It’s getting cooooler!!!! Waking up to condensation inside the cabin now so this means Jack Frost is on his way. Today was spent doing a lot of cruising as we needed to make Coventry by nightfall.
Coventry is and was always a very industrial town and during the industrial revolution is was pretty much the hub of activity. They made everything from the very British Rover car (no longer in existence) to munitions. Early on the factories were very missed in with residential which made sense as in those early days people did not have public transport to get to work. Over time they moved the residential out towards the edge of town.
Here is a little history on what happened to Coventry during the war
It has been claimed in a number of books that the wartime prime minister knew that the city was to be targeted by the German Luftwaffe, but chose to do nothing because it would have alerted Adolf Hitler to the fact the Allies had recently cracked the Nazis’ top-secret Enigma codes.
Coventry and its people were sacrificed, the theory goes, “for the greater good” – that is, that the benefits of playing the long game outweighed the short-term costs of leaving the West Midlands city to a terrible fate.
Guess that little tit-bit wouldn’t make you feel that good. Today Coventry is a very dirty deprived looking city with lots of immigrants and lack of work. You can see where they have tried to rehabilitate areas but for some reason they have just not taken off – not like other cities in England.
So we chugged along in beautiful weather up to Hawkesbury Junction where we stopped in at a great pub. As it was Saturday and the weather was conducive to sitting outside the place was really buzzing. After having a break and chatting with some locals we then headed back out to the cut to make our final five miles to Coventry.
The canal was pretty grubby with lots of graffiti and rubbish in the canal. We picked up some indistinguishable item of apparel plus a few urban jellyfish (plastic bag).
The basin in Coventry was well protected and relatively clean with a good reference to the history of the canals. They had a beaut statue of James Brinkley the squiggly canal engineer.
We spent the evening going over final hand over instructions of Ange De L’eau. It is a big responsibility to look after someone else’s boat. It is quite different to looking after a hire boat like no Lucy. With Ange De L’eau we have gone considerably up market from our nb Lucy days!!!
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