With a little rain overnight, our morning started overcast and chilly, but not the coldest so far. We were moored just before a lock, so we slid right into that from our mooring spot. This stretch of the canal has been very quiet, and no boats had been through the lock since we moored yesterday afternoon.

These boats do not have a fuel gauge, and the rental companies tell you that you’ll be good for a week. Well, a week is now up and we have no idea how much fuel we have used. About an hour into our trip this morning we pulled into our first canal marina to fuel up. They weren’t open yet, but we figured out where the fuel pump was and pulled into the dock. A few minutes later someone came out to help us, but said we had to back into the slip. John did a flawless job of backing out and spinning the boat around! 70 liters of fuel and a water tank top off and we were off again.

I ducked down below to make the skipper breakfast – the warm boat cabin may have influenced that offer. 😁

About an hour and a half later we arrived at our mooring spot, a bit before the town of Chester. If we had gone any farther, we would have had 5 locks to navigate before another turning spot, and we’ve had our fill of locks (we have 24 to go through on our return trip to the rental marina – making a total of 52 for this trip!).

At our various lock passages yesterday, a few fellow boaters recommended The Cheshire Cat Pub, and that’s where we are moored for the next 2 nights. The pub looks great, and we have dinner reservations for tomorrow.

Another recommendation coming from a volunteer lock-keeper was to have lunch at the Chester Cathedral in their refectory cafe. We always like going to cathedrals and this one did not disappoint. The earliest surviving parts of the cathedral structure date back to 1092 when it was a Benedictine Abbey. The ornate carved woodwork, tiled floors, stained glass windows and beautiful chapels within the cathedral are stunning.

And lunch in the 1092 Cafe was fun and delicious. I’m glad we had that particular lock-keeper on our trip. Otherwise, we probably would have passed by the cafe.

We continued our walk around the city center – some on the streets and also along the city wall which almost completely encircles the city. These walls were begun in the first century when it was a roman fort, and evolved over time until their current configuration in the 12th century.

The last stop on our tour of the city was the Cheshire Military Museum, which tells the story of the Cheshire soldiers from the 17th century to the present.

We had taken a taxi into Chester Center in the morning, and opted for the 55 minute walk back to our boat. I said I’d do it once – and almost regretted that! No problem getting my steps in today!

Some days we don’t have reliable internet on board, so we’re doing a combined post today.

We set off from our mooring spot in Ellesmere at 7:30 on Wednesday. Our morning routine has been to wake up at 7 or 8 and set off as soon as we are dressed. I make the first round of tea while John drives, and we both sip tea on the back deck of the boat as we chug along. After an hour or 2 we’ll pull over and tie up for breakfast on the boat – sometimes bacon, eggs and toast, or maybe just granola and yogurt. And another cup of tea – of course!

This morning was the coldest so far. We both had to duck back into the boat to add an extra layer of clothes. It was overcast and windy for most of the day but we had plenty to keep us busy with 10 locks and a stop at a neat nature tower.

First the nature tower. Mammoth Tower was built to show how deep the peat bog used to be. Now the bog is about at the level of the canal, but 150 years ago it was about 15 feet higher. When the canal and railroad went in, the bog was drained (peat is 90% water), and peat was harvested for commercial purposes. There is an effort underway to restore the peat bogs. And yes, mammoths roamed here.

Moving on down the canal, we hit our first set of locks for the day. These 3 locks are called a staircase, because 1 drops directly into the next, allowing for a large drop in a short distance. Luckily, we had volunteer lock-keepers on hand to orchestrate the proper opening and closing of gates.

After our last lock for the day we found a secluded stretch of canal for our nightly mooring. By that time the wind had pick up and was pushing the boat across the canal. It took a fair bit of John’s strength to pull the boat to the canal side. While we were getting ours under control, a boat coming towards us stopped and had the wind push them into a shallow spot in the canal. Luckily, they were able to do a little back and forth action to get back into the channel. It sounded like they had a more exciting day than us – one of the boaters told us he had fallen into the canal earlier in the day. Oops!

