Adventure Begins

It all started last year when Julie and I started thinking of life changing stuff. New everything…..Jobs, house,way of life,you know mid life crisis sort of thing. It was around this time that I saw a program on discovery channel about working narrowboats and thought ` now thats an idea`   We thought it through and decided to look into it. The house was put up for sale and we went looking for a narrowboat. It`s not like buying a car, kicking tyres, oh what a nice colour thing, this was going to be our home, so everthing was investigated by internet,books and talking to people on the canal being the main way. We then went looking, seeing good boats -high prices, bad boats-high prices , in general a high price market for value for money. This is why it took nearly 5 months to find the one we wanted for the price we knew was good value. In the search we had a list of things that we would not move from,a budget, length of boat 57 ft to 60ft,a budget, engine good ,a budget,general condition good,and most important, a budget which was set at £40,000 and not too go over in anyway!!  The house had a buyer, still no boat, we arranged to stay at parents for the inbetween time ( house sold, boat bought ), when by chance we went to a boat yard not in our book to visit, there we saw Teila, looked around her inside and out, the big thumbs up from Julie, Teila was the one. Before you ask she was under budget…. This was December 2006, full survey was done, little jobs that needed to be done was done, the money was paid on the 16th December, we moved some stuff on her that night and slept not a lot that night ,we were taking Teila from Stoke-on-Trent too Swanley Nr. Nantwich the next morning, the adventure begins.

Now might be the right time to tell you that we had never been on a moving narrowboat before in our lives, inside one,on top one, one in the water ,one on hard standing, but never ever on a moving one. We had planed to go on holiday on one, but just did`nt have the time. We had a couple of friends to help us, Farmer John my mate had been on holiday on a narrowboat and Julies mate Graham was like us a canal virgin. Anyways after two days of laughter, hard work, and much more laughter we arrived at our mooring for the rest of winter and settled down to living aboard our new home.

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