Great Canal Journeys, the Llangollen Canal

I can’t stop smiling and tearing up watching this Channel 4 documentary. We’re considering whether to travel the Llangollen Canal next year or the Union Canal from Falkirk to Edinburgh, so it was a delight to find these Channel 4 travelogs presented by Timothy West and Prunella Scales, two British actors you’ll know from so many classic television shows that they seem like old friends. In episode 3, they take their hired narrowboat from Ellesmere, England to Llangollen, Wales.

It’s lovely to see these two celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary by traveling the canals, and it’s so reassuring to see West at the helm bang into other boats, just like my husband and I did on our canal journey. West sums up the experience perfectly for me. Some people want a vacation on the Caribbean, but I’m smiling at the thought of a cold rain in Wales while crossing the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. I just have to develop a slight case of catarrh if I hope to pronounce anything properly.

Just imagine a canal journey where you can cross a UNESCO World Heritage Site, take a stream train, get pulled by a horse on a former lifeboat and visit two countries. Yes, it will be hard for the Union Canal to compete … if it weren’t for the Falkirk Wheel, that is.

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Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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