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 Route canal ON PAPER, the odds on our holiday being a success were about as narrow as the boat we were going to be living on for the next three days.For I was about to spend a long weekend on a slow, 58ft canal barge in mid-April with two excitable small children, two anxious grandparents (one with a morbid fear of water) and a husband with a serious adrenaline sports addiction. We also had a sketchy plan to pick up my sister at some point the next day which would inevitably involve a fair amount of plan changing, map reading and mobile phone calling. So it was with some trepidation that the six of us arrived at the Alvechurch Boat Centre at the Blisworth Arm marina near Gayton that was to be the starting point of our journey through rural Northamptonshire. After a tour of our boat which was full of creature comforts we got a chance to watch a video that not only gave us a good idea of what to expect but also fuelled my mother's fears that we were all going to drown in a lock! Then it was time to hit the waterway. My father, who had apparently been swotting up on this stuff for the past two weeks, was first at the helm looking a little tense as he attempted to manoeuvre the long boat out of the busy marina while I struggled to keep my young charges under control. But it didn't take long to get into the flow. Soon we were chugging along through the unspoilt, green countryside with the sun on our faces pointing out a heron here and a Canadian goose there, feeding the ducks and generally feeling like we didn't have a care in the world. In the back of my mind, I had given my other half, Andrew, about an hour before he got bored of travelling along at 4mph. But, contrary to all my expectations, he loved every minute of the trip. He even made casual inquiries about how much it would cost to buy a boat like ours (about £30,000 in case you're interested). And there was plenty to do. Our route, which took us through Weedon to just past Braunston, where we reluctantly had to turn back in order to keep to our schedule, involved navigating our way through a mile-and-a-half long tunnel and around 16 locks each way. Locks require team effort and certainly keep you fit. It usually involves two people running on ahead armed with a windlass to open the gate paddles which control the water flow, opening and closing the gates, keeping the boat steady, and so on. No two locks were exactly the same either - one was deeper or faster than the one before, some gates required plenty of elbow grease, others were easy to open and shut. The children loved it, especially my six-year-old daughter who got very adept at hopping on and off the boat (my youngest, who is four, was a bit more of a liability, but he enjoyed himself just the same) And if you do tire of just messing about on the water you can always moor up at one of the many waterside pubs for the afternoon, explore the countryside or visit one of the waterway museums. As we made our way back to base on the last day it poured with rain which made me grateful that we had been blessed with good weather. But nobody wanted to go home, even though it was chucking it down. We could easily have spent the rest of the week working our way round the waterways.
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