Getting ready to cruise

At last. We are actually going for a cruise, starting tomorrow. The first one since last November. We are only out for five days and don't intend to go far. We will head for Middlewich and when we get there we will decide whether to head towards Barbridge or Wheelock.

We have been shopping and bought loads of food, beer and wine. Just got to pack some clothes and we will be ready to set of bright and early in the morning. The BBC 5 day weather page shows reasonable weather at least until Friday.

Going to Suzy's for tea tonight, celebrating Carl's 61st birthday, which is on Thursday.

Geocaching

We spent yesterday Geocaching with Suzy (daughter), Bethany and Ben (grandchildren). For those who don't know what this is, it's like a treasure hunt. People hide the caches - quite often in plastic sandwich boxes - and then enter either the co-ordinates or a clue for you to work out
the co-ordinates on the website http://www.geocaching.com/ . You then use a GPS to find the cache. Caches contain a log for you to sign when you find it and some bits and pieces (treasure). You are allowed to remove an item from the box and replace it with another item that you brought with you. Some items can be kept, others must be moved to another cache to help them travel. Such as this coin that we found in a cache near the airport. It had been put in the cache by someone from Germany!



We searched for five caches. Three near the airport, one at Carrington Moss, between the training camps for Man City & Man United, and one in Broadheath, near Altrincham. We found three of them. We could not find one of the ones near the airport. It turned out to be extremely small, so we probably overlooked it. We did not find the one in Broadheath because there is a riddle to solve and we couldn't solve it. We will have to work on it. (Photos taken by Suzy - hope you don't mind me nicking them Suz!).

The adults enjoyed the day more than the children. They were OK with the first one, but soon got fed up with walking in the cold, rain and mud.

When we got home we searched the geocaching site for caches near canals. There are loads, so we may get ourselves a GPS and do some geocaching when we go cruising.

New Start

The last nine months have been sad for us. First Carl's Mum went into hospital with pneumonia and died. Then the day after Carls' mum's funeral, Liz's mum was taken into hospital. She died eight weeks later. We have hardly been out since May. We missed our three week cruise in September because Liz's mum died on the first day of the cruise so we had to go to Kent for the funeral and to help sort out Liz's dad, who is 85 and cannot really live on his own any more.

As this blog was originally set up specifically for Liz's mum, so that she could follow us whenever we were out cruising, we have not felt like adding to it.

However, Mum would have wanted us to continue with it, so here we are again.

We have not taken Blackstone out yet this year. The one free weekend we had that coincided with dry sunny weather, the canal was frozen solid! Still we went to the marina, lit the fire and ran the engine. Everything is still working OK.

It is Carl's birthday on 28 February. Liz has taken some time of work and we are hoping to cruise for five whole days. Fingers crossed that nothing happens to stop us. We need a bit of a cruise to get lots of hot water to spring clean the boat. It's surprising how mucky it gets over winter when it's not being used.

Wonderful memories

The holiday is over, but the memories will linger on. We had such a wonderful time. Plenty of sunshine, good food and laughter. We will have to investigate better ways to connect to the Internet while we are on the boat. There were too many days without a signal and even when we did have a signal trying to connect was very frustrating when it took 10 minutes to log into the blog and then the mobile phone disconnected and we had to try again. Anyway, here are a few of our memories.

Day 13 Tuesday 29 May 2007

Last day today. It rained all night again and the rain carried on all morning. We came back through Preston Brook Tunnel at 11.00 and when we got out the other side, the sun was shining! Back in the marina, filled up with water and moored by 12.00. The sky was blue with fluffy white clouds and the sun was out. A bit different from the last couple of days.

Day 12 Monday 28 May 2007

Minshull to Bridge 206 on the Trent & Mersey canal. It rained again during the night, but it had finally stopped by the time we set off this morning. It was cloudy and quite cold. Luckily the fire stayed in all night so we put a couple of logs on and we soon warmed up. We stopped for provisions in Middlewich and had to wait ages to get through Big Lock. It started raining around lunch time. We moored by Billinge Green Flash for lunch and then carried on through Anderton and the tunnels at Barnton and Saltersford to just past bridge 206, where we moored for the night. We saw another kingfisher along this stretch. It was near the Northwich Victoria football club. Would you believe it, the signal kept disappearing when I tried to update, so this is late again.

Day 11 Sunday 27 May 2007

Up early this morning to help clean the dog hairs out of David and Cathy’s boat, Jennifer, before they took it in. It rained heavily all night and it looks as though it is set for the rest of the day. David and Cathy were back at Empress for 9.30. David reversed the boat into the bay successfully. We helped them unload and said goodbye and then turned our boat round and headed for Barbridge Junction and the Middlewich Branch of the Shropshire union canal. Volunteers from the Shropshire Union Canal Society were manning Cholmondston Lock. They do this regularly on bank holiday weekends as it raises money, which they use to help install mooring rings along the canal. They are also active in the Montgomery restoration. We bought some stuff from their stall and gave them a donation for seeing us down the lock. We carried on through Minshull Lock and then moored up around lunch time for the rest of the day. It has rained all day and we were cold and wet, so we lit the fire and the inside of the boat was soon lovely and warm. We had soup and bacon sandwiches so our insides were soon lovely and warm too.