Heading south – again!

It’s been an odd few months, but we’re finally heading towards Wigan (again) in the hope that the Wigan Locks will reopen in a week or so. Apparently, they’re just about to pour the concrete!

We’ve had our second anniversary of moving onto the boat and we’re feeling more settled – if that’s a way to phrase it when you’re constantly travelling!
Whilst it has been a rather gloomy and wet period, we’ve been cheering ourselves up with plans for this year and, we think we’ve hit the right balance of time cruising on the narrowboat, planned adventures in the motorhome and holidays on a cruise ship (or two).

With such a cold wet winter, from November to January, we’ve been looking back at our fuel costs on the boat. For travelling and for charging batteries we’ve used about 200 litres of diesel, for cooking it’s been 1 x 13KG propane gas cylinder and for heating, 30 X 25KG bags of smokeless coal (yes, that is 0.75 metric tons!!). Total cost of around £800, and of course, we’ve been scavenging wood from along the towpath too (it’s addictive and very satisfying).

One of the vloggers that we follow on YouTube, who have a brand-new Hybrid narrowboat that is only powered by diesel (sounds backwards that, but there’s no sunshine for the solar panels in the winter) recently shared that they’ve spent about £750 on fuel for the same period. I’m surprised that their costs and ours are so similar, when their boat is probably worth about 5 x ours and is supposed to be much greener.

We’ve had a slightly mixed time on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. The scenery has been dramatic, from industrial towns to stunning valleys of rivers and limestone gorges. But we’ve also had a few rough patches, we’ve been assaulted, the car was vandalised, and we’ve had a couple of incidents with young people being rather “playful”. It’s been a very eventful time but we’re ready to head back to more familiar territory for a while.

To blow away the cobwebs, we caught a train to the seaside and walked along St Anne’s Beach to Blackpool. The dog loved the open space, I enjoyed a bit of shell hunting and we all found it very cold and bracing. St Annes is a great traditional, seaside town. It was built in the late 1870s for the cotton mill workers of Lancashire to enjoy a never-ending beach with fish & chips and ice-cream on every street corner. Its romantic Victorian architecture reminds me of the resort in Jane Austen’s Sanditon, but that was most likely based on the Georgian town of Worthing in Sussex (so, that’s the wrong period and wrong end of the country!).

As we head south towards Wigan we made a lunch stop at the infamous Fredericks Ice Cream Parlour. Starting in 1892, four generations of this family have been producing 120 flavours of real Italian ice cream and of course, we had to sample their wares (2 flavours each not 120!!!)

Right now, we’re on the move again and it’s a joy to feel a little sun on our faces. It’s all very wet underfoot, but that also means that there’s plenty of water for cruising. The swans are beginning to get territorial again, particularly when they spot the dog. We’ve seen kingfishers and snowdrops, catkins and pussy-willows. It feels like Spring is just around the corner and we’re hoping that there’s some warm, sun-shiny days ahead.