Another quiet evening on board with our nightly game of cribbage. I was able to tie the game score at 3-3!

We woke to a bright, sunny morning on Thursday. The weather isn’t looking good later in the week, so we decided we would have a long day on the canal today. It was still pretty chilly, but the sun felt nice and warm.

We finished out the Llangollen Canal and turned onto the Shropshire Union Canal heading to the town of Chester. The final stretch of the Llangollen contains 9 locks along more picturesque countryside. There were a few more little villages and clusters of houses here, but still many big farm spreads. The building construction is so different here – even the barns are brick!

The locks were close enough together that I walked between them on the tow path. Spending all day on the boat makes it hard to get your steps in, and it was a nice morning to walk. We went through most of these with another boat close behind, so we shared some of the lock work. It’s a nice way to chat with other folks on the canal.

Here we’re going to play a game of “find the boat in the lock”. 😁

The Shropshire Union Canal is a larger canal than the Llangollen, and the locks can accommodate 2 boats at a time. The first set for us was a staircase with 2 locks. There was a boat coming up and we were going down. Luckily, the other folks had been through this lock many times (there was no lock-keeper here), and they showed us how both boats go into their respective locks and pass halfway through. We were in the full upper lock and they were in the empty lower lock. We open the middle gates and the water level evened out. We drove past each other, then we dropped our water level and drove out and they raised theirs and drove out. It was pretty neat!

A few more locks and we made our stop for the night. But look, there’s a castle up on that hill! Beeston Castle, built in the 1200’s is just ruins now, but a very impressive site. We hiked up from the canal, exercising our “right to ramble” (public paths crisscrossing private farmland). The museum gift shop was offering tastes of mead and ginger wine (made exclusively for the English Heritage organization), and we’re now working our way through a bottle of the wine on the boat. We do like ginger!

And a lovely sunset to finish off the night!

What we saw today-

• Baby ducks
• a farmer haying a huge field
• someone doing yard work in his canal-side garden
• More sheep, cows, and horses
• a long line of cows crossing a bridge as we passed under, going to the barn for milking
• the sun
• more boat traffic than previous days
• yellow fields of rapeseed
• wildflowers
• lush green pastures
• lots of baby lambs!
• pretty boats, and boats that look like they shouldn’t be floating
• a giant bee!
• cool trees

Since we were at the end of the Llangollen Canal, we are heading back the way we came, then will continue past our starting spot for week 2. This morning took us back over the 2 aqueducts and through the 2 tunnels. We’re feeling like pro’s now!

We stopped at the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and had a wander down under it. It’s quite the impressive structure! We also walked across on the tow path, so 4 times across for this trip. It’s a long way down to the River Dee!!

We motored on for a bit and moored near the town of Chirk. The first thing I noticed was the smell of chocolate. After a bit of speculation – were they processing cocoa bark mulch? were they actually making chocolate? – google confirmed that there is a Cadbury factory here. this is where the cocoa beans come to be roasted and processed for use in their other factories. It did smell really good!

Since we need to see more of the area than just the canal, we took a 40 minute walk up the hill to Chirk Castle. The castle was built in 1295 and is still completely intact and habitable. The last owners lived there until the 1980’s, and their family had owned the castle for over 400 years. The rooms open for tours still have the original 1700’s furniture that the family purchased when they did a “remodel”. We also got to venture down into the dungeon – but managed to make it out safely.

It’s always good when you return from a wander to find your boat still moored along the canal!

Then back to the boat and a short trip to a mooring spot for the night. Dinner on board, but the dessert menu, “puddings”, at the canal-side pub look really good. I think we’ve earned that tonight.

We decided to stay put for the day today, but did move the boat closer into town in the morning. We also turned around so that we’d be heading in the right direction tomorrow morning. The canals are narrow, and even though we have one of the shorter boats at 48 feet, you can’t just spin around anywhere. There are designated spots along the canal for doing the equivalent of a 3 point turn. I think it would be more than that if we had a 70 foot boat. There are lots of those on the canal – ours is just enough space for us and fairly easy to maneuver.

