Shakespeare & Barges

We ended up going to an amazing place called Stratford upon Avon yesterday and despite it being bitterly cold we still managed to look around somewhat.
We saw the home where Shakespeare was born which is pictured below here.


It was amazing to see, they had exposed part of the original wall which they call Wattle & Daub so you could see how they used to build the houses here.


It was really amazing to see the house in perfect condition after almost 500 years. There is so much history here it was impossible to see all of it in just a short amount of time, let alone in the freezing rain!

This is a little public library in the town

And here is a statue of the man himself!

And the other man!

The kids loved playing in the phone boxes and we had a hard time getting Ella to stop talking to her imaginary friends and to move along!

Ugggggg it really was a dreary day though and so very very cold. Still we had fun.




We did get to see how the canal lock works though which was cool. These where built because of the contour change in the landscape, a bit like going up or down stairs across the water way of the canals.
It's a very clever system that works by opening and closing special gates.
In this example the water level was lower than where the barge was at so the Captain needed to "step" the barge down. She did this by entering the first gate, there were two sets of gates in this lock, you can kind of see that in the picture. She then closes it behind her causing the barge to be in the lock and has to be moored to prevent accidents etc... then she uses a gear called a windlass which operates the lock gear mechanism and equalizes the water in the lock in this case it lowered the water in the lock.



When this was finished she could the open up the bottom gate and pass on through. Just look at how narrow the lock is it almost felt like the barge was too big but this girl knew what she was doing and made it look easy!

The whole process takes about 15 minutes, which may seem a long time, but can't you just imagine yourself in the middle of the summer on a barging holiday with all the time in the world to just meander along the lovely canals of England...