Things Don't Always go to Plan

Ruth and I have spent years travelling around the world.  One thing we’ve learnt is that things don’t always go to plan.  From public transport strikes, to bad weather, to earthquakes (there’s room for another blog on that one!), we’ve experienced scenarios that threw us in to moments of panic, followed by a swift change of travel plans (normally involving a good hostel and a large cup of coffee).  Flexibility is key when travelling – a warning to those who pre-book every night of their trip on Hostelworld before they’ve even left their home country!  When things do go wrong, and you re-arrange your travels around such unforeseen circumstances, it’s not unusual for the resulting experiences to turn out better than your original plans.  They also provide the fuel for the best pub stories when you get back! 

So back to Wandering Duck.  You may imagine that on the canal, ambling along at 3 miles an hour, not a lot can go wrong.  The problem is that the canals have changed little since being built 200 years ago. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic that we can still see and use these old lock gates to get our boat up and down hill, but it’s a bit of a bugger when you get a tweet to say that the lock flight is closed for leak repairs!

This in itself is odd – the fact that the Canal & River Trust is using social media technology to tell me that engineering from 1804 has failed!  But the world that Wandering Duck lives in IS a very strange one.  We say hello to everyone we meet on the canal like a scene out of Heartbeat – it’s like stepping back in time. Yet at the same time we’re listening to Maroon 5 on the ipod.

So we need to re-plan.  Cue big cup of coffee.  We have a private charter booked for this weekend and we can’t go down the locks. Well our guests want to get involved with opening and closing the locks. So here’s the deal; Instead of heading North to Marple Locks, we head South.  There’s another set of locks about 12 hours away.  If we do a few hours cruising before picking them up, we can take them on a lovely trip through these locks.  We check for water, public transport links. We hear from Ruth’s mum (our office is in their front room) that the womens rowing team have won 2012’s first Gold Medal – good work!  Back to the plan; we check for rubbish disposal, and turnaround point (we’re 69ft long and can only turn at designated spots sometimes hours from one another).  Even for diesel we have to re-arrange for the working coalboat to fill us up mid-way through the trip.  These are the logistics we spent months organising prior to starting our business.  We’ve just re-arranged it all in about 4 hours!!  We’re so wrapped up in it that we miss Bradley Wiggins get Gold in the Time Trial.  It’s never the same watching the replays instead of the real thing.  Final part of the jigsaw; there’s a fantastic pub in a little village called Sutton with good moorings right outside – the cherry on top!

Problem: We’ve just finished a trip in completely the wrong place, and we started so far away from our base, heading South, that it’s going to take us 3 days to get back to the Peak District.

Solution: (cue more coffee). We need to run a trip back to Bugsworth Basin.  It’s a one-off 4 night trip.  It’s a great route back along the Macclesfield canal, and did we say there’s great pub on the way?  Then there’s Lyme Park once we get back on to our normal patch.

We’re really excited by the prospect of a change of scenery and an extended trip.  It’s very last minute, and who knows, maybe it’s too late to get a group together.  But it doesn’t matter.  The point is, when things are out of your control, there’s no point stressing.  You can’t change it. So you roll with it, have fun with it. Dare I say it, fuck about and enjoy it. Life’s too short to waste a good pub story.