September 30, 2022
Day 24: Bromsgrove to Shifnal
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We punted ourselves past the big city of Birmingham, using the train for what might be one of our last chances. An all England, most of October, rail strike will begin tomorrow. The train process was fairly painless this time, with only one transfer and reasonable space in the carriages for the bikes.
Something I noticed particularly today, though it is not at all a new phenomenon, is that every single person on the train around us had their nose in a smartphone. Of course we too recognize the value of these things, and use them, but every person, all the time?
Very briefly a ray of light shone on this picture as a guy got on the train with a Brompton in one hand and a briefcase in the other. Brompton is a British folding bike that compresses to an incredibly small package. The guy set his bike down beside ours, easy for him because Bromptons have little auxiliary wheels that come into play when they are folded.
But the thing that has me ranting here is that next pulled out a book, quite a fat one. "Wow", I thought "an actual book, haven't seen that for a while". Unfortunately the man only looked at the book for a brief moment, seemed to think better of it, and shoved it away in favour of his, yes, smartphone.
These smartphone musings continued as we left the station, at Wolverhampton. There was construction going on, with orange clad workers on the job. Or were they? Unless the guys are watching Youtubes on how to build whatever they are building, they are just playing with their smartphones!
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We found Wolverhampton to be quite a pleasant town. A lot of that feeling could be because there was not a lot of aggressive traffic, or bicycle unfriendly roadways. Our track took us through the centre, which included a traffic free street. None of it was stupendous, but it was nice.
As we expect, it was not totally quick or obvious to find our way out of Wolverhampton on our track. About an hour later and two km further on, we were still in some kind of Wolverhampton neighbourhood. Around then I declared my assessment that Wolverhampton had a majority of brown people. Dodie agreed, but cautioned that this could just be the neighbourhood we were in. Whatever the case, we were finding lots of interesting stores and restaurants, more interesting than in a standard English town.
My favourite one was a kind of Punjabi bakery, shown below. They had a selection of gulab jamun type sweets, but with various different names, curries, and piles of samosas! I told the nice couple running the place about being from British Columbia, and of course they had relatives there, and could name places, like Surrey.
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One shop that also particularly caught our attention was the one below, with "motor spares and accessories" on its signboard. Motors are on our mind a bit, given the e-assist problems. We had a recommendation to try "Sugru", a moldable silicone type material, to seal that problem controller. The shop had never heard of Sugru, but Dodie did come out with another, more mundane, goo. We'll try it soon. We will also need some wire connectors as part of trying to install the controller, but we didn't try to find these at the shop. Dodie declared the ladies running it as fairly useless.
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Our time spent noodling through suburban Wolverhampton came to a close as we were inserted onto the tow path of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal. The entry to the tow path had one of those pernicious "monkey puzzle" gates, but fortunately it was being by-passed.
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The big thing on the canal is what they seem to call here "narrow boats". Most have some kind of unique decoration or naming, making them fun to come upon and look at.
The tow path is sort of cyclable, but it can be tricky. Today it was wet too, and at one point ny bike skidded and headed for the drink. I jumped off and also hit the brakes, sparing myself a swim!
But of course, eventually the path deteriorated to more of less nothing. We put up with it for a bit, but soon I lifted the bikes up some stairs to a higher and better trail.
The rain, which the forecast had warned of, began exactly at noon, while we were on the canal. It quite quickly intensified, and there was wind as well. We cycled through this, quite happy in our rain gear. The surroundings were basically uninteresting suburban type streets. Slowly we began to chill, but since our total ride for the day was quite short, we arrived before becoming total ice cubes.
The hotel we had found in Shifnal was probably the main landmark of the town - The Park Hotel. It is quite a large complex, formed by building together former structures. The core was apparently built in 1699:
The interior of the hotel is all dark paneling, dining rooms, chandeliers type stuff. From Reception, I got sent off with the key to Room 21, to start dropping in our stuff. Not so simple! There were left turns, right turns, up stairs, etc. to negotiate, and for some reason room numbers were not sequential. After several trips ferrying the bags I almost had the route memorized.
Some other things, in the room, were not as simple as we are commonly used to. For example, the toilet. It sounds powerful, being a "Dudley Duoflush", but we could not achieve even a single flush. Using skills I thought I had from home, I grabbed a wastebasket and filled it with water from the bathtub, dumping this in the toilet. Amazingly it resisted this, just sort of sulking. OK, I phoned reception and they sent up a lady to put us straight. It turns out "duoflush" means you have to pump the handle twice to get one flush. Nothing else works.
Having the lady there, we asked about the radiator. I had been unable to raise any heat from it. As I then came to understand it, the heat will only come on after 8 p.m. What kind of country us this? In fact it's not that bad. After October 1 you can actually control the heat all day long from the radiator. Our problem is that October 1 is not until tomorrow.
No problem though, said the lady. She set up a small electric heater for us. It seems adequate for drying our gloves, anyway, but I am having to type this with my hoodie on.
The forecast for tomorrow is drier and warmer. That will be good for our run into Shrewsbury. Dodie is much looking forward to this, because Shrewsbury is ground zero for the Brother Cadfael medieval mystery stories, written by Ellis Peters (Edith Pargeter). The setting is Shrewsbury Abbey during the time of the "Anarchy" ( 1138-1153) -a struggle between Stephen and Maude (descendants of William the Conqueror) over the Crown. We hope to visit a lot of the sites mentioned in the books!
Today's ride: 28 km (17 miles)
Total: 845 km (525 miles)
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