Manchester

Here I am Rune

Distance 22.8 miles

Total 2979 Locks  133 Tunnels

Running total mileage 4094.1 miles 

For those following the distances and locks we have travelled, the above figures will look decidedly suspect but the reality is that the figures represent what we have done over the past 6 days rather than the usual daily rate. This has been caused by something of a meltdown on my computer which disabled the hard drive and has resulted in my having to put it in for repair in which the hard drvie has been changed. The good news is that the problem seems to have been fixed and the computer works a whole lot faster than it did before now that it has a solid state drive rather than the old hard disk drive. The downside is that the memory has been reduced by three quarters from 1 Terabyte down to 250 Gigabytes but I think that will suffice. Worse news is that I've also lost Office which means that all of the files that I have in Word and Excel are now inaccessible. That is something that I'm going to have to find a solution to.

As far as the canal boating goes, we have made it to the centre of Manchester at Castlefields Basin which seem to be a reasonable mooring. I will update this page of the blog at a later date with the overnight stops that we have made between Slattocks and here. The trip down the final Rochdale 9 locks was a bit sordid in places as some rather dubious characters seem to gather in the darker areas of the canalside, of which there are quite a few on that section. In fairness we didn't get accosted or anything but it wasn't the sort of places that you'd want to linger in.

Heading into one of the darker areas of the Rochdale Canal in Manchester