No, I haven’t gone native, that’s what the sign just inside the door says. The Yorkshire Waterways Museum has an interesting collection of local boats ranging from a reproduction coracle… … to a Humber keel, descendent of the Viking longship… … to the Wheldale, the last of the tom pudding tugs. The Wheldale was built in 1959 which means there are things younger than I am being preserved in this museum. Damn! There is a story that repeats for many…
The day dawned bright and sunny, so we got off to an early start up the New Junction canal. From the map I thought it was going to be a fast run as it is wide and straight and there is only one lock, but there were lift bridges every few hundred yards, so I got to practice my docking skills letting Paula off to work the bridges. Happily the were all electric, so there was no grunting to be…
So far the northerners we have met live up to the stereotype. They speak a strange dialect in which the definite article is reduced to a clicking sound, and are friendly, welcoming, and uncontrollably chatty. Graham, the lock keeper who shepherded us through our first lock and swing bridge, kept coming back to our boat to tell use about World War II reenactment and stuff he had bought on eBay. I suspect it is all a front. It was less…
For the next three months Paula and I will be exploring the canals of England in the narrowboat Wharram Percy. We are starting out in Yorkshire, and will be crossing the Pennine Hills to Lancashire on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, and then probably back by the Rochdale Canal. These canals were built to connect the textile mills of the Pennines with the seaport of Liverpool. I’ll be posting about our travels, probably with rants about the Industrial Revolution, the…
Airplane! Spend 10+ hours on a Norwegian Airline “Dreamliner”. Norway hasn’t produced too many notables, so Norwegian has done some cultural appropriation from other Scandinavian nations. We taxied past Danish Victor Borge on the tail of one plane. We had bulkhead seats in Economy. Plenty of leg room but narrow seats, not much shoulder room and a stranger on one side. I took my first ever Ambien sleeping pill, hoping to get knocked out. No. Such. Luck. Pretty groggy yesterday…