Sunday 17th July
We were naughty today and over stayed on the 24 hour moorings. Most of the boats there were having the same idea! It started chucking down about 8 am and this set the scene for the rest of the day, another one of heavy rain interspersed with lighter rain!
In our wisdom we decided to catch the bus in to Macclesfield as we had not been there before on any of our visits to this canal. The bus went at 10-08 am and we arrived in Macclesfield at about 10-35 am. Unfortunately there were very few shops which opened before 11 am on Sundays. W H Smith’s was shut so we found a garage to get a paper then we made a beeline for the Grosvenor Centre shopping mall, hoping to get out of the driving rain, but even that was closed when we first got there as well! When it did put it’s security grille up the shops were still shut, not that there were many of them any way! This was turning in to a bit of a farce.
Faced with the prospect of getting soaked to the skin wandering round the unopen shops, (it was sheeting down and I had somehow persuaded Ken he didn’t need to take an umbrella), or buying a very expensive cup of coffee we didn’t really want we decided to head to the Wetherspoons early and shop later.
Where was this Wetherspoons? Well, my computer expert husband had looked it up on the internet the night before and thought he knew where it was. To cut a long story short he didn’t. We walked, in the rain, for about 25 minutes and did indeed eventually find a pub but it was not a Wetherspoons and it didn’t open until 12 pm! We walked back in to town and lo and behold I spotted the Wetherspoons. It was literally 2 minutes round the corner from the bus station!
By this time it was nearly lunch time and we had to fortify ourselves with sausage, bacon and egg sandwiches and a pint of Abbott! Suitably refreshed we went shopping and caught the bus home. It was still raining and would continue to do so for many hours to come.
