Hanging about at Anderton

25th & 26th January

With no plans to move, we were able to have a lazy start on Friday morning. We walked to the shop, mainly for the exercise on a fine morning, but also to get a paper and perhaps a tin of fruit. This was just as well, as the shop, which was never a hugely well stocked emporium, has now just a few bare items, and seems to be doing more trade as a small cafe. It used to be a Post Office in days gone by, but that has gone altogether.

They had a handful of tabloid papers, and some tinned goods, including a small tin of pineapple rings which I bought so as to have something to show for the trip.

It was too nice a day to get upset, though, so after a coffee at the boat we set off for a ramble round the Anderton Nature Park. In fact, we found a route through the Uplands Woodlands ( a Forestry Commission area) and then across towards Marbury Park, rejoining the canal after about half an hour's walking, and taking as long again to get back to Sanity.

There wasn't a lot of wildlife to be seen, to be honest, but it was a nice ramble in a well restored area, which is also clearly popular with the locals.

In the afternoon, I tried creating a web album of the Preston Brook Tunnel photos using the Photoshop facility for so doing. Until now I've used iPhoto to do that, but these shots were defeating iPhoto's ability. I need to experiment a bit more with the PhotoShop process, but at least I was able to put something up on the website. They are not a patch on what Andrew Denny has been talking about, but have, I think, a certain artistic interest. (All this, and modest too).

Although today was a Saturday, we got up in good time, and were on the water point by nine, mooring behind a Community Narrowboat Project boat. Tank full, Sheila winded Sanity by reversing her back past the marina entrance and then putting the bow in there to bring her round. Despite a fluky wind, she managed this without any serious hassle, and with just a bit of prodding with the manual bowthruster (aka 10 foot shaft) by me at the start of the manoeuvre.

We made steady time back to Barnton, mooring this time on the new visitor moorings by the cottages before you get to the main road bridge. They are OK, but the channel is quite narrow, and the position of the loops in the concrete pilings such that we're moored very square, so passing boats, even those that have the courtesy to slow down, tend to move us about quite a bit.

We called at the PO whilst shopping in the village, making up for Anderton's deficiencies, but the forwarded stuff from Elanor hadn't arrived, so it's a case of hanging around here until Monday. I may well do the tunnel/wind/tunnel sequence tomorrow, to see if we can end up on a better bit of mooring.

It is at least a reasonable internet connection here, so I've been spending some time tidying up other bits of the website photo gallery, applying a consistent template to all the albums. Last year, Malcolm Nixon was kind enough to point out that using cascading style sheets would be more efficient, and he's quite right, but I got swept away by the joys of blogging just then, and haven't seriously looked at the state of the traditional site until this month.

One of these days/months/years I must get down to a complete reconstruction of the site on modern principles, learning from the examples Malcolm kindly sent me, but I've been having too much fun doing other boating stuff (and being scared out of my wits by the floods last year) to get my head round it.