We only did 10 miles today as we had a very pleasant excursion round a village called Polesworth where legend has it Shakespeare went to school and another round a “Heritage Park” which is really some coal slag heaps which have had trees planted on them and a statue built on the top. The statue is called the gold leaf pillar but we were disappointed to find it is covered in gold paint. It also had some mountain bike trails which looked exiciting, I suspect the council built them to entertain teenagers but the only people we saw on then were about the same age as us. I must confess if we had bikes with us I might have had a go, it looked great fun.
The day started well as we were greeted at the first of a line of locks by some Canal Trust Volunteers, these wonderful people help boaters through the locks and do general maintenance on the canals and as far as I know they just get a nice blue tee shirt and a day out in the fresh air in return. Our two were on a five mile litter picking walk but at the same time helped us operate the six locks we tackled this morning. These volunteers mostly seem to be retired people who turn out on one or two days a week, one of the chaps today mentioned he had never been on a canal holiday, it just seemed like something to get him out of the house every Thursday. I don’t know if he would turn out if it was raining.
Probably because the canals have had very few boats going through over the last four months there is lots of weed, bits of wood and a wide selection of plastic bags floating in it. This means that each evening I have to open the weed hatch and untangle lots of rubbish from round the propeller, the water is very cold, not a great task.
Tomorrow we hope to reach a point in the canal which is 2 miles from the National Memorial Arboretum so will then walk over to pay our respects.