Serious shopping and a tunnel

Saturday 11th May 2019

Graham was up and set off on the lock wheeling bike back to Etruria Yard to dump all of the waste left over from yesterdays plumbing extravaganza as there will not be another refuse dump before Red Bull.

We then breakfasted and walked to Humbert St (5 mins) to catch the number 4 bus to Newcastle under Lyme. The driver advised us to have a day rover ticket instead of two returns as that saved us.

£3, he also gave us warning when our required stop was approaching – many thanks for excellent service! Newcastle is an interesting town with it’s history written in the varied architechture housing a good variety of shops.
The purpose of our trip out was to revisit a fabric shop that we discoved by accident last year. We will need new curtains for the lounge diner at home when it’s re-decorated later this year. We even managed to find suitable fabric to replace all of Jannock’s curtains as well. Brenda will be busy ;^)

To get over the surprise of us both making choices and being pleased with what we’d bought, we hopped back on the no. 4 bus, got off immediately opposite the Holy Inadequate and went in and celebrated with a beer and pork pie lunch. Therapy for the soul as the purse was already lost – no redemption there.

Back to Jannock and we cast off in glorious sunshine, but with an accompanying biting wind, and made our way up past Middleport lake to the Southern portal of Harecastle tunnel. I suspect the tunnel keeper would have let us go straight in but we wanted to fill with water first. By the time I had filled the tank and taken a picture of the entrance to the original Brindley tunnel, it had started to hail so we entered the tunnel into a drier environment followed by a Black Prince hireboat.

We appeared out of the other end 35 minutes later and it was glorious sunshine in a cloudless sky but still accompanied by that wind.
We did the first five Cheshire locks before mooring for the night at Church Lawton, one of our favourite ‘peaceful moorings’.