Another slight change of plan

As I said yesterday, the plan today was just to potter through to the aqueduct to use up another of our spare days – we want to arrive at Poynton a week tomorrow and could have been there today if we’d pressed on hard. But like they say, if you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans. We hung about until half nine before setting off, expecting to take maybe 30 minutes to get there.

No, it’s not going to be a bad luck story… it was such a nice day for boating, we’ve come right on to the foot of Bosley, running a wash load on the way and getting here by half eleven. There hadn't actually been time for the washing machine to finish, but the boat we tied next to was still running its engine too, so no problem in leaving ours on for a bit.

We were even able to deploy the whirligig when it had finished, getting it all done in nice time to eat lunch. It’s very busy here this week. In previous years, when we’ve been just a week or so later heading this way, it’s been very quiet. We’ve normally avoided overnighting here ourselves as the phone signals used to be terrible, but both the Vodafone and 3 phones have reasonable connections now.

After lunch, we took a walk up the flight to see how it’s looking this year. It’s not bad, but there were a fair few boats coming down – we did the odd bit of huffling as we went, opening and closing gates for boats and dropping the occasional paddle. We got back to Sanity Again in time to take the now largely dry washing in and have a cup of tea.

We’re still a bit ahead of ourselves, so tomorrow we’ll work up the locks and carry on to Lyme Green, from where we can catch a bus into Macclesfield. We’ll spend a couple of days there before ambling on to Bollington or Riley Green.

Location:Bosley