Why Did We Choose Narrowboat Life?
About 6 years ago Michael and I decided that it would be a good idea to move aboard a narrowboat and explore the waterways of England and Wales. Our main motivation? Well, we wanted a semi-permanent home, but we didn’t want to be forced to stay in one place. At the time we had been living in Venice, California for 10 months, and we’d moved there after living in Wellington, New Zealand, for 15 months. Before that we had both, independently quit the 9-5 life to spend a year or so travelling around the world, and that is how we met back in 2013 in Vietnam.
On our round-the-world trips we had gotten accustomed to seeing something new everyday, discovering new places, meeting new people and tasting new cuisines. We wanted to get back to moving more. While life in one place suits many people, and there is nothing wrong with that way of life, its what most people do after all, we realised that we didn’t want that life and the routine that comes with it. We wanted more variety and less predictability.
We had an another issue that we had to resolve at the same time though. We realised, that it was important for us to have a passport in common. With me being British and Michael being American and Canadian we recognised that for our future together we needed to have the right to live in the same country together, long term. This meant that for a number of years our travel opportunities would be limited while we went through an immigration process. The question was, which passport should we get in common?
We determined that we had three options. Firstly there was America, but, after the best part of a year in LA I wasn’t convinced I wanted to live there, even with that glorious west coast sunshine. When Trump got elected in October 2016, America was instantly removed from our list of options. We definitely didn’t want to stay there while he was President. I remember on election night sitting on the beach in Santa Monica, waiting for Michael to finish work. I sat watching another stunning Pacific Sunset as the results came in, and noticed that the ferris wheel on the pier was illuminated in red, white and blue. There was no celebratory feeling on the pier that night though, instead an eerie sense of doom hung in the air. Decision made… we were definitely leaving America.
Our second option was Canada. It was a good option in many ways. The main positive being that it is where Michaels closest family live. At the time I had never actually visited Canada, so it would have been quite a leap for me to move there. We were however, more influenced by the fact that Micheal was adamant that he didn’t want to live in the Vancouver area where he had spent his teen years and early twenties. One possibility that we considered before ruling out North America altogether was van-life and Canada would have been perfect for this I’m sure, but, it wasn’t the option we settled on.
One day, back in 2016 when when we were still living in America and trying to decide what to do next, Michael was leaving for work and made a throw away comment about us moving to England to live on a narrowboat. He didn’t think any more of it once he was at his desk, but while I was home alone I spent my day researching narrowboat life. By the time Michael returned home that evening, I had lined up a whole heap of YouTube videos for him to watch. Dan Brown, Cruising the Cut, Mylo and of course Robbie Cumming all made the play list that night.
Before this point our knowledge of boat life was pretty limited. Michael had first seen a narrowboat when visiting London a few years previously and had paused to watch a boat navigate through a lock in Camden but had never stepped foot on one. I had been on a narrowboat holiday with my family in 2010 on the Leeds and Liverpool canal, but that was a very different experience to living aboard. Neither of us had any idea of how extensive the waterways network was or that it was possible to travel from Surrey to Lancashire on one, so when we discovered that there was over 2000 miles of waterways we could explore we were even more intrigued.
Weirdly, at that point we didn’t think we’d actually go through with it, we thought we’d come up with another, more ‘sensible’ idea, but we kept researching boat life anyway. There were so many aspects to it that just made sense to us. The small living space didn’t put us off. Since we’d begun travelling so much we’d leant that we didn’t really need many possessions. We moved between London, New Zealand and LA with only a couple suitcases between us. We had sold or donated most of the possessions we had owned before travelling and we were working hard not to collect more ‘things’. The main appeal of boat life though was the ability to keep moving. Living on a boat would mean that we could pull pins and visit a new village, town or city when ever we wanted. We could wake up with a new view everyday if we chose to, but we’d have some home comforts whilst doing so.
The research continued, I binge watched all the boat tours on the Rugby Boat Sales YouTube playlist, and scoured the Apollo Duck listings even though it was far too early for us to be thinking of making a purchase. We made a wish list of the things we thought our narrowboat should have and we carried on obsessively watching all of the new narrowboat videos that were released on YouTube. The whole time though, we were very aware of the fact that we could change our minds and come up with an entirely different plan at any point. My family was sceptical and Michaels family didn’t really know what a narrowboat was, but our fantasy of a live-aboard life was not going away.
In December 2016 we packed up our Venice Beach apartment, sold, donated and gifted the possessions we had collected and drove north. We had one more US adventure in us before we left the states. We visited The Hoover Dam, Zion National Park, Monument Valley, the Slot Canyons, Arches National Park and The Colorado National Monument. We took a detour east to visit distant family in Casper, Wyoming. We then headed back west to San Fransisco and warmer whether. Then it was north through the Redwoods and onto the Oregon and Washington Coast and finally into Canada for Christmas with Michaels family. I’m sure most people would have just flown from LAX to Vancouver but we couldn’t resist squeezing in a month long road trip packed with new sights and experiences along the way. The desire to see new places daily is strong and we really didn’t want to give up the freedom to do that by getting tied down to one location.
January 2017 saw us finally move to England, and we began the immigration process for Michael. We started the boat search too, were we actually going to do this? No alternate idea had surfaced and we found ourselves driving all over the country looking at boats. We had to remain in the UK for 5 years to compete Michaels immigration and were only allowed to travel overseas for a very limited number of days during that period. The dream of narrowboat life was now at our fingertips and somehow the idea of of exploring all the integrated waterways had morphed into an obsession to actually visit every possible length of navigable water, pass under every bridge and through every working lock. Initially we had naively thought that would take us about two years and that we’d work out what to do after that as we went along.
Five hard and wonderful years later we finally finished the trip and triumphantly limped up the Northampton arm to complete our journey around network. (Video coming soon).
It’s funny looking back at the reasons that lead us to getting our boat Perseverance, and thinking about whether the reality of boat life met with our expectations. Maybe I’ll write about that in another post. We have see so much of England, places we wouldn’t have visited if we hadn’t had a floating home. We’ve met some wonderful people too. We weren’t expecting the Narrowboat community to be so supportive and welcoming so that was a really wonderful surprise. Moving the boat to a new mooring was a chore at times, but its so rewarding too. There is nothing like coming in to a warm boat after a long day locking midwinter. The main thing though is that we did get to keep moving. We took new walks, visited new cities, saw different landscapes on a weekly basis. The good and the bad, it was all worthwhile.
I’d love to hear what made you choose boat life or what make you want to try it. Please do comment below your reasons for wanting a life afloat.