A late change of plan last evening

Hardly had I finished last night’s post than Peter was in contact again and in short time Tiree arrived. She managed to find a mooring space just ahead of us here and it was soon agreed that we should all foregather in the Broughton Arms for food, conversation and sensible amounts of drink.

Actually, Tiree having had an even more arduous day than ourselves, it was obvious that prudence and an early night were obligatory. It didn’t stop us having an excellent time, swapping gossip and eating some very good food indeed.

Sheila and I had the sizzling platters, a stir fry of rump steak strips with peppers and so forth, served with proper chips. The others ate well too and the Pedigree was in excellent condition.

Braidbar’s motto is “Arrive as a customer, leave as a friend” and that's certainly been the case for us. The World Wide Words daily email yesterday was about the quaint American description “All wool and a yard wide” meaning honest, sincere and trustworthy and that absolutely describes Peter and Susan Mason.

It was good, too, to get to know their daughter Catherine better; she’s accompanying her parents as a holiday from her course training as a paediatric nurse.

We still managed to get to bed in decent time, as I said, and slept well, a result of both plenty of exercise and cooler nights.

Rising betimes this morning, we saw little sign of life from Tiree for quite a while, so we got on with polishing the cabin side and front bulkhead which we’d washed the other day at Wheelock. It was just the right conditions for doing so, pleasantly warm but not sunny until we'd nearly finished.

By the time we’d done, the Masons were up and about and duly set off homewards. They’ve got two days to get back to Poynton, so were aiming for somewhere towards the foot of Bosley Locks today. We’ll be following in rather more leisurely fashion.

We’ve spent the rest of the day pottering, doing some extra twiddly bits for the quiz, such as creating proper answer sheets would you believe. A certain amount of newspaper reading has also occurred.

We’ve decided to put in an extra day here as it’s an unrestricted mooring and has a handy shop. Then we’ll carry on up to Church Lawton on Thursday and Hall Green/Scholar Green on Friday, where we’ll rendezvous with Elanor on Saturday.

After that, I may be able to persuade Sally to do some blogging…

/wahaha