We spent another day today dodging rain and coming down through the last nine locks on the Llangollen canal. We are now back on the main branch of the Shropshire Union canal, just north of Nantwich, where we were eight days ago. However, we are back in the land of decent mobile Internet, so I can upload more of the photos from Llangollen. First some of the highlights of the town itself, then more from the Eisteddfod. Welsh is normally…
We put in another long day of traveling today. We have already visited most of the towns on the Llangollen canal on the way up, so we don’t need to do the tourist stuff on the way down. We had a couple of unscheduled stops, though. We had just come down the Grindley Brook flight of locks and I was coming out of a bridge. There was rental boat was coming the other way, right in the middle of the…
This post covers the last two days, as I was busy last night. Actually, we’re going to start two evenings ago, to reveal the most sinister news about Llangollen. Take a close look at this sign. At first glance it looks perfectly normal: this way to the dragons, steam train, canal boats, toilet, and parking. It’s the sort of thing you might find in any dragon-infested tourist trap. Look again. See that rectangle where something has been covered up? There…
It turns out that an Eisteddfod (pronounced Eye-Steth-Vod, plural Eisteddfodau pronounced Eye-Steth-Vod-Ah-Fuck-Welsh-Is-Hard-To-Pronounce) is not a feral crumpet after all. It’s a singing and music competition and festival. There is a Welsh National Eisteddfod, which features Welsh music and is held in different places, and the International Eisteddfod, which has performers from all over the world, and is held in Llangollen every year in the second week of July, which happens to be now. More on that later. We arrived in…
So we went to Chirk first. To get there there was an aqueduct, closely followed by a tunnel, both of then single track, but we were able to get through without delays, unlike the two locks this morning where we were delayed by a party that seemed to think that narrowboats should hunt in packs of three. Chirk aqueduct would probably be famous if it were not so close to an even better one at Pontcysyllte, and the fact that…
Ellsmere was once a major center of canal operations, even today it is a popular stop for canal users mostly because of the Tesco right next to a branch of the canal, where you can take your shopping cart all the way to the boat. A mere is a lake, and there are several of them in the neighborhood…. including one that makes an attractive training ground for battle swans. This is a junior battle swan, disguised as an iceberg….
The Welsh Marches: border country, the edge of civilization and the start of Wales. From where we are moored tonight you could fire a longbow across the border, which probably explains why there is no frigging mobile service for the second night in a row. The locals are too busy baking soda bread and molesting sheep to care about decent 4G service. It’s not that I hate the Welsh, I’m just bitter. They used to have a town named after…
It’s a thrill-a-minute life on the cut, if by thrill-a-minute you mean that something out of the ordinary happens every few days. This morning’s excitement was a blocked lock gate, the second in a flight of fifteen. By the time we got to the top of the flight, the Canal and River Trust had been summoned, and their man in a van set to work with a giant extendible rake, closely monitored by the skippers of the three or four…
Ah, the jokes of my youth… Q: What’s black and white and red all over? A: A newspaper Tell that to kids today and they just don’t understand. Happily, Q: What’s black and white and red all over? A: A nun in a blender still works. Printed newspapers are almost gone, and those that remain are a shadow of their former selves. While this has saved a lot of trees, there were so many useful things you could do with…