A trip along the canal

Hi folks and after Friday's popular post, here's something different.
As you may of gathered from reading this blog, our area is something of a transportation hub for much of England and an older form of it is the Canal network, originally built to transport goods across the country.
In our instance it was to transport Coal and Pottery from North Staffordshire across to Runcorn ready to make it's way to the Port of Liverpool for export.

 The above property was the (former) Lock-keepers cottage along our part of this important canal in the North-west Midlands and maintains much of its period look with the road it's on not being tarmac'd.

 Here's Leo, one of a goodly number of narrow boats to come along here this morning making its way toward Middlewich and then on Runcorn via Northwich.

The canal around here is at different levels thanks to local geography and so toward the far right there is a lock that acts a bit like a stairway allowing the narrow boat to climb to the right level and the point I took this this picture have just passed through one set of locks with only a short distance to go before meeting the next set.
There was actually a very famous set of steel locks just to the right built because this area suffers badly from salt related subsidence in 1958 and removed as they didn't work too well in the mid 1980's.

All pictures originationed on ye olde film and if think the colour saturation and contrast is great, that's no trick of photoshop, just gen-u-wine Lomography 100 colour print film properly exposed and scanned by Photo Hippo Ltd in Lancashire straight from the negatives.

Narrow Boats

Well well well! After last weeks scary moment I'm feeling much better and have been busy doing Something Else over the weekend. As well I have my broadband back.
Jennifer seemed to like the boat picture I took and obviously loves the Trent & Mersey canal part of which goes through here to Runcorn via Northwich. Also if I'm not mistaken wasn't there a tv program called Rosie and Jim set on a narrowboat shown over here???
Anyway the upshot of this is I've decide to post a couple of pictures I took a while back but not previously published on this blog or any other site so it's a kind of exclusive for you!
The first is of a Narrowboat decorated for a Festival that passed this way with flowers and plants the second taken during the summer when we have a lot of boat people pass by and use our stores.

Every cloud has a silver lining edition

Hey people did you know this blog has had over 5,019 page views since it's conception and is read people people on two continents? Quite something, eh?
Well yesterday was quite something in a bad kind of a way cos I was halfway on the commute to work when I senses an 'aura' the warning sign of  migraine which are a lot worse than just a bad headache and had to make my way back home.
Now that of itself doesn't bother me but for two things I was feeling dizzy, the local taxis were all tied up with school runs so I couldn't get one home and critically I'd left my cellphone at home on charge!
Not good as I had to walk though quiet country roads home.
Anyway I got home taking my time and ensuring I kept to where there were houses that if needed assistance I could get some from and the weather was pretty good  - so good -  that decided to take a picture by the Trent and Mersey canal; something that Jennifer had written and taken some pictures of elsewhere.

Alice Rose

Here's Alice Rose in red and yellow livery. Notice the floral decor.

Caught just after the passengers had disembarked to stock up on food and other provisions.