A bit of this and a bit of that before we go

We have now booked the boat, the airline tickets and the two hotel rooms we need from Wednesday the 12th (when Ryanair still has affordable prices) till we get the boat two days later. Now all I have to do is deside what to pack. In comparison to going south in the winter, one doesn't need to go in the attic for summer clothes for a trip on the canals. In fact, I can pack more or less what I would have packed for a skiing trip - omit the skies, add rainwear. The problem now is to pack so little that we can manage to carry our bags on and off all the public transportation we need to take before we get to the boat. And to leave room for a little "finery" since we are going to London. Not totally necessary may be, but I do have a fear of being taken for a bag lady after a couple of days on the boat. I tend to think boat is boat and forget that this boat actually has both shower and hair dryer, and I have no excuse for looking like an old rastafari after a week on the boat! Which I have on the sailboat.

I thought I should bring some kitchen wear, since most rental places at least has dull knives, but after having read the inventory list on the luxury boat we have rented, I found out I could open up a catering business from the boat (coffee grinder and cake tins were extra, and I think I will get them just in case... are there any laws agains opening up a small business on a rental boat?), so all I will bring is a knife sharpener.

And then its the weather question: What will it be like? We always expect rain in UK, anything else is an extra bonus (and first time we did this, we had a heat wave, and came back as tanned as if we had been to Spain, so I have to remember bathing suits), but what about the small (and some times large) storms we "inherit" from UK three days later? How will the keel-less monster react in strong gales? And how will other canal boaters react to us if we are unable to steer the boat then?

We found out the hard way (we were yelled at a lot) that there were a couple of "no-nos" in canalboating in comparison to sailing. You can cling clang the boat into a lock as much as you like (it's an iron boat on muddy ground), but you can NOT bump into somebody else's boat. You can not moore outside another boat without asking (and then expect a NO), and I suppose being "distressed at sea" does not give you any rights on the canals. Very much unlike at sea, where if in distress you can moore anywhere you like and if not distressed, anywhere a "horse can not wade", and in the harbours the boats moore outside each other without asking and in the evening if you are in the boat moored closest to the harbour, you just have to endure all the people from all the other boats jumping on your boat on they're way to the next one. And our pubs close at four in the morning! And if you want to go out early in the morning then ... well you have to retie all the other boats with fenders and all...

After having opened up a lock in Stourport that haden't been opened for 20 years (all the kids in Stourport had to help us) and thereby wasted about 50.000 litres of water, we found out we had a "narrow" boat and not a very wide one, as we first thought! Well, we learned. Coming back, we sort of dog-walked the boat through the basin not to touch other boats (while our kids were washing the boat on the outside) and then the lockmaster yelled "you can rent my boat next time". Well, we did give him a couple of beers as an excuse for our miserable entrance to Stourport, and he yelled something very different before that!