Call Of The Clan

After plenty of planning, it was time for a journey back to Emma’s roots across the border and a family wedding in Scotland was a bonus

We had been planning to visit Stoke on Trent for months. As continuous cruisers, who travel all the time, we can be quite relaxed about the direction of our journey. We generally move for water, supplies and post offices. However, we had a family wedding to attend in Edinburgh and this involved a lot of planning. We needed to be away from the boat for a long weekend and wanted to book our boat into a marina. You can leave your boat moored up on the canal, but because we travel all the time we don’t always know people in the area who could keep an eye on our boat. We also have five dogs that needed to be transported to kennels, so we also needed to hire a car. This weekend away involved a lot of planning over months, once we had decided on our location.

Stoke on Trent seemed a great location as it had all the facilities we needed. We booked into Festival Park Marina, booked the kennels nearby and arranged car hire.

We arrived in Stoke on Trent after completing the Stoke flight of locks and moored in Etruria, just beyond the Summit Lock. The Stoke flight has some quite deep locks and fierce water flow, so take care. We had just under two weeks to wait until we were due to go into the marina. As continuous cruisers, we need to move every 14 days, in order to comply with our CRT license. We were near a water point and services located on the junction of the Caldon Canal and the Trent and Mersey Canal and we were within walking distance of shops. I even managed to visit Waterworld, which was a great experience.