Cruising the Canals!

A weekend out of London crusising on a 70ft narrowboat is just the ticket to get back to nature and get some drink in you. 5 of us from the flat and 1 driver crammed into the 6ft wide Sycamore for a weekend of fun.

The weather on one of the days at least was absolutely fabulous and made for excellent Pimms concocting, hanging out on the front and roof of the boat, grooving to some tunes and nibbling away. The boys had some beer but we managed to polish off more than a bottle of Pimms with the mini galley kitchen serving its purpose well for cutting up the fruit and making the Maggi onion dip. Our driver was a chef in his other life so we weclomed the bacon and eggs after a couple of big nights.

We moored near a local pub every night and seemed to outnumber the locals as we perfected our darts and learnt and loved the rules of skittles. During the day we casually cruised along, stopped at a few more pubs for canal side beverages and to watch the rugby and had fun frollicking in the long grass with a new footy.

Opening the locks was a lot of work but it was good catching up with other boaters and their dogs as we navigated through. Our flattie Mick loved being at the helm and proceeded to commandeer the Sycamore for the majority of the trip.

Amazing weekend away, although we arrived back to London Sunday night more shattered than when we went away.

Turns out that Nicola’s a dab hand at throwing cheese.

Me, I’m much more of a darts man. But Nicola was born with a block of cheese in her hand, as Captain Mike from Birmingham liked to say.

I’m talking about skittles, a popular pub game in all the pubs we went to during our canal cruise from Rugby to Warwick. It involves throwing a round block, “the cheese”, at some wooden skittles on a hooded table from a distance of about 3m. Nicola was bloody brilliant at it. You’d think her last name was Chappell, she was so good at bowling underarm.

Cruising the canal was a blast, drinking in the sun, watching the countryside drift by, spotting rabbits and greeting all the other boaties out on the water. The boat was really rather comfortable, with a nice area to sit up front. It slept 10 but there were only five of us, so we we’re pretty lucky to have so much room.

Working the locks was quite fun, too. The hardest manual labour I ever do is pushing a computer mouse around my desk, so I was a tad sore on Monday. It’s amazing how they work actually – raising and lowering the water with just a twist of a few cogs.

We stopped in at a pub on the Saturday and watched the rugby – almost wish we hadn’t – and kicked a football round on the way back to the boat. It was amazing the number of pubs along the canal that you could just pull up to and moor at, and we did stop at quite a few over the weekend.

That’s the thing about the UK: you’re never more than a few hundred meters from a pub, even on a canal boat.

There are a lot of canal cruise pics here.