North by North-West

Our brief trip home was highly successful in its primary purpose – getting my best beloved's dental emergency unemergencified. Yesterday we drove back north to Erin Mae, wondering from time to time what on earth had induced us to do so on a Friday afternoon, when the world and her husband are going places. But we have plans! Our big question is whether the weather will allow us to fulfil them. Everybody's talking about a hurricane for Monday – and boaters, generally speaking, don't like the wind. But if you look at the Met Office website, the forecast for our neck of the woods seems at most a little breezy and for the most part quite balmy.

So (intrepid adventurers that we are) out we set, following the Trent and Mersey on its North-West passage to Stone. And very nice it was, too, with the autumn colours around on a sunny afternoon.

It was a bit of a long haul (over 4½ hours) and we'd started late, so we were slightly concerned about finding a mooring spot. A boater who helped us up the first lock in Stone indicated that there was a place above the second lock, just behind his boat, where we could squeeze in and no one would mind us staying over the weekend. The first part of his assurance was correct. We'll report back some other time on the the second part was as accurate!