The route into Birmingham is surprisingly leafy and pleasant with the bright sunshine giving dappled patterns on the water.  One unusual sight was a dam put in place to hold back the water so that work could be carried out on one of the spill ways.  It seemed surprisingly flimsy to hold back so much weight.

Then it was time for a couple of surprises.  The first was a crowd of the local youth near Kingswood Junction, calling abuse from the safety of the tree line, and dropping berries on the boat from a pipe bridge that a couple had crawled onto.  They seemed upset that despite trying a variety of insults they could stimulate no more response than a laugh from us. 

The second surprise came when passing through the remains of the stop lock at King's Norton, where our boat came to a sudden halt and wouldn't budge.  Exploration with a boat pole revealed what felt like a log wedging us firmly in.  Pushing and pulling and hitting the log did nothing to dislodge it.  Fortunately a following boat had a scaffolding pole, and after various attempts what shifted us was tying the boats together, both engines in reverse, pulling from the bank, and levering up the bow of the boat with the scaffold pole.  What had stopped us was a portion of tree about three feet long and having the stumps of several branches.
 
We moored for the night at Hopwood, which had a little traffic noise that we thought would die down over the evening.  Unfortunately there were major road works scheduled, and lots of big machines going up and down the road until very late.  It is the reversing alarms that are hardest to ignore...