Once we were situated on a mooring in town, we had our breakfast and waited for the drizzle to stop. This is vacation, so we are allowed to just hang out and relax. 😀

The head of the canal is about 1 1/2 miles from the town wharf. Private boats cannot travel that stretch, but there are tour boats that go down – some horse-drawn. The canal begins at Horseshoe Falls, a manmade dam that diverts water from the River Dee into the Llangollen Canal. 12 million gallons of water per day flow into the canal. A friendly fellow playing fetch with his dog told us to walk up the path to a little church. It was Sunday mid-day, the church was open and there were fresh flowers, so maybe it’s an active church. We wandered through the graveyard and saw stones from the 1700’s up to the 2000’s.

We finished off the day with dinner in town. We did get that table overlooking the river, and the food was delicious!

Our first full day on the canal brought us from Ellesmere, England into Wales. It was a bright, but chilly start to the morning and we set off after after a cup of tea. We motored on for about an hour and found a quiet spot to tie up and make breakfast. Our little kitchen is serving us well.

The countryside here is beautiful! Rolling green hills dotted with farms and cottages. Small villages with lovely old churches. More sheep and cows around every bend. It is very peaceful to meander along the canal. This is definitely the time of year to come for a narrowboat holiday. We have encountered very few boats as we are traveling, making for a relaxing time as skipper. We trade off skippering throughout the day, taking turns maneuvering bridge passings, locks and tea preparations.

This stretch of the canal system only has 2 locks to navigate. We have found that locks not near a busy town center will be self service. We were traveling upstream, so these locks were lifting our boat. The sequence of events to accomplish this are 1) pull over to the towpath and one person hops out 2) If a boat has gone up ahead of you, the lock needs to be drained – with top and bottom gates closed, open bottom paddles and water rushes out. As soon as the lower water level equalizes, the lower gates will open and you drive the boat in 3) close lower paddles and slowly open the top gate paddles 4) water fills the lock and the boat rises 5) when water level equalizes with the top level, the gates will open and you drive out. There’s a lot of cranking and running back and forth for the person on land, but it’s fun. Today we have a succession of 4 boats traveling through these locks, so it worked out that the person waiting for their boat to enter helped the previous boat go through, saving some time and running back and forth.

When the canal needs to cross a valley it uses an aqueduct. These are very impressive structures and feats of engineering – especially considering that they were built over 200 years ago. The first of these that we crossed was the Chirk Aqueduct, 710 feet long and 70 feet above the River Ceiriog (yes, we enter Wales as we cross the aqueduct). There was a similar train crossing running parallel to the aqueduct. The canal then immediately enters the Chirk tunnel, which is just over 1/4 mile in length. The tunnel is only one boat wide, so you need to ensure no boats are coming at you before you enter. Luckily, you can see the end of the tunnel, and boats have good tunnel lights making them clear to see.

The highlight of this section of canal is the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. This one is over 1000 feet long and 126 feet above the valley. The entire structure is only 12 feet wide, with a water channel just wide enough for 1 boat and a towpath for pedestrians. At least the pedestrians have a guardrail on their side – no such thing for the boats, just a small lip of steel to keep the water in! It was very fun to cross, although I did have to move over to the towpath side after the first few bumps along the edge. I took a video of the crossing, which I will post later. We’ll cross it again tomorrow and I’ll get some better shots of the whole structure.

We finished up the day making it most of the way to Llangollen, and mooring alongside the towpath. Another tasty meal for the hungry crew, and, even though we were 2 miles from town, we took a walk in to check it out. After all, it’s hard to get your daily steps in when you’re on a boat! The town was bigger and busier than we had expected, but with lots of charm. We found a great pub right on the river and made reservations for dinner the next night, specifically requesting a table overlooking the river.

