Late Monday Afternoon, September 19 & Tuesday, September 20

We arrived in Nantwich about 5pm on Monday afternoon & had a snack in our boat’s galley before walking into the town. The town center is very close to where we were moored for the night.

The main commercial area is predominantly classic architecture & is so compact that it’s perfect for walking & sightseeing. Tuesday morning we were up early & headed to the town center for some more sightseeing & shopping for some light groceries.

One of the shops was a combination tea room & bookstore. We had a delicious snack there & bought some roadmaps of England & Scotland for the next phase of our adventure after we rerun the boat to Preston Brook.

A predominant part of the town center is St Mary’s Anglican Church. It dates back to the 1700’s & is really well preserved.

The church is a focal point in the town center & its spire can be seen for several miles around.

We finished off the afternoon by picking up some groceries for snacking on each day & a few more bottles of wine. Then we returned to the boat to settle in for the night. But before we could settle in we had to take the boat a little further down the canal to a spot that was wide enough for us to turn the boat around so we could start our journey back to Preston Brook early the next morning.

The photo below shows the aqueduct that we crossed as we headed to the turnaround point – or “winding hole” as many of the seasoned narrowboaters call them. As you can see in the photo many sections of the canal are above the local landscape.

Cheers!

Monday, September 19

We got up early on Monday morning to set out for Nantwich which was about 8 hours traveling time including passing through 7 more locks and under 30 bridges.

We passed through a lot of farming country & the traffic over the bridges was often quite heavy.

The canal narrows to just a few feet wider than the boat at the majority of the bridges we passed under, and the approaches to the bridge are often on a slight bend. As a result we have to slow down a lot and take extra time to line the boat up before passing under.

Fortunately we only met boats coming the other way a few times & there was enough distance between us that one boat could slow down to let the other pass under the bridge first.

Shortly after 3pm we stopped at The Barbridge Inn at Barbridge Junction & had a fantastic lunch & a pint, of course. The parking for boats on the canal is even closer to the pub than the parking lot for cars!

I asked our server for a draft pint of something local & she asked me where we were from. I replied “London, Canada” & the two couples sitting at the table across from us said “we’re from Stratford & Port Perry, Ontario”. They were on a narrowboat as well & headed back to a marina in Wales where they had picked up their boat the week before.

It never ceases to amaze me how small the world can be sometimes!

After our late lunch we got back underway & continued our journey to Nantwich.