Into Chester and back

Before mentioning today's exploits, I must fill in a lacuna from yesterday's account. This was that on the way to Christleton, we crossed with Cherokee, whose steerer is a blog follower; it's always good to meet, even briefly, one of those who otherwise are just known as stats on the hit counter!

I hope you had a good cruise yesterday and today.

As planned, we ourselves went down into Chester on foot today. I took the Garmin, so can tell you that it was  2.7 miles, and it took us about 45 minutes to reach the start of the shops. We'd already found out online that we could get a bus back from Stand F in Foregate Street, so knew that we could avoid the slog back uphill if we wanted to.

Main targets of the trip were Lakeland and Tesco. Lakeland is on the first floor of the Rows in Eastgate Street, and we got there at 9.15. This was a bit of a problem, as they don't open until 9.30 on a Tuesday. We filled the time in by going to see if the Julian Graves store was still there, but it wasn't. Julian Graves used to be a really good source of basic dried goods like fruit and nuts, traditional sweets and the like, but they were taken over by Holland and Barrett, and have been being closed down steadily every since.

H&B, meanwhile, are American owned, and we dislike them intensely, a source of expensive varieties of stuff you almost certainly don't need like vitamin supplements at silly prices and protein drinks.

Heigh ho, that's the free market for you, I guess.

Anyway, by the time we'd found the closed up Julian Graves, with sad messages from the former sales staff on the door, and then wandered about a bit, Lakeland was open and we could buy some boxes of EasiYo sachets and some food labels.

On then to Tesco, where we bought basic perishables, hopefully enough to see us through to Middlewich next weekend. Round to the bus stop and a quarter hour wait, then quickly back to Christleton.

Our mooring there was OK, but very overshadowed by the trees, resulting in bird poo over the roof and not much contribution from the solar panel. So we had an early lunch, then winded the boat at the winding hole before Christleton Lock, and pottered back just a little way towards Eggbridge.

We've tied on a rather shallow towpath mooring, with the stern sticking well out, but we're in the sun, it's very peaceful and we'll be able to make a flying start in the morning, having got all the turning round stuff done already.