Our week on the Canal Boat

We have just finished our week cruising the canals around Derbyshire. We arrived last Friday and David and Joll had a lesson on how to drive the boat and how to work all the bits and pieces that kept it going. It was 64 ft long and 8ft wide and had a lounge and kitchen up the front with a good stove/oven/grill as well as a fridge and all the necessary cooking things like saucepans etc. It also had three double bedrooms (well skinny double beds!!) a bathroom/toilet and another separate toilet and a long thin passage down one side (and I mean thin!!). It was a really fun week, very relaxing, especially for Jenny and I as we didn't do any of the driving!!! There is a whole canal boat world out there we didn't know about!!! The marina that we left from had heaps of boats moored there, and we were to see many, many more whilst we spent our week cruising the canals. Many people actually live permanently on them, some were really flash, others old tubs, all were named and some had very decorative painting on them, lots of them had planters of flowering plants, some had herbs growing in pots too. And I think the majority of them had dogs!!! They obviously love dogs over here, they take them everywhere, on trains and to the pub, we noticed some of the pubs had signs saying dogs welcome, just sit them on the floor not the furniture!!! One night we were having tea in a pub on the canal at Fradley Junction and the pub owner came downstairs, through the lounge with his two dogs, one was a labrador and the other a huge Irish Wolfhound, who then went back upstairs with a packet of MM's in his mouth which apparently he opens himself and eats!! There are over 3000 miles of interconnecting canals that go all around England, so no wonder some people live permanently on the canal boats cruising the countryside. Most of the people we met were very friendly and would say g'day as we passed each other, the canals are only about 10 feet wide so you couldn't really pretend you didn't see whoever was passing by. Part of canal boat cruising though is passing through locks, we had to navigate through a varying number of loch, around 20 each way. The first lock was a bit scary, but after that we got the hang of it, we were quite expedient at it, thee locks varied in depth from 3ft to up to 12ft, but really only took about 5 minutes to get through them, depending on whether the water was at the right level for the direction we were heading. We saw heaps of birds, and as it is spring, we saw lots of ducks with ducklings and swans nesting right on the edge of the canal, also saw some baby goslings. We saw lovely countryside, farms and rolling hills in the distance, cows, sheep, rabbits and one day a big grey squirrel. I was a bit excited to see the squirrel, he was sitting up looking at us just near the canal and, I rushed to get my camera open and got a lovely shot of a squirrel's tail in the distance!!! We are not sure how many miles we did over the course of the week, the top speed is only 4 miles per hour, but it seemed like a long distance. We were supposed to keep the motor going for 6 hours per day to charge the batteries and ensure we had hot water and lights etc so we did cruise for quite a while, then find a good spot to moor, have a snooze, a read or a wander around the town before tea. We stopped every night at a different place, either just along the canal in the countryside or in a village. The villages were so cute, typical of what I expected, they all love their flowers and there are heaps of pots of flowering plants in their gardens, in window boxes and in big pots around the streets. The villages were fairly small and didn't have many shops, just a couple of pubs, so we generally went there for tea each night. The food is good and quite cheap at the pubs, but they all seem to serve the same vegies: carrots and peas!!! The boys did a great job of steering the boat through the sometimes very narrow canals, it wasn't an easy job as the boat was very long and sometimes the wind would blow it off course also, we had one episode where another canal boat went past us too fast and we got caught in his wake and made the boat head for the canal bank and the trees, there was a family of ducks with ducklings just there and they certainly scattered up the bank to safety very quickly!!! But we all agreed it was a great way to spend a week, a new experience for us all.