It was no problem finding somewhere to eat last night, we ended up at Indico a supposedly Indian Street food restaurant where you get a selection of dishes with a selection of flavours. The place was very quiet just like most of the other establishments.
Seeing this sign set me thinking who actually owns the towpath here, I suspect its Brindley Place and CRT just manage it.
This morning we again woke to the sound of rain so didn't move until 11-30am. other than saying goodbye to Bob and Rosemary who were moored ahead of us we haven't seen another boat on the move. We reversed out from our mooring onto the main line and headed down to Cambrian Wharf to fill with water and dispose of the rubbish, but the tap was so slow we gave up well before the tank was full.
We had just set off down the locks when a Volocky came up carrying a tyre he had retrieved from a lock, when he had deposited it in a suitable location, the bin, he returned and asked Diana if we were OK or would we like a hand, she enquired if it was not his lunch time but he said he hadn't done anything except talk to people all day so was pleased to help. He was ace, he went ahead and had every top gate open ready for us all the way to the bottom of the farmers Bridge flight.
The flight is decked out with scaffolding with some interesting 
engineering solutions to support it. It seems that wooden cladding on high rise buildings may not have been such a good idea, but I expect they received a "green" award for it calming it to be
sustainable and a low carbon footprint I would also suggest it was not a good idea to build such buildings with no means of access for maintenance, if they had left the wood it would have required attention in the next few years.
With our Volockies help were soon down the 13 locks and on our way to the Aston Flight, again they were all against us so required a bit more work with us setting ahead, so the next lock was full by the time the one we were in was empty, a lot more walking about but a lot faster. I had my first brush with an Escooter here, someone had left it parked lock side in the quadrant of the tail gate, so I moved it to the other side of the towpath to the grass, it will still probably be in the canal tonight. As we worked the Stratford Canal I mentioned split cantilevered bridges to get the tow rope through, well there are a couple of cantilever bridges on this flight, but the gap for the rope is at the towpath side, not in the centre.
Now one for all you people so knowledgeable about the history of the canal in the Birmingham area. Why has this section of wall behind the towpath ended up with holes in it which since they were no longer needed have had metal grills fitted. The first is the size of a pair of double gates but they are probably 15 foot from the ground. 
Just below lock 8 we passed this, could it be the site of the major landslide that closed the canal last month or will we see evidence of that further down, this just looks like a wall falling over.
We continued on just a little further to moor on the offside in front of the office blocks with their rather green water feature
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