjacent Junction One Retail Park where she headed for The Range.

Homebase and Wickes used to be located at the old Elliot’s Field Retail Park but now have new premises in Junction One on Technology Drive road. This next map extract shows the location.

Top arrow – Elliot’s Field.  Bottom arrow – Wickes and Homebase.  Interestingly there is no direct link between the new Wickes and Homebase and the other Junction One outlets.  Different developers?

The reason for visiting Homebase was to collect an item from the Argos collection centre inside the store.  Homebase and Argos are owned by the same parent company.  We had ordered a USB storage dongle from ebay for Jan’s iPad as it only has 16GB total storage which is nearly all used.  The iPad doesn’t have an external slot for a memory card but we have a solution.  We’ve purchased a dongle that plugs into the power cable port.  These dongles can be bought with various storage capacities and we selected 32GB.  The dongle has the Apple plug at one end and a standard USB plug at the other.

This means the dongle can be connected to either the appropriate Apple socket or a standard USB port.  Here is is plugged into Jan’s iPad.

I’ve already plugged it into our Windows laptop and transferred some files.  The cost of the dongle was approximately £20 and has trebled the iPad storage capacity.