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Would you mind giving me some of your time and direction regarding proper planning of the following scheme. . . I would greatly appreciate all unbiased opinions given our narrowboating criteria. Next April end of 2014 my friend and I will be flying over from Amsterdam after having spent 1.5 weeks riding bicycles through the tulips and paying our respects to a man who was stationed there during WWII. Once in jolly old England we then wish to float along an exquisite canal for 6 days, with forests and taking in pretty villages and authentic pubs with which to imbibe ourselves (?) of (?). . . various UK ales and the odd scotch. History is high on our list of likes as well as pastoral country settings. We aren't excited about boating past large scale development. Would like to take 1 - 4 hour walks from the boat. We want to actually boat for 3-4 hrs/day maximum. We don't want to deal with many locks. I know that if we don't choose the Llangollen we will have to handle some locks, looking for a maximum of 30 locks (+ or -) in total. We very well could end up staying in one location more than one night and would like to choose the right section of a canal to start from. We may end up only partially boating (half way + or -) the weeklong route. We need to make that part awesome! Do you know of a 3-4 day route that may be perfect for our version of 1 week? Once we figure out the right trip for us, then we can hire the narrowboat. The Nicholson's Guide - would you recommend this once we've chosen a route? Other guides/maps? Can you help me by looking at my narrowed down list of 4 canals and then give me your opinion please (given my lengthy and rather demanding requirements...)? South Oxford Llangollen (Bettisfield) - is where we've been looking at embarking from. (Less than a week travel won't get us to the famous aqueduct me thinks.) Staffordshire and Worcestershire. Ashby Canal Thank you very kindly, Carol

Having left our home moorings in Burscough three weeks ago we are now moored between bridges 12 and 13 on the Llangollen canal. Are we mad to be here in August? This is reckoned to be one of the most popular canals on the system, especially for hire boaters and a lot of other boaters tend to stay away from it in summer. So we shall see. At the moment we are moored on a 48 hour visitor mooring, having arrived yesterday, and we are the only boat to have used it in the last 2 days!, and it’s one of the quietest and darkest moorings we have been on for ages, it’s great! We came up through Hurleston locks yesterday morning, after we had waited at the bottom for about a hour while some CaRT men did some repairs to the bottom gates on lock two which where leaking badly. Chatting with a couple of boat crews that where also waiting, one a hire boat and the other a boat that the crew had borrowed for a week. No one was in any panic to be going anywhere. While we where waiting I thought I’d have a fish with the magnet for any dropped windlasses, didn’t find any but as the locks where being refilled one of the CaRT men walked down to tell me I shouldn’t have been fishing with the magnet as it was against the bye laws! He even quoted a reference no at me, something like rule 44 section d I was amazed, never having heard of this before, thought it was a regular pastime for boaters? I did check later on and yes there is a British Waterways bye law from 1965 that prohibits anyone “Dredging for coal or any other rubbish from the canal without permission from the board” Actualy it's 41 (D) What will we do if we ever drop our boat keys in? Get CaRT to come and find them for us?