Steadily on

It's been another day that went more or less to plan; after a good night's kip, we had a lazy start, setting off down the first two locks at half eight. We tied outside Stone Boat Building just as they were opening up at nine, and bought four bags of Supertherm from them, together with a big bag of kindling.

Then it was tally ho again down to the water point below Star Lock. I left Sheila rigging the hose whilst I nipped into WH Smith's for a paper. On my return, I took the recycling to the bins by the leisure centre – they take everything but plastic, so that's cleared a lot of stuff out.

Recycling is almost the biggest problem with living aboard these days; the opportunities to get rid of it are not getting any more frequent, rather the reverse. Now that most residential places have recycling collections, there's less need for the bins in supermarket car parks or whatever, and you end up boating about with carrier bags full of the stuff.

C&RT are slowly starting to provide recycling skips at their domestic rubbish points, but it's by no means invariable yet. Sue's No Problem site has a page for recycling centres here.

As we were filling the water tank, there was a group of kids being inducted into the mysteries of canoeing. In fact, they were in two groups, one lot in two person Canadians and the other in slalom type bats. We managed to pass both sets without incident; they were being very expertly instructed which was good to see.

By gone eleven we'd got down Aston Lock and were heading along that pleasant bit of rural canal that comes between Stone and Great Haywood. Our original thought had been to stop at Weston, but time was getting on, so we've settled for the peace of the towpath between Bridges 85 and 86.