Leeds Here We Come

It seems to have been a long time coming but eventually it is time for our first holiday of the 2012 cruising season, a trip to Leeds.

Tomorrow sees me gathering the necessary kit together and prepping the boat ready for the off. The other half has to work so I will pick him up later in the afternoon before heading back to the boat and setting off to Torksey for the evening.

Saturday is going to be the longest day of the trip. We will leave Torksey at about midday taking a relaxed jaunt to Gainsborough before letting Cal stretch her legs for an hour or so on the way down to Trent Falls. Here we will drop the anchor and await the incoming tide which will then takes us swiftly on our journey up the tidal Ouse towards Ocean Lock and onto the Aire and Calder via Goole by around 7.00pm, if all goes to plan of course. The day hasn’t ended here however as we then plan to push on the extra six miles or so to Pollington so that we can have a decent curry in the fantastic Indian restaurant in the village.

The rest of the holiday is fairly flexible with a likely stop at Woodlesford on Sunday night before a short hop into Leeds by midday on Easter Monday. The intention is to then have a couple of nights in Clarence Dock if visitor moorings are available, before heading back for the Trent via Keadby on the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation. We will have to find diesel on the way back to the Trent so the most likely stop will be Thorne to refuel and spend an evening in the club house before reaching the now derelict and depressing village of Keadby for our last night on the canal system. The only redeeming feature of Keadby at the moment is the cracking fish and chip shop, but as we have an early morning start on Saturday to catch our tide we don’t have much choice but to spend our final night here. Beers on board me thinks for our final night here.

So it will be a little quiet on the blog for the next week or so unless we can find some decent wifi signal, but, I promise to take lots of great pictures of our trip so that you can see the places we have been and the things that we have seen along the way. It is the first time we will have travelled along the whole length of the Aire and Calder, previous visits have seen us traverse the short section between Knottingley and Pollington on the return journey from York, and so we are looking forward to exploring many new places along this fascinating waterway.