Why a narrowboat trip?

Why did I want to travel down a canal in a narrowboat? From where did this particular desire evolve? The simple answer is a trip down a river is one of my favorite recurring dreams, one that I’ve had most of my adult life, which is bizarre for it has almost no basis in any real life events. I’ve never floated down the Mississippi on a raft, never coursed through the Boundary Waters on a canoe and only in my late thirties did I ever go whitewafter rafting, which is very far from my dream of a languid trip down a narrow river.

And yet I’ve always dreamed of traveling down a narrow river, with heavy vegetation dripping down the sides, obscuring the banks, not knowing what each turn might bring. Ultimately, I blame Journey to the Beginning of Time, a movie about four boys who, after visiting the American Museum of Natural History, rent a rowboat in Central Park, enter a cave and later emerge onto a river that takes them through Earth’s past. They encounter giant mammals and dinosaurs and volcanos, mostly from the relative safety of the rowboat. Later they awaken and realize it was all dream.

I watched Journey to the Beginning of Time, in a serialized version, growing up in San Antonio on the Captain Gus Show. In actuality, it was a Czechoslovakian film directed by Karel Zeman and dubbed into English, the bit about the AMNH was tacked onto the beginning with different child actors, whose faces you never see until the original footage begins. I’m sure kids around the country watched the movie on their own hometown kiddie shows, but I watched it on KENS.

Of course by this time I’d already read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which starts with a boat trip down the Amazon to find Maple White Land and pretty much all of Edgar Rice Burroughs, so I was pretty predisposed to a fantasy down a river filled with danger.

All this would make you think my dreams about a river trip should involve dinosaurs and hostile tribes, but about 1976 I watched Three Men in a Boat, a television version of the Jerome K. Jerome book, starring Michael Palin, Tim Curry and Stephen Moore, to say nothing of the dog. It was probably shown on PBS and of course I was charmed for I loved Michael Palin from Monty Python, and I fell in love with the story of three clueless Englishmen traveling the Thames in a skiff, struggling with how to open a can without an opener, pitching a tent in the rain and even the sad note of finding a body in the river. Somehow this sad, sad coda in a gentle comedy really impressed itself into my memory and from then on, my dream involved punting down some form of English river, in relative comfort and safety but with a sense of adventure and some wistfulness, but hopefully without the discovery of a body.

Unbeknownst to me at this time, the Kennet and Avon Canal, that connects Bath and Reading (and through the Avon and Kennet rivers Bristol and London), was slowly being restored after decades of neglect. In fact the Caen Hill locks at this time were still filled with dirt and grasses, the locks reduced almost to splinters. But by 1990, the K&A was reopened by the Queen and when we visited London in 2001, we walked along the Regent’s Park Canal and I saw my first narrowboats. From that time, I knew I had found the perfect way to realize my dreams of cruising a river (or canal) in relatively comfort and with the promise of pubs strategically placed along the canal.

So for this trip, we rented a 65-foot narrowboat from AngloWelsh Waterway Holidays at Sydney Harbour in Bath. AngloWelsh is a consortium of boat hires around England and more information can be found at British Waterways. I will post more specifics about the trip later.