Underdressed in Chester

Cruising into Chester at twilight

Two years ago, following our last Narrowboat trip, we spent a week in the city of Chester, and really enjoyed it. While exploring the city we discovered that the canal runs right along the old city walls, so when planning this trip I worked Chester into it. After all, last time I was only able to visit about ten of the 50 pubs within the walled city.

Mooring by the city walls

This time, we cruised into the city and found a mooring spot right beside the city walls. A short walk along the canal and we went through the gate into the city. As soon as we found the old section of the city, we were surrounded by crowds of people all dressed up. Men in suits and women in evening gowns and high heels. Although it was pouring rain, no one was wearing raincoats, and only a few had umbrellas. It was cool, but most of the girls were dressed in just fancy dresses. This was not the Chester we recalled from two years ago. Looking for a place to eat was a challenge, as most places were packed and had long lines waiting.

Found a pub . . .

Finally finding a pub with a table for six, we asked what was going on. It was race weekend, and the big last horse race of the year at Chester Downs was tomorrow and everyone was celebrating.

Here we were all dressed for narrowboating in raingear (Yup, raining again today), so we really did not fit in with the crowds of race revelers in Chester this evening.

Filling The Day

We had almost two full days in Anderton before we pick up the boat and begin our actual boat trip, This gives us time to find everything and get supplies for on the boat as well as giving us some room incase of delays etc. As a result, we had a day here with nothing planned to do.

The day began with an “English Breakfast”, and anyone familiar with these knows that it is an overwhelming meal which results in having no room for food all day. It did however give us time to plan how to fill and unplanned day. Fortunately, the cheerful waitress at the B & B had a couple of useful suggestions, including a castle, and Regis simply cannot pass up a castle visit.

 

Going UP!

Going in.

Our day started with a visit to the Anderton Boat Lift. This is what happens when you challenge Industrial Revolution engineers with a problem. The Canal which was used to transport pottery and goods around the Midlands, was 50 feet above the River Weaver which connected to the ocean. Both were busy transportation routes, but goods transferring between the two had to be unloaded, carted up the hill and reloaded (And vice-versa of course). The solution to this problem was to build a “lift” to take the boats from the one to the other. Simplifying it a bit, the boats are floated into a tub of water, which is then lifted or lowered by hydraulics to the other level. Two of these tubs operate side-by-side, thus creating a balance and actually used very little energy. Originally operated by water hydraulics, this proved to be very corrosive due to the salt and chemicals in the water due to industry in the area. The system was converted to counter-balanced weights powered by electric motors, but this finally jammed and shut the lift down. It sat rusting for years, but has recently been restored and is now operated by oil hydraulics. We watched a couple of boats being moved up and down, and it is a fascinating process which we hope to fit into our schedule at the end of the trip.

What a View

Next we took Regis out to her castle. This was an amazing visit. The Beeston Castle sits on a beautiful 40 acre hill with a view over 60 miles of English countryside. You can imagine how this 4000 year old castle could control the entire area. Unfortunately it was not invincible, and lost to a siege and was mostly demolished, so is mostly a ruin now.

Pretty well exhausted from a day with nothing to do, we required a visit to a nice English pub for a good beer and some pub food to recover from the day. 

Beer with the Brats

OK, now right off the bat, they are not really brats, it just made a cooler title.

Beer & Pizza at Beer Revolution

When we knew we were coming to Calgary, we discovered that we knew a fair number of people in this city. Alisha's friend Josh lives there now, my brother's son Andrew and his girlfriend has just moved there for Law School, My friend Jim's daughter and her boyfriend are both teachers in Calgary and Ryan's friend Andrew now lives there. Of course that does not include Natalie & Frank who's wedding we were coming to celebrate, or my friend Gordon (Who I lived with in China) & his family. We were staying with Gordon and using one of his vehicles, and we were attending two official wedding functions with Natalie & Frank, so we had these folk pretty well covered, but we sort of wanted to attempt to see the others somehow during our limited time in Calgary.

The problem was that we were only spending five days in Calgary, and two of those days were booked with wedding functions planned, and I knew that Gordon would want to show me some of his home town, so there wasn't that much time to visit the other people.

Josh doing a "Tasting"

We finally figured that we had a little time on Sunday that we could try to fit some “non-wedding” visits in. That didn't give us much time, and it was hard to decide who to visit and who to leave out. Recalling a very pleasant visit to Craft restaurant & beer pub with Natalie & Frank during our last visit to Calgary we decided to find a pleasant purveyor of brew & food and tell all our friends that we would be there at a particular time on Sunday and see who showed up. We enlisted Josh's help as I consider him a bit of an expert on anything beer related and asked him to scout out the Calgary beer scene to find us a good location for this event. He had picked a wonderful spot in Vancouver during another trip so we trusted his advice completely, and he quickly came back with a couple of choices. We looked into his ideas, and chose a place called Beer Revolution, which not only seemed to have a wonderful selection of beer but also provide a good food menu. The internet reviews were good, and the location was nice and central, so we decided.

Really good Pizza

We put no pressure on anyone, (but we did have a suitcase full of 'stuff' from home for Andrew, so we figured he might show up at least to get his suitcase), but we knew we'd have a good lunch anyway. As it worked out, we had three of the young folk show up, and Gordon came along as a guide to make sure the GPS got us to Beer Revolution without problem, so we had a wonderful time. Good conversation, catching up on what everyone was doing, their plans, our travels, and discussing Calgary and all it has to offer.

Oh, the beer was excellent and they serve absolutely amazing pizza!