On an overcast but dry morning Dave fitted the new starter battery. The old one is now serving as temporary ballast on the starboard side! At least we can now start the engine even if we can’t tell how full the batteries are! By 10 we were in Wast Hills tunnel – a swift transit but rather wet, as usual. At King’s Norton Junction was the sad sight of the canal house, which has been burnt out. There is no road access, so the fire engines had trouble getting to it (as reported in Canal Boat in the new issue).
Now it was the fast stretch into Birmingham – not particularly interesting when you have done it many times, but hey. The area between one of the walls and the works buildings behind it has been planted up with Forsythia and Chaenomeles and looked stunning.
The little café in a portacabin on the offside has been done up and re-opened, with the mooring cleared, but we didn’t stop. We pulled in at the Selly Oak moorings for a trip to Sainsbury’s but it was closed!! It has moved to the new premises where the Lapal canal should be running, and there has been a lot of planning-related argument as they have (allegedly I expect I must say) attempted to get out of making space for the restoration. We got directions to the new store from the lovely girl in Pets At Home and found an enormous megastore in a new retail park, which includes a Go Outdoors and M&S food among other shops which I forget, shopping not being a favourite activity of mine. We wondered if this (below) was destined to become the line of the Lapal canal, but couldn’t see quite how it would join the main line. The signal on my phone has been dodgy to say the least on this trip, and I haven’t had the laptop battery life to research the current position.
It looks like a towpath running along what could be a canal under restoration. It ends at the road bridge in the distance and is on the very edge of the Sainsbury site. By now Meg had realised where we were headed. We are pretty sure she remembered there was a park up ahead!
The moorings on the windy stretch between the Mailbox and Gas street were deserted, and there was just one at Brindley Place – a widebeam! What??
It is a sales office for ‘Port Loop’ – we guess that is the development on the land we saw being cleared at the Icknield Port loop last year. We had the pick of the moorings on the Main Line, and as soon as we had moored got going to the Museum and Art Gallery to see the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. The Royal Collection has a large number of his drawings, and to mark his 500th anniversary various locations around the country are displaying – free – twelve of them. They are small of course, not much bigger than A4, but protected by a plain sheet of glass so you could get up close and really have a good look. It wasn’t busy, everyone could have a good look and people were talking to each other about them.
After a burger apiece at the Handmade Burger Co – mine was a Veg-Mex with pickled jalapenos, my that brought tears to my eyes! – we had an evening on the boat.
8½ miles, Wast Hills tunnel, and Leonardo drawings that are rarely seen, at least by the hoi polloi.
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