Friday 28th July - Sunday 30th July

A quiet few days really as we join, and start back along, the Trent and Mersey canal. By the time we get back to Mercia Marina we will have travelled its complete length. We left Stockton Heath and these semi circular steps show where the 18th Century canal passengers would embark aboard packet boats linking  Runcorn with Manchester.

Further along you pass a Science and Innovation Centre where the Van Der Graff generator is certainly larger than the ones we had at school!

A very ornate water tower could be seen in the distance. It was built in 1892 as part of the system which supplies Liverpool with water from Lake Vyrnwy in mid-Wales.

Then it was through Peston Brook tunnel (1239yds long) and through lock 76. By the time we reach the marina we will be down to lock 7.

The marina is 12 miles from Shardlow, so a little way to go yet.

By now it had been raining for a couple of hours and looked more like a November day than July. We called it a day, put the heating on and spent the evening listening to the rain lashing down.

Saturday-no rain today but still quite cool. During the first part of this holiday we hardly saw any boats on the Leeds and Liverpool canal but we are now in a holiday area and both private and hire boats are coming thick and fast. We called into Anderton Lift cafe for coffee and to see the lift in operation. We used it 2 years ago when we went down onto the River Weaver. It is often beset with mechanical problems but today it was OK!

5 years ago the Lion Salt works were just being developed as a tourist attraction and it has recently won a regional Museum of the Year award. A lot of hard work has gone into achieving this and there were lots of boats moored so hopefully the visitors were enjoying a good tour as we did 5 years ago.

The chemical works are always a strange site as you pass under many pipe bridges with steaming containers on either side. There are some very old and some much newer installations.

We had a very pleasant mooring for the night before the town of Middlewich.

Sunday - We only moved about a mile today! We want to visit a chandlery in Middlewich tomorrow and the moorings are nicer on this side of the town so we are staying here for the night and going up the 3 locks to the chandlery tomorrow morning. We did some shopping and walked along the canal bank. There have been showers on and off all day and the forecast is not much better for the rest of the week. I feel very sorry for the hire boaters and can imagine that the conversations inside the boats are along the lines of " Next year we are going abroad!"