Canal Boat Adventures

We have now spent five nights living on a canal boat and travelling through the English, and now Welsh, countryside.  This is my first opportunity to be "on-line" with wifi in a pub close to the canal. We have traveled from a marina just north of Wolverhampton to a canal that will tale us to a Welsh town called Llangollan.
Each day is busy and fun as we negotiate our way past other "narrow boats" travelling through the canals and going up and down locks which requires lots of manual effort winding the gates open and closed.   They really are narrow boats. We sleep across the boat and it is not as wide as I am long; however it is 70 feet long (about 22 metres), so takes a lot of maneuvering as we negotiate our way along.  I really enjoy being at the helm.   We travel about 20 to 30 kilometres each day of which we estimate we walk a third.  It is great exercise and lots of fun.

I have visited two schools in small villages on the canal and have two more to see early next week.

Here are a few photos:

Here I am standing beside our home for the two weeks we spend on the canal.  Isobelle is 70 feet long and has three bedrooms, each with a small bathroom.  There is also a small dining room and kitchen,  She is 7 feet wide (just over 2 metres) on the outside and less than that on the inside.  6 of us are living here for 14 days.  We are all good friends now and hope to still be after 14 nights living so close together!!

The Harecastle Tunnel is 2.6 kilometres long and I had the challenge of guiding our canal boat through this in a convoy of 4 boats.  It took about 45 minutes and apart from the light on our boat it was pitch dark.  The tunnel was very low at times - so low I was down on my knees to keep from getting hit on the head, and still having to guide the 70 foot long boat from hitting the sides.  This was a neat experience.  Mrs McLeay took this photo as we exited from the tunnel.

Each afternoon we tie the narrow canal boat up to the side of the canal and that is where we stay for the night.  We usually do this near a small village and either go into the town for a meal or cook our own meal on the boat.  Last night we used a "throw away" BBQ designed to use only once and cooked up lots of chicken to go with vegetables cooked in the boat's kitchen.  Here we are enjoying the meal on the back of the boat.