Coventry; Tuesday, 23 February, 2010

I checked out of the hotel and wandered back to the station and caught the train up to Birmingham to put my luggage into the left luggage office there.

From New Street I caught the train out to Bournville. This is a small village on the outskirts of Birmingham city centre. The village was built by the owners of the local factory. The fact that factory is Cadbury’s make it one of the most famous in the country.

You can’t look around the actual factory (it’s still a working factory churning out millions of kilos of chocolate a week, so they need to keep it a little clean!), but the Cadbury World centre gives you an overview of the history of chocolate and the company.

Going around the visitors centre takes a couple of hours (and longer if you need to sit down after the sugar rush of all the chocolate you get handed as you go round), and ends in the largest Cadbury’s shop in the world.

After visiting the centre I wandered back to the station in what was starting to become heavy snow. By the time I arrived back in Birmingham I had nearly two hours before my train, but with my bag weighed down with half a tonne of chocolate gifts, the snow had developed into very heavy snow with accompanying biting winds.

Given the weather and the weight on my back I decided to just camp out in a coffee shop watching the snow fall before heading back to the station to catch the train home.