A proper introduction

After exactly twenty five years of dreaming about it, we finally tasted the reality of life on the canals in 2007 after an invitation from our good friends Graham and Iris to spend some time with them on the Canal du Midi on their floating home, "Manatee".

Ten days was simply not enough, and apart from agreeing that we'd happily take Manatee off their hands when they got tired of this life, we left completely unsatisfied and intent on arranging our lives differently so that we could return for much longer periods of time.

We weren't to know then that a new phrase would be coined in very quick time  "Global Financial Crisis", and like many others we'd have quite a task to overcome the new obstacles to be placed in our way.   (If you are reading this stuff by the way, don't take it too seriously, the advertisements on this page are supposed to do that, but they still think I am without a spouse and of the persuasion that would have me discovering one on the internet.)

Quite coincidentally on our return that year we were contacted by Ian and Lynda whom we hadn't seen for years, which was not surprising considering that for some time they'd been spending half of their own lives on their boat in the north of France.

We'd travelled through the desert in Australia by four wheel drive, and across much of the European continent and Asia by train, and it seemed that somehow the die had been cast, a new mode of transport, a new life in fact, beckoned.