The river Trent

Despite all the rain and the "they'll never let you on the Trent" doom stories we cruised past the warning lights ( none were on ) of Shardlow, an olde-Worldy type place with oodles of history and charm, but due to the lousy weather we only managed to stop briefly for water, although we would have liked to "explore".

Today the weather looks hopeful so we aim to get as close to Sawley lock as possible.

We reached Sawley Storm lock by mid morning Lynne decided to pop into the adjacent Marina for a Trent river guide, except it was shut for a "team meeting" until 11 am, thus we moored for a while and admired the "Gin Palaces" as they stuffily cruised by peering at us down upturned noses, last seen on the Thames  a couple of years back. There are two distinct classes on a river,very upper and very lower whereas the class gap narrows ( no pun intended ) and reverses on canals, where there are narrowboats and tuppaware craft, the latter being far-removed from gin palaces.

Everything on a river is a far grander scale than a canal. We went from Sawley onto the Trent then onto the Cranfleet cut, through the lock ( manned by 2 CRT volunteers) and back onto a very wide stretch of the Trent to the Nottingham Beeston canal, where Beeston lock set us a conundrum we found difficult to solve - how the hell do we get through it? Why have 2 volunteers on a "normal" lock and none on a complicated one? The "village idiot" was sent to solve the issue initially, eventually to be joined by my mentor,who was equally befuddled. Considerably later in pouring rain the puzzle was solved and we managed to get through, after which we emptied the oblutions at a CRT oblutions centre and then moved onto a nearby mooring marked "permit holders only" for the night. Being extremely wet and getting dark we guessed getting a permit would pose problems, so opted to take a risk for one night.