It is truly amazing how we have gone from 38c and glaring sun to a high of 15c with rain and dull and overcast. We awoke to a fair amount of rain having fallen over the night and it was still mizzling by the time we pulled up anchor at 10.00am.
We continued down the Stratford Canal heading towards Kingswood Junction.
On our way we did encounter quite a few hire boaters who in this case very kindly allowed us to go through the lift bridge prior to them as they said they had more feet on the ground.
We finally broke away from the outer suburbs of Birmingham which is in the county of West Midlands and into Warwickshire which is Shakespeare territory.
It is a particularly pretty canal. The canal, which was built between 1793 and 1816, runs for 25.5 miles (41.0 km) in total, and consists of two sections. The dividing line is at Kingswood Junction, which gives access to the Grand Union Canal. This is where we will turn off tomorrow onto the Grand Union Canal.
If you were continuing onto the Stratford Canal, you would end up at Stratford-on-Avon in the basin out the front of the Shakespeare Theatre.
Following acquisition by a railway company in 1856, it gradually declined, the southern section being un-navigable by 1945, and the northern section little better.
After a few hours cruising we stopped for lunch. We made the decision to continue on down the Lapworth Flight from Lock 2 to Lock 14 as the weather forecast for tomorrow is not the best.
Lock areas can be slippery in the wet and we felt that by leaving only six locks for tomorrow, less chance some one will end up going for an impromptu swim.
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