The beginning.......

Well, even to this day we can't remember what made us do it but for some reason we hired a day boat from Barbridge in the summer of 2008. I can remember in my distant past seeing narrowboats and thinking it would be good to have that freedom but was put off by the thought that people on narrowboats were few and far between and a bit 'different' to be kind.... i was about 19 at the time!!
Anyway we had a great day, hadn't a clue what we were doing, got grounded, probably went too fast and thought the gaps under the bridges were tiny..lol

The day went so fast and when we handed the boat back we left for home chunnering on about how great it was. The only problem being that we wanted to do it again the following day. obviousley monay wouldn't allow that all the time so we spent a few weeks on the towpaths in different areas watching everyone else and chatting to some lovely people which is when we realised that there were so many people living on their boat. We had always intended to sell up at some point and move to a static caravan, had the site picked out and everything, but this got us thinking.

A few weeks passed and we gave in and hired anothe day boat this time from Bunbury. 5 minutes in to the day i was fed up and also worried because i didn't want to be fed up however another 10 minutes down the cut and all was fine. I told Tim How i had felt and he said he was the same but we had gone on to have another fantastic day and realised our dissapointment had been in the hire boat, being a fussy pair it wasn't as nice and neat, clean, quiet and as easy to handle as the previous one but and that had put a downer on the day but we got over that.

We were now wanting to do locks but it wasn't going to happen, so be it..

Once home every day was about narrowboats, on the tv, in the library, on the cut, on the internet , it just wouldn't go away. We spent time hunting down marinas, looking at boats for sale and somewhere along the line decided we wanted to pack in work, retiring early, sell the house, home school Kal and live on a narrowboat.

Having never been on one, what i hear you say, we started to go to brokers and see what they were like and agreed that if one of us didn't feel right then that would be the end of it..