According to gps: trip odo 12.5 moving time 1h41m odo 12.53 max speed 18.9 moving avg 7.4
A nice October Sunday... so a friend and I continued our tours of the Manchester canal network, after having done the Huddersfield Narrow and Ashton canals recently! The plan was to start up in Rochdale (in a big B&Q carpark) and cycle down the Rochdale canal to Manchester city centre, catching a train back to Shaw or Rochdale and back to the car.
So, we went up to Rochdale, parked in B&Q's carpark, cycled down the Rochdale canal... you get the idea. It all went surprisingly to plan, really. However, there were a couple of diversions we had to make, one was because the towpath stopped at one point (where it went under the motorway through an old road tunnel) and the floating towpath wasn't in place. More info here. A half a mile diversion on the main road later and we rejoined the canal.
It's worth saying that the towpath was, in general, a little worse off than the Ashton canal and other canal towpaths I've cycled down recently. Still, most of it was navigable. It was noticeable near some locks (and between locks in places) that the path was very roughly cobbled; good fun for 20 seconds or so, not so kind to the arms and legs for longer! Further up the canal there were large ruts to cycle down which were equally tricky to navigate at times; still, it wasn't too bad and the variety of surfaces kept it interesting.
There's a good page about the restoration of the Rochdale canal here, including points of interest like the hydraulic lift bridges and diversions around/through/under motorways.
We made it back to the junction with the Ashton Canal, just near Piccadilly station, and from there we cycled to Victoria station through town again, catching a train back to Rochdale via the Oldham loop - the train journey in itself was interesting, and I followed the route as we travelled it on the OS map. From the station it was a short journey back to the car, along the towpath in Rochdale... all in all, another nice day and ride (and a reasonable distance covered too, particularly for towpath surfaces!)