Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx Handheld GPS Navigator
Garmin (sold one at a time) that provide topographic maps, city streets, and nautical charts. In fact, the unit is compatible with most Garmin ...
A narrowboat escape - in London
Dream of a canal holiday and you think of ploughman’s lunch-fuelled bucolic puttering, of trim little incarcerate-keepers’ cottages and humpback bridges. You probably don’t think of the Grand Union in west London, extremely if you’re me and punctuated your adolescence watching this neglected trans-urban waterway clog with the rusted trappings of antisocial conduct.
As a commercial entity, the Grand Union met a suitably bitter end in 1981, when a final narrowboat consignment of lime extract left Brentford Wharf bound for the Rose’s depot in Hemel Hempstead. By then, London had long since turned its back on this sluggish legacy of low-tech, horse-drawn sloth. Like almost every civic canal in Britain, the Grand Confederating was hidden away and fenced off, a secret realm where bad things happened: Narnia for tramps and vandals. Associated misgivings over-abundance up as my car’s sat-nav steers me towards the Willowtree Marina in Yeading, west London, through an unpromising hinterland of distribution centres and self-storage depots.
