Warm dry weather and lambs frolicking in the fields suggested spring was in the air. The canal had come to life and we met cheerful hire-boaters starting their holidays. A gaggle of geese honked noisily as we moored up near Chirk. The walk to Chirk village took me down and up the other side of the steep Dee valley. It was worth the walk as there was a good selection of shops including an excellent butchers.
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| Bess and Brin enjoy playing on the towpath in the sun. |
Our other technical issue was worrying. My email account had been hacked and was being used to send out spam emails. Apologies to anyone who received these. The spam emails are easily identified, they just contain a link to a website without any text from the owner of the account. I've since heard of several other instances of this type of hacking.
The signs of spring disappeared when cold weather gripped the country. We were lucky we did not have a heavy snowfall but it was very cold and windy so we decided not to move on. We were also lucky that we had moored up outside the Willeymoor Lock Tavern which serves hearty meals to hungry boaters and has a selection of real ales. We felt sorry for the hire-boaters who, huddled in layers of winter clothing, had to keep going to return to their hire bases.
The weather improved on Monday so we resumed our journey passing through the last of the manual lift bridges which are a feature of this canal. The bridge is lifted by turning the lifting gear with a windlass. It isn't hard to turn the windlass but a lot of turns are needed to raise and lower the bridge.
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| Raised manual lift bridge |
Sounds like Bess is turning out to be a right character!! Great pic of them together though, we know from experience that it's an art form in itself trying to get them to stay still at the same time :)
ReplyDeleteYou're right, they don't like to stay still for long
ReplyDelete