A life afloat

It's been a while since I last updated the blog, but with good reason.  This being July/August and the school holidays we have been away !  After the wetness that was the first two weeks in July I was crossing everything I had that the sun would shine for us in England, you see this year we had opted to join my parents on their canal boat, cruising the inland waterways of Great Britain, (you can actually follow them here)  As Mum has discovered, rain, on a canal boat, is fun for all of half a day, we were staying two weeks.  My prayers, it seems, were answered, and while we did not enjoy blazing sunshine for the entirety of the holiday, it did beam upon us for a substantial part, and the rain held off until the very last day.

The canals in England are something of a family love affair, although having now spent a winter and very wet Spring and Summer on the boat Mum is maybe a bit less enthusiastic now- it is also her job to do the locks........  But for us on a two week only break they are fantastic.  I love the bridges; (577 photos taken and a weighty proportion are bridges - I am not alone in this, Dad has hours of film of them, no really.)  the locks (no honestly, I like doing them, for a fortnight) and I love that within the space of a few minutes you can move from the uber modern 21st Century cities into the rural idyll of England (although this is actually just a clever illusion sometimes, the boat doesn't travel very fast and you are pretty much still in the city centre, you just can't see it)  You get to travel through factories, tunnels that drip on your head and under the most secret parts of the motorway.  The flowers and lilys pour into the water and crowd over the boat fighting each others colour and smell, the days are spent dreaming away at the front of the boat as you drfit through networks of water, never seeing and often never hearing anything other than the chugging of the boat.  We enjoyed it - here are a few photos from the 577 taken.....