Monty on the Monty

Well, wasn’t December 1st ushered in in style? We woke to a real winter wonderland, a heavy overnight frost coating everything in hoary white. In fact, it was so glorious that I had been out of bed for a whole five minutes before I even thought of food. I’m usually dreaming about it as I crawl out of unconsciousness…

I thought it was going to be another heavenly day as we pulled away, noting as we did so that we hadn’t actually seen another living soul from the time we’re moored up the previous evening to the moment we let go this morning. Sadly, the weather did deteriorate and for most of the day we had cloud, interspersed with the odd blue sunny patch and indeed the odd snow flurry. However, stoical me stayed at the tiller all day and I was rewarded with some very attractive evening sunset stuff in the distance. I have to say, the Llangollen is surprising me. It’s wider than I’d imagined for a start, and has all sorts of different characteristics depending on how far along you are. At times it reminds me of the South Oxford, at others the Leicester Arm and of course, the Shroppie influence is never far away. But through the primordial mosses and the meres, from Whixall through to Ellesmere, it really does have a personality all of its own. The film Deliverance kept coming to mind for some reason…

We saw four boats on the move, which is four more than yesterday. These included two intrepid Canaltimes and Braidbar No 51, Cedar. I really should keep a Braidbar spotters’ book as I’ve seen a fair few now, although I’ve still to clap eyes on my blogging muse Bruce of Sanity. One day….

So we’re now moored up just past Frankton junction, and we’ve settled down for the evening having taken Monty along the Monty. I don’t think he appreciated the link as he just kept cocking his leg everywhere, but we enjoyed the trundle down to the bottom of the locks and back again. In fact, we’re enjoying everything about this trip and in the winters of the far distant future, I can see cold cruising in Clwyd easily vying with motorhome marauding in Morocco. I mean, A only wants to do the latter because he fancies wearing a fez….maybe I could cut down a traffic cone….

P.S. I'll be posting all my pics retrospectively when I'm back on something resembling an internet connection. If I hang out the side hatch jiggling my dongle, I may well get frostbite on my particulars and we wouldn't want that, would we? I think losing parts of my anatomy is going a bit far diet-wise...