Journalism has its perks, such as those rare occasions when one is tasked with doing something cool just to write about it. In this particular case that lucky journalist was my friend Claire, one of several ex-Advocate journos in the UK. Claire was offered a weekend away on Wandering Duck to write an article for TNT Magazine. And she got to take a friend. Turns out there are also perks to being unemployed and therefore free for last-minute adventures. I held off on this post until Claire's article was published.
The weekend started with a pint of cider in a small pub in Romiley. A car tyre had got cosy with the propeller and the boat wasn't going anywhere until it was off. In the end we caught a taxi to where the boat was moored, arriving just a few minutes after Mark had stripped to his undies to get into the river to pull the tyre free. We saw the photo though.
So about Wandering Duck. Ruth and Mark have worked in hostels and wanted to buy one. But they don't come cheap so instead the couple bought the canal boat and turned it into a floating backpackers. Some nights they moor and
open it simply as accommodation and other times escort people through the canals. We're doing the latter. Claire and I are joined by five others for the two-night trip. The boat is called Rakiraki, which is Maori for duck. It's a little nod to the time Mark and Ruth spent in New Zealand. Rakiraki has four sets of bunks, two bathrooms, a double bed up one end (Mark and Ruth live on the boat) and a kitchen/lounge. It's snug.
The tyre held things up a bit so we spent the night moored at Romiley. Ruth prepared an awesome meal so we tucked into lasagne and cheesecake. There's an Honesty Bar so we marked down what we drank to settle at the end of the trip. It's easy to get carried away when all you need to get a drink is a pen. The drinking also didn't help our efforts at Jenga.
In the morning we are up early. There are 16 locks waiting for us. And these aren't the automatic, push-a-button-and-wait style I am familiar with after
France. These require a lot of, winding and pushing and pulling. It's a good way to work off the chocolate brownies Ruth made at the request of Tim, one of the other guests from Manchester.After the locks and two bridges, we relax with a cuppa and a brownie at the front of the boat. Every now and then we hear some traffic, but the noise is usually limited to a few cows in the paddocks and dogs out for a walk with their owners along the canal. The countryside is just what English countryside is supposed to look like (according to BBC classics such as Heartbeat). Rolling green paddocks, sheep and cows, stone fences and cute cottages. It's what I expect of Britain and I don't understand how people can visit London and say they've seen the UK - you haven't seen anything and you're missing out.
We're lucky with the weather. A few little drops which caused me to pull my hood over my head for a few minutes, but that's all. Barely even jacket weather. Despite it being a weekend we didn't pass many other boats on the move. But there were plenty moored on the side looking quite at home.
On Saturday night we moored near New Mills, a nearby town that we walk out to. It's a nice walk and we pass an old mill of some sort. It's a gorgeous building and when I win the lottery I shall buy it and turn it into....something. When we get back Ruth has a casserole waiting. We all turn to the Honesty Bar again and this time it's a game of Bamboozled.
After just 24 hours on the boat it felt like we'd been away for a week. The locks that we'd gone through in the morning felt days ago, not hours. I think this is what relaxation feels like.
[caption id="attachment_2614" align="aligncenter" width="960" caption="A gorgeous old mill we found on our walk"]
[/caption]In the morning we were up early and docked about 11am at Bugsworth Basin, the boat's home. We'd covered 10 miles, but since the speed limit was about 4mph and we had all those locks, you can see why it took us so long.
A big thank you to Claire for the photos. I was still sans camera on this trip.
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