Onwards and upwards, as advertised

We'd estimated around three hours boating today, mostly in the form of 15 locks, so set off a bit before half seven. The first lock was full, but then all the others were empty, or nearly so, until we reached Kingswood Junction.

It was a case of steady plodding, on a pleasant enough morning. There was a bit of traffic the other way after a while, just enough to make for interest. I did the first eight locks, then Sheila took over for the last seven. Before she did so, she took a photo of the poor state of the brickwork in one lock wall:

All these locks have the three useless square wooden bollards along one side; how much better would it have been to spend all that money on actually repairing the structure?

Above the junction, the locks have two bottom gates, rather than a single, BCN style gate. This means that they are less horrendously heavy to swing, but do slow things down quite a bit, especially as the positioning of the bottom ground paddles (unusual in themselves) make it very difficult/impossible to get on or off the walk way of an open gate, so stepping across the half open lock isn't on, and the lock wheeler has to walk right round to open or close the other gate.

In addition, they were all against us after the junction. No matter, we took just ten minutes less than the three hours to reach our chosen mooring, in the "Boot Pound" between locks 15 and 14. We've only once been to the pub which gives its name to this pound; it's very upmarket, and made us feel a bit scruffy. When we saw the prices on the menu, this changed to feeling very poor; we've walked over to the Navigation on the GU side of the junction ever since.

Tomorrow, a mere 13 locks, and we'll stop somewhere by Hockley Heath before making the dash into Birmingham on Thursday.