First stop today after a brief cruise and two locks was the Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker. You know it’s a secret because it says so on all the signs.

Unlike Maggie Thatcher’s secret nuclear bunker in East Anglia that we visited many years ago, this one actually looks like a bunker above ground.

Seriously guys, if you want to keep your bunker secret you should make it look like a cow.

The bunker was built in 1983, about the time that scientists were pointing out that even quite a small nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter which would kill most of humanity through cold and starvation. It was abandoned by the end of the decade, as Russia no longer seemed to be a threat at the time.

Inside it is chock-a-block with communications equipment of various sorts, with the phone service, military, and BBC competing for space. This is the telephone exchange.

This is the backup telephone exchange because the one above would be wiped out by the electromagnetic pulse from an atomic explosion.

This is a radio setup for sending coded messages to nuclear submarines.

Maggie Thatcher used this one to send the command to sink the General Belgrano.

This is a nuclear warhead they have lying around. I hope the remembered to take the uranium out.

My favorite exhibit was the post WWII Russian Enigma machine.

During the war the British and Americans didn’t mention to the Russians that they had broken the Enigma code, so the Russians rounded up some Germans who knew how to build Enigmas and went on using that technology.

The whole place was creepy and depressing.

We did not stay very long.

Another brief cruise and we were faced with the fifteen lock flight at Audlem. They are single wide locks, so less grueling, but there are not bridges at the low end, so it’s a problem closing both the lower gates when the boat is in the lock. However they are not that deep, so for many of them I was able to take a shortcut across the lock by jumping down onto the roof of the boat, and climbing back up on the other side. The locks also have vicious side weirs that push you off course just as you are entering the lock, resulting in a lot of clunks and one broken planter.

However, at the top of the flight there is a self service store with ice cream.

We snagged the last two chocolate ice creams.