For quite a few years I’ve talked about a hand-wavy future in which I am somehow able to split time between the US and the UK. The dream is to secure a permanent home-away-from-home somewhere inspiring that scratches our travel itch when visiting, but that also also allows us to invest in that place. Join local communities and meet friends, join a local pottery studio, have those friends over for dinner. Maintain a small garden perhaps. Family and friends would have a cool and free place to stay.

We lived in the UK (York specifically) and we absolutely loved it. The people we met (and ability to easily communicate!), relatively easy and inexpensive access to Europe for travel, and far enough from the US to feel unique – all great things that checked a lot of boxes for us. This summer we are spending around seven weeks back in the UK as a bit of a fact-finding mission to see if the UK still felt like a potential cake we could eat while having it back in the States too. Starting with London and life on a narrowboat.

First, London

We started our summer in London. The flight was uneventful, though I will say the 8ish hour flight time from Detroit is a bit too short in ways. You get on the plane, settle in, see what movies are available, and soon enough dinner is served. You eat dinner and you’ve got 6 hours left in the air. So you try to sleep as much as you can because it’s past bedtime in the UK and you want to try to adjust as much as you can. 4ish hours later of very fitful “sleep” breakfast is served. Eat. Feel over-full and mildly gross. Try to sleep another hour maybe, then it’s time get ready to get off the plane.

When we did get off the plane it was very early and well before our check-in. We were both fairly miserably tired and our guest house host had some issues with laundry due to the heat, which meant we actually had a slightly late check-in (instead of an early check-in which is what we had hoped for!). Still, we were able to drop out bags off, after which we walked around our neighborhood for close to 5 hours and genuinely felt so happy to be there. But by 5pm when we learned we STILL wouldn’t be able to check in, we were SO tired we decided to just ride a random city bus around for an hour and a half to kill time. Desperate times.

Eventually we got into our room, which was nice, but hot. Here is a very quick tour around our room (it was in a persons home, a woman and her child):

This might be a good time to point out that there was an exceptional heatwave in London the week we were there, and our room (and the entire house, and frankly most of London and the UK in general) had no AC. As a result, one night the fan by our bed measured 34C, roughly 93F.

For this trip, we decided to stay in Camden. I don’t know much about London or it’s villages/neighborhoods so take this all with a grain of salt, but Camden in my research was a good location with very good access to the city and public transport, lots of green space, and great walkability. It seemed like a potential place for us to live, if we were ever to live in London – this was part of our goal of visiting London in the first place, evaluate it as a potential place to live.

So what did we actually do? Most of the time I was on my laptop in the British Library.

During the heatwave the British Library allowed anybody to work from the library and they were open from 9:30AM to 8PM. We got to the library every day at 9:15AM to wait in line with hundreds of other people so I could get one of the best desks, then stayed at that desk until around 7:30PM most days. Lindsay walked me to “work” and stayed for a few days, but sometimes when traveling like this (when I am spending most of the days on my laptop) it can be a bit depressing / frustrating. The majority of my time is spent staring at a screen when one of the great cities of the world sits 20 feet away, unexplored. At the same time, sitting in the British Library in front of a huge column of very old books seven stories high feels pretty special. A few days sitting in front of this world class collection of books and it really sinks in how special of a place this was, and how lucky I was to be sitting in this space, even if I was just sitting on my laptop.

Lindsay also found out that the British Library has a Magna Carta, a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, and this amazing wax tablet from Roman Egypt that is a student’s writing practice tablet literally feet away from where I had been working all week (below):

A highlight of London was finding a restaurant that served not only sticky toffee pudding and spotted dick, but also pies and mash and jellied eel.

We walked a lot through quite a bit of the city and there was a ton of life everywhere. One of the great things about a big city like London is it feels like almost everywhere you look is some event or activity or interesting thing to look at or watch.

A huge highlight was seeing my childhood friend Mike and Ezgi + family. They have a beautiful house and family and it is so comfortable and easy to spend time with them. We only see them once every few years but it’s always great.

We were going to a flower market one morning and walked past the Museum of the Home and it turned out to be a very small but very cool museum. This photo might not look very exciting, but it’s part of a display of a room from the early 2000s.

The museum had rooms / houses from various periods of history along with stories that went along with it, but it’s my perfect sort of museum because it really lets you imagine you lived in a different time period / place. We also went to the Tate Modern, the Tate Britain (which we preferred), the British Museum (which is just absolutely draw-dropping – and stifling hot in places). I think the museums really were one of the most incredible things about London. While some (Lindsay) had feelings about seeing such incredible treasures procured from all over the world housed in one of the richest cities in the world, the fact that they were free and open to the public was truly special.

Another thing we’ve done a lot of (and are still doing) is watching the World Cup. We have certainly not watched ALL of the games, but we’ve watched quite a few of them. We rooted for England and Norway main, but regardless it was a lot of fun to go the pub and watch the game with a lot of energy all over.

We ate loads of fish and chips (some better than others), we ate doner kebabs, and went to Harrods, which is a silly thing I wanted to do because I watch a guy on Youtube who did a pub crawl in Harrods and I sometimes hear it mentioned in various TV shows and podcasts and things. To be honest I was less much impressed with Harrods that I thought I would be.

Mostly though, we just walked around the city for hours at a time as we typically do and took in the sights. I think something that I will remember is just how green the city feels. Whether in Kensington or Kew Gardens (which were incredible), or just on random city streets, the city feels lush and alive in ways that I don’t think many others do, which felt really special.

The last thing I’ll mention (because I feel like I’m just mentioning random things now) is that a surprise highlight for both of us on this trip was a £10 ticket to the Globe Theatre to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

We bought the cheap yard / standing tickets, and I sort of figured we’d go, stay for 15 minutes just to say we were there, but in the end it was without a doubt one of the top things we did in London. The performance was funny, the space was beautiful and intimate (several times the cast members bumped into me while running through the crowd), and the way that they added audience participation (including a bit of a audience-as-a-choir thing that was pretty great to be a part of), and the location of the thing right next to the Thames make it a pretty magical experience.

Living in London?

Would we be happy living in London? Almost certainly yes. The city is exciting, there is tons to see everywhere, it feels diverse and connected to the world, and there is still a ton of green space in the form of parks, even public swimming pools (lidos). The city has a lot of diversity in landscape and “vibe” with grittier areas, modern areas, but also of course many many magical old beautiful buildings from long before the US was even a country.

Another question I keep asking myself is “do I feel motivated to move to London tomorrow, sell our house in Michigan and never look back?” the answer to that is at this point “no” – given a big motivation to move to London, I think I would absolutely love living there, but without a specific reason to move there I think the cost of living would make it a bit difficult to do it easily.

If money was not an object, I think in a lot of ways London could be pretty perfect. It’s exciting and different enough from Grand Rapids (obviