A Long Climb to a Long Tunnel!

After a whole day with just one strange, tiny lock, our journey north from Milton Keynes included lots more.  I could see from our map that, to get to the village of Stoke Bruerne, Polar and Grizzly would have to work through seven big locks.

It was a busy day on the Grand Union Canal and, when we reached the bottom lock, there was a queue of boats waiting to go up and just as many boats making their way down.

'Oh dear!' I thought.  'I hope we don't run out of water!'

I had a good view from my place on the roof of all the boats on the move and I couldn't imagine how there could be enough water at the top to keep the locks working.  Polar explained that, when this section of the canal is busy, water gets pumped back up to the reservoir.

'It's still important to share locks and save water,' she said.  'They say these big locks hold enough water to fill a thousand baths!'

At some of the locks, there were volunteer lock-keepers trying to organise the boats.  Even where there weren't lock-keepers, most of the boaters shared sensibly and passed each other carefully in the pounds between the locks.  I tried to give any thoughtless boat crews a Paddington-style hard stare, but I'm not sure that worked.

After slowly working up through the locks, we reached Stoke Bruerne.  The waterfront here is very pretty and busy with visitors to the canal, as there is a wonderful Waterways Museum.  We were lucky to find a mooring here, just big enough for Uppie, and we found some friends too, as the kind people who had travelled with us along the tidal Thames were here. 

While Polar and Grizzly went to have a drink with them at the pub, I decided to look around the museum.  Because I am very small, I couldn't make the lady at the ticket desk see or hear me, so I wasn't able to pay to go in, but I was also too short to read most of the notices which explained what the things in the museum where, so didn't learn as much as I wanted to.  I liked looking at the brightly-coloured painted ware, covered in Roses and Castles art, and decided that, when I got back to the boat, I would ask Polar if she would teach me to paint too. 

That evening, however, I had a more important job to do.  I was going to be the captain of a Pub Quiz team called 'Sonnings Pals', made up of Polar, Grizzly, Bob from Zodiak and another boating friend of his.  I thought that because the pub was beside the canal, there would be lots of questions about boats and canals, and maybe even a few about wildlife and plants, which I had been reading about in Polar's little old Observer's books, which are a perfect size for small bears to read.  

'I'm sure we'll win!' I said to myself.  'I have some very clever friends and I'm a studious little bear.'

Unfortunately, there were no questions about nature or canals - or bears.  Most of the questions were about human things rather than bear things, human history and people from films and television programmes.  As I hadn't even seen a television or been to a film, I was not a lot of help to my team-mates and we did not win. 

As well as doing quizzes, people in pubs often drink something called 'beer'.  I noticed that, after several glasses of this, they seemed to talk more loudly but less clearly, and walk less steadily.  I sniffed the beer in Grizzly's glass and decided it probably wasn't good for small bears, so I didn't drink any.

Polar and Grizzly didn't drink very much beer either, because they wanted to be up early the next day.  Our journey was going to start in a very long tunnel!  I had never been into a canal tunnel before and I was surprised when Polar said I should put my raincoat on.

  

'You get lots of drips from the roof,' she explained.  'And you'll see little calcite stalactites where the drips have been dripping for hundreds of years!'

Polar doesn't really like tunnels, as she finds it difficult to steer the boat in them and worries about bumping her head if the roof is low, but I thought the tunnel was amazing.  Uppie has a big headlight which lit up the tunnel ahead of us very well.  It was like a huge bear cave and, sure enough, there were streaks of different colours down the walls where the water droplets had deposited different minerals and thousands of tiny stalactites on the roof.

Suddenly, I had a very worrying thought.  'What happens if there is a boat coming the other way?' I asked Grizzly.

'The tunnel is just wide enough for two boats to pass,' he explained.  'But we do have to slow down and be careful not to bump into each other!'

I was quite glad there were no boats coming the other way.  Soon, we were back out in the sunshine but my raincoat was very wet and so were my ears and paws.  I was glad it was another sunny, breezy day, as I would soon be dry and fluffy again!