After a long day+ of travel, we arrived for our first night in Stoke-on-Trent. We really enjoy traveling by train in England. Trains are clean, quiet, comfortable and reliable. From Heathrow, we took a train into London, then another to Stoke-on-Trent. We had some time to kill between those trains, so we took a stroll through Regent’s Park and Queen Mary’s Garden. Wonderful gardens, even this early in the year. It must be spectacular when all of the roses are in bloom!

Making Stoke-on-Trent our first night stop meant just a short train ride in the morning to pick up our boat. Little did we know that Stoke-on-Trent is the home to Spode pottery. The Spode factory closed in 2009, but another local company is still producing the wares. We visited the Spode Museum and picked up a couple of original pieces in the museum store.

Friday morning’s train ride dropped us off in the middle of nowhere at the Prees train station. A test of the UK SIM card was successful in procuring a taxi to take us the last few miles to the marina. We had a nice lunch at the marina cafe while they readied our boat. Boaters are a friendly bunch, and we had a nice chat with Trevor, who lives full-time on his boat. He gave us some good tips on mooring spots and pubs to try.

After a short tour of the boat and a bit of instruction, we were off! It was a cold and rainy start to our trip, but fun nonetheless. We quickly got the feel for steering the boat, and motored on for a few hours until we reached the village of Ellesmere. While we passed few boats on our way, the section of canal at Ellesmere was busy with many boats moored for the night (or even longer).

We found a good spot a short walk from the Tesco supermarket – and the rain had stopped and sun was peeking through the clouds. We stocked up on provisions for the next several days and settled in for the night with a boat cooked dinner. We’ll make most of our meals onboard, and stop a few times at local spots as we travel along.

There are a LOT of sheep in this part of the country. Here are some of our neighbors across the canal. The lambs were having fun and venturing to the edge of the canal to check us out. I hope we see them again in the morning before we set off.

This past year of pandemic lockdowns and social distancing has left many of us missing our family and friends. For the safety of our elderly parents, they have often been the most isolated. John and I are very fortunate to still have all 4 of our parents living – some in the same house and others not too far away. Living with John’s parents this past year has been wonderful – we often comment on the fact that we both love our parents and in-laws. We share dinner duties and always sit down together for our evening meal. So far, reports are they they enjoy having us here as well. My mother lives in a small assisted living residence on the other side of town. She was in complete lockdown for quite a while last year – not everyone was happy with that, but no one in the residence got sick. Visits to her were from the sidewalk looking up to her second story window. Then we graduated to scheduled short visits in the garden for the summer, moving indoors for the winter. Now that the nice weather has returned, and residents have been vaccinated, we can have spontaneous visits in the garden – still being careful to wear masks and keep to 6′ apart. My dad lives in NH, and while video calls are nice, we hadn’t seen him in person since late last summer. Once he was 2 weeks post final vaccine, I decided it was time for a visit – and we could bring our bedroom and bathroom with us!

Dad was a great campground host! We had a nice spot under the trees and even had an electrical hookup. His road is really quiet at night, and the only thing that kept me awake one night was a pair of owls chatting overhead.

The weather was great, and we helped do a bit of yard work. Dad has a big milestone birthday coming up this summer (divisible by 9 and 10), but he still keeps very active outdoors. We let him get started on the tilling for his flowerbeds, but then John took over to finish up (fun for both of them). We hear there will be hollyhocks all along the front of the house.

Once the tilling was complete, John and I took a break to sit and admire the work, only to turn around and see dad raking the debris from his stone wall. Back to work! This time we got to drive the John Deere mower with dump trailer – worth all the work! Now he has the cleanest stone walls in town!

When we weren’t working in the yard, dad has lots of toys to play with. This weekend it was cameras. We did take a walk over to Copp’s Pond, but there wasn’t anyone close enough for a picture. There were a lot of mergansers and a few geese way out in the pond. It can be a great spot for bird and turtle sightings, but some days they don’t show up at the same time as you.

Close to home, the bird feeders are a constant source of photo ops. We had 3 kinds of woodpeckers at the same time! Here’s a shot I took with one of the cool cameras, testing out the back button focus feature – great for setting the focus and then waiting for your prey subject to arrive.

Our Scamp is proving to be a great acquisition – easy to hook up, super easy to tow, and getting more and more comfortable as we learn how to live in it. We’ve done a bunch of quick weekend trips, and never feel like it’s a lot of work. Our next planned outing is our first fiberglass camper (egg) rally in May. It will be fun to meet up with other owners and share stories and ideas. It will also be our longest stay in one spot, so we’ll break out all of our outdoor amenities and settle in for a long weekend. Stay tuned…

February 5-7, 2021

Those of you that know us well won’t be surprised to hear that Myrtle Beach is not high on our list of places to visit. However, we have driven through a couple of times when it’s been much like a ghost town. Both times were in the off-season, once at 7am when there was not a person in sight. Another time we decided to eat out before getting to the airport. We drove the whole length of the “strip” before finding a restaurant the was open. We got a window seat overlooking the beach, and had a nice meal. Given the number of establishments, I can’t imagine how crazy it is there during high season.

Looking around for another weekend campground, we ended up heading to the Myrtle Beach State Park Campground. It’s fairly big, but the reservation calendar looked like it was only about half booked. It’s hard to know what your campsite will be like, but we use a few parameters to choose –

• a site on the periphery, so that there is no one behind us
• choosing a site currently showing adjacent sites empty
• on a roadway that looks less traveled and no turns so that headlights shine in
• On a loop that is not the closest to the nearest roadway
• not too to close to the bath house, or trash area

Myrtle Beach is an hour and a half from Oak Island, so we left Friday afternoon to have time to set up and take a walk before it got dark. Driving through a Myrtle Beach on the main highway showed so much more of the tourism that takes place there. If you can put a word before “House of Pancakes” and pop up a sign, it’s there. I lost count of those. Then there are the beach stores – there are 12 Eagles stores along the strip, plus 5 or 6 Pacific stores and many others. If you don’t find a shark tooth on the beach, there are plenty of places to buy some! I think we’ll stick with off season visits.

The state park is 312 acres located right at the end of the commercial strip (we walked the beach up to one of the commercial piers). It has a mile of beach and a very nice fishing pier. The campground seemed to be about 2/3 booked, but the sites are well separated and buffered with plenty of trees and vegetation. We did not have neighbors on either side or in front of us, but there were campers a few spots down in both directions. Once again, the weather was threatening rain and chilly, so we fired up our heater as soon as we set up camp. The heater is really small, but it heats up the space quickly and has kept us warm.

The campground has a 14-day limit, but there were families there that looked like they’ve been there much longer. They have huge campers, and the amount of “stuff” outside is crazy – awnings and tents with multiple tables and outdoor rugs, lots of outdoor cooking setup, bikes for the family, kid toys galore, dogs and cats. I’d hate to have to pack all that up every 2 weeks!

There is a nice nature trail in the park, starting near the campground, going through the forest to a pond, then meandering through some swampy areas and coming out at the beach. We spied some ducks in the pond and a great blue heron hanging out in the swamp.

The partridge berries on the floor of the forest brought back memories of hunting for these with my dad when I was a kid. I think we made little terrariums with them.

We didn’t see any yellow-bellied sapsuckers, but we saw plenty of evidence of them! They drill their holes in straight lines, and here the vines growing up along the tree were drilled as well. That can’t be good for the tree!

The serious rain came during our second night. It was a a good storm with loud thunder and bright lightening flashes (although someone in the camper slept through it). The one who did not sleep through it eventually got to sleep, only to wake up in a puddle on her side of the bed. This was our first time out in a heavy rain, and our back window is leaking. Bummer! Breakfast, another walk on the beach and we headed home. We still call it a successful camping weekend – even with the weather and the leak. We continue to learn how to live in a small space, and I think we bring less with us each time. And, most importantly, we continue to have fun!

Just by luck we parked on the high spot in our site – not everyone else did.

Sights throughout the park –