Wednesday 21st September
We haven’t come far today, just 4 miles from the Lion Quays to Chirk and are moored outside the marina. We moored here last year and amused ourselves watching the comings and goings of the hire boats trying to get in and out of the marina. There have been a lot of boats about today, about 8o% of them have been hire boats. Welsh Lady, Vikings Aground, sorry I mean Viking Afloat, Black Prince, Alvechurch, Canal Time, Bettisfield Boats and several more. We have been scraped along the side as two tried to pass us in opposite directions at the same time!
There was a huge queue at the far end of the Chirk Tunnel by the time we got through it. The boats we were following were quite a long way through before we entered, then there were 2 more boats behind us so by the time we had all crawled through there were about 6 or 7 boats queuing. After we had gone, apparently, a Preston Brook hire boat went past the whole queue and went into the tunnel first! I bet the others were chuffed about that.
We got here before the weather went tits up and it started blowing a gale and raining! B and B arrived about an hour after us and we all walked in to Chirk. This took about half an hour, we had to walk back to the tunnel and go up to the road. Chirk calls itself a town but there’s not much there really. We did spend some time drooling in the window of the bakery but bravely resisted the temptation. We obviously went to the pub and the first one we tried was a bit of a disaster. The real ales were all off so I said I’d have Guinness but that had run out too so I had to have lager (not my favourite). We transferred to The Hand Hotel next which was a lot better.
On the way back we got some conkers (well, Barbara gave us some of hers) to put in the bedroom to keep the spiders out (it does work) as ours were about 2 years old and had stopped working!
Tomorrow we are going up to Llangollen.
