After Richard retired I started murmuring with intent about going on an extended narrowboat trip, maybe a year I suggested?
Richard, always the more measured, suggested three months to see if we really liked it. That was the green light I needed to start trawling the internet for a ‘good deal’. Most hire companies made no exception to the fact that you wanted a boat for 12 weeks – if it was £1000 for one week, it was £12,000 for 12. Before long, you might as well have bought a boat for that price, so I kept trawling and hey presto, I found a company called ‘Escape the Rat Race’. I liked the name. After all that was exactly what we planned to do. For too long we had been living life at such a pace that the years were just whizzing by. What we wanted to do was slow life down, reconnect with each other and have time just to be.
ETRR offered us just that, so we set a date of early April 2020 until end of June to take time out. Planning got seriously underway as we decided to go north from Braunston. More experienced boaters than us (we had only ever done 1 week a decade before!) were incredibly helpful and our trip took shape.
As we all know, Covid hit in March and lockdown put paid to our immediate plans but sometimes something better comes out of disappointment.
Talking to Alex, who owns ETRR, I mentioned part of my disappointment of the postponed trip was that I had in my mind that in addition to recharging our batteries, I wanted our boat to become some sort of ‘prayer boat’. The idea of meeting people on the towpath, or other boaters, hearing their stories of life and maybe either offering to pray with them or for them, seemed a good idea.
Alex was amazed because he, as a committed christian himself, had felt God telling him for the last five years that he should put a prayer boat on the canals. Now here I was suggesting just such a thing. A month later Alex rang to say he had found an old boat in need of renovation and would we like to run it as a prayer boat in due course. It happened to be called Emmanuelle but if we removed the le at the end, it would appropriately be called Emmanuel, God with us. I firmly believe God has a sense of humour!
We reset the trip for September but by this time our ideas had slightly changed. Richard and I no longer needed time to reconnect or slow our lives down – Covid and lockdown had done that for us. Nor did we feel that we wanted to preplan our route. There are often set stoppages on the canals in the winter to allow for repairs to locks etc so some routes are not feasible. However, Emmanuel’s reconditioning has not gone to plan for lots of reasons so September came and went and we were still boatless. Then Alex suggested we start our trip in Wind Rose, a 58ft narrowboat available until March 2021. So here we are!
NarrowboatTLC 