A good meal, and some serious locking

21st & 22nd July

I seem to have spent a lot of time in the last two days sat in front of this laptop, so this will be a shorter blog post than some recent ones.

Yesterday being our 37th wedding anniversary, we made a very lazy start to the day, as we planned to stay put and eat in the Queen's Head that night. Having finally got round to breakfast, we set off to find the right route to Morrison's from the Queen's Head mooring.

Having checked out Google maps first, it was quite straightforward. Sheila observed that had she been involved yesterday, she would have done that in the first place – obviously it's another variant of the gender difference about asking the way, or asking a shop assistant where an item is in the store, instead of the masculine approach, which is to wander hopefully around until you spot it.

OK, so how do you find it? From the bridge over the canal, walk past the Queen's Head and carry on down the road until you go under the railway. Ignore the first footpath sign which is right by the railway, and carry on until you cross a bridge over a stream and walk uphill past some light industrial units.

Then take the footpath on the right, which has a handwritten sign on it saying 'Morrisons'. Follow this path through thick and thin, ignoring an option to turn left into the trading estate, until it comes out onto a road. Bear slightly left and uphill, and you can see the pyramid roof of the end of the store dead ahead.

Total walking time around 15 minutes at a steady pace.

Having shopped and returned to the boat, we took a stroll up the lock flight to while away the time before lunch. After lunch, I spent most of the afternoon sorting out the photos I wanted to put up on the web. After tweaking them in Photoshop, I used the iPhoto facility to create the basic web album, which then had to be tidied up in Dreamweaver.

By the end of the afternoon, I'd got them uploaded and a brief announcement here that they were there.

In the evening, we went round to the pub and had an excellent meal in very classy surroundings. The whole place has had a real makeover, and I very much doubt if you could play a quiz machine in it any more as Greygal apparently used to do.

It worked out at £30 a head, including drinks and tip (no "discretionary" service charge here, I left cash on the table.) Highly recommended.

We both had a broken night afterwards, mind, but that was a combination of quite a lot of Argentine Malbec, and some characters who partied on the towpath until gone midnight.

It didn't stop us from getting up at six, and by just after seven we were heading into the bottom lock, just a little too late, as Festina Lente was just leaving it, having had the same idea as ourselves.

The bike came into its own as we plodded steadily uphill, swapping roles every five locks, as usual on a long flight. The top paddles are very heavy, so the long throw windlass was brought into play.

All was going swimmingly until about half way up, when Festina Lente stopped in the lock above, and her lockwheeler came back to explain that BW had asked us to wait for around twenty minutes as some of the pounds ahead were drained down, possibly as a result of vandalism.

By the time we'd made a cup of coffee (it was now half nine) we were able to set off again, though working slowly at first as the lockie wanted to give more time for water to come down from above.

By half eleven, we were tied on the visitor moorings below the top lock. They are very quiet, especially after the rowdiness of last night's mooring, and we are looking forward to a good night's sleep. Tomorrow, we'll tackle Tardebigge and Shortwood Tunnels, and probably stop at Alvechurch for a couple of days.