There was no Internet last night, so you get two days of news today. We set off up the Grand Union yesterday morning, and were faced with a flight of seven locks. These were double wide, and we shared them with a family of inexperienced but enthusiastic boaters in a hire boat. The canal was busy (including idiots coming down through the locks who did not bother to check if anyone was coming up), but we made it up the flight eventually, and turned with some relief onto the Leicester Branch, which attracts fewer rental boats. I had planned to moor up before the next flight of locks, but it was still fairly early so we pressed on through the Watford locks. (NB This is Watford, Northamptonshire not to be confused with Watford, Hertfordshire, where we started this voyage many locks ago.)

This is another flight of seven locks, but four of them have been combined into a staircase, where the top gate of one lock is the bottom gate of the next.

There were volunteer lock keepers to assist, so we breezed up this flight. The lock use large side pools to maintain the correct water levels, so this staircase is easier to manage than the Bingley Five Rise.

We stopped for the night in Crick. For one long weekend a year, Crick is the center of the narrowboating world. The Crick Boat Show has the latest and greatest in narrowboats on display. The rest of the year there is not so much going on. The village has a grocery, a post office, a restaurant, a church, and three pubs. I don’t think they would have quite so many pubs if they weren’t guaranteed at least one weekend of epic sales every Spring.

The church, St Margaret of Antioch, is your typical started-by-the-Normans-and-mucked-about-in-every-century-since.

There are some really interesting carvings on the corbels. Antioch (home of the holy hand grenade) was a popular vacation spots for crusaders, medieval knights devoted to spreading a version of Christianity that left out Thou Shalt Not Kill. So, we have a crusader king in chain mail…

… and St Margaret of Antioch herself with the amazing snake-killing crucifix.

As well as the usual saints and kings, there are demons, or maybe sinners.

I think this one is Pinky and Perky.

There’s a Green Man…

… monkeys…

… a dragon…

… and I’m not sure what this is.

An allegory of the tax collector and the walrus, perhaps?

Pride of place, however, goes to this couple sucking face so hard their heads are merging.

One of them appears to be wearing a bishop’s mitre. OK, I can understand how you might want to illustrate the sin of lust, but why with a bishop?

This morning we set off early, but stopped at the first water point to scrub the roof of the boat. That took about an hour and a half. We are now at the summit of the Leicester Branch. From sea level at Salter’s Lode we have ascended 420 feet. Tomorrow we start going down again. We moored up in an isolated location and started work on touching up the rusty spots on one side of the boat. Today was scraping and rustproofing, tomorrow we paint. Oh, and then ten locks in two staircases of five each.