Plans made and cancelled!

 We’ve spent the last few days over the border, but crossed back into England yesterday.

A pile of logs from a blown down tree at the north end of Chirk Cutting will wait until next year…

But this blow-down was too good to ignore!

Mark on Great Escape, the boat in front, helped to haul it out as I chopped it up into logs, and he took the thinner bits, not having a chain saw.

There it was, gone!

Back across Chirk Aqueduct into England.

The stoppage at New Marton Locks, originally planned to be starting on the 21^st, has been bought forward a week. So there are a fair few boats heading downstream. 

We’d arranged to meet Val and John at The Poachers, but decided to pull in at Monks Bridge instead in case the Poachers moorings were full.

We had a good afternoon chatting and catching up, before they left us to head home. They brought us our mail and some bits I’d ordered online, and some beautifully fresh leeks uprooted from John’s veg patch that morning.

We stayed here last night and will be moving onward tomorrow. We’ll be needing water soon and the nearest tap is just this side of New Marton Locks.

I mentioned last week that we were waiting for Mags’ ERCP appointment to come through, but to move things along I rang the hospital directly instead. I was surprised and pleased when they offered Mags an appointment for the 17^th! I thought we’d have to wait longer than that, the way things are.

So I arranged for a hire car for Monday 14^th, a taxi to get me there to pick it up, and passage down Frankton Locks for the Friday before. The plan is to go from Queens Head down on the Montgomery Canal.

Feeling rather smug with my logistics prowess I unearthed my driving licence (not used for a while) and you can imagine my reaction when I found it had expired in the middle of January! 

So Saturday morning was spent cancelling everything I’d sorted the day before!

There’s no chance of getting a new one in the time available, I can’t apply online without a current passport and that expired 25 years ago! So my paper application along with a new photo is winging it’s way to Swansea as you read this. When I know the new licence is coming I’ll do it all again.

Did I mention that I’d bought a new laptop before Christmas to replace my aging HP? It was cheap, a Huawei Matebook D15, even cheaper as I opted for the cut-down version with only a 256Gb SSHD but with a spare drive bay. The plan was to install a second drive, just a standard one though, for data. The stuff that Val and John bought included a 1Tb drive and SATA connecting cable. I knew it was an easy job, there are several UTube videos demonstrating just that. What I hadn’t realised was that they related to the 2020 model of the D15, not the 2021! This one doesn’t have the SATA connection on the mainboard! Why not???

I do have a spare hard drive enclosure so the large drive is now permanently plugged into a USB socket and is recognised as D drive. A bit slower to access than it would have been, but I’ve now got 1,256Gb of storage. It’s amazing to think that my first proper PC had just 2.1Gb!  

Chirk Aqueduct and railway viaduct from below this morning.

 Locks 2, miles 3¼