Halfway up Heartbreak Hill. It sounds like a line from a Country & Western song, doesn’t it?

Here I am still
Half way up Heartbreak Hill
And when I reach the top
That’t where I’m gonna stop

The rest would be the usual sordid tale of marital infidelity, alcoholism, and suicidal depression. All things considered it’s amazing that C&W singers have any energy left over to write music.

Heartbreak Hill is the name given in the canal community to the series of twenty six locks in seven miles between Wheelock and Kidsgrove. We are in the process of slogging up them. Of course, we had several other locks to warm up first. From where we moored overnight there was one final lock down (all the locks from LLangollen to here have been going down) to Middlewich Junction. That’s the northernmost point on our trip, 53.18778 degrees north, further north than Saskatoon.

Then we had five locks going up before we even started on Heartbreak Hill. Paula insisted I take a picture at this one.

I hope all the nine year olds reading this blog enjoy that.

We also went past a salt factory.

This was actually one of the more scenic bits of the factory. I just hope they are producing industrial salt and not table salt.

After that eyesore, how about some nice canal boat art?

This boat had the lyrics and music to John Lennon’s Imagine painted on the outside.
I think this is my favorite boat name so far.

We had a couple of heavy rainstorms this morning, which delayed our start, but the rest of the day was actually not bad. The was some sunshine, and I was down to two layers of clothing for a while. We’re still passing of flooded fields, though.

There are three ways you can moor the boat for the night. If there are mooring rings on the towpath, you just tie up to those. If there is a metal crash barrier style canal bank, we have special hooks we can use to attach the mooring lines to that. Otherwise we have metal spikes to hammer into the bank. The problem is that with all the rain, the banks are so soft that they don’t stay in place. If another boat goes past faster than one mile an hour, the backwash they produce will pull the mooring spikes out of the mud and leave your boat floating free. Tonight we are moored to pins, but as an extra safety measure I have taken a line from the middle of the boat across the towpath and tied it to a tree. Note the creative use of yellow tape to try to stop people tripping over it.

We have now gone one step further and put plastic mats over the line to stop people tripping. I suspect this is just American paranoia. In the UK if you trip over a rope you probably don’t get to sue for astronomical sums. Still, early morning joggers suffer enough without an extra pratfall.