Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 22:41:32 +0000 From: Tony Mealing Reply-To: Canals To: Canals Cc: canals@ukwaterways.net Bcc: nonet@yahoogroups.com, jane.svendsen@innovex.com Subject: Two Weeks of Leisure (XP) [ The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set. ] [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] Today started off rather lazily, both of us getting up between eight and half past. Helen decided to find a shop, a sign for which we'd seen on our previous visit to Whitchurch. Follwing the sign lefft her frustrated as the shop had obviously moved since the council put the fingerboard up. Personally, in hindsight I think that someone had been playing with the signage. We left the mooring at 09:30 after winding BH under the gaze of everyone in the arm. For once The whole reversing into the winding hole and swinging the front round worked like a dream, much to my surprise and delight. After exiting the Whitchurch Arm, boats heading towards Hurleston are supposed to head toward Llangollen for about 100 metres and use the winding hole to turn and head back in the proper direction. This turn wasn't quite as successful and took a while longer than normal, eventually by 10 am we had turned and gone through Whitchurch lift bridge. Cruising today was much easier until we arrived at Grindley Brook, the total time from Us leaving Whitchurch to exiting the bottom lock at Grindley was 2 and a half hours. Pushing on we decided that today we'd stop for dinner at The Willey Moor Inn at (surprisingly) Willeymoor Lock, a good decision, with me round the outside of a WilleyMoor grill and a ham salad nestling inside Helen we then continued on at two twenty having spotted a hire boat heading in our direction and setting off to pinch the lock long before they arrived. Nothing untoward or interesting happened between WilleyMoor and Hurleston Jct. We moved on down towards Babridge and are now moored almost opsite the Barbridge Arms. Tomorrow we plan to be in Middlewich so if John Watson is out there please give me a ring as I don't have a number for you. 07947530220 or 07970793697 will get one of us. That's it for tonight. Tomorrow who knows, minigig in Middlewich possibly? As You Do Tony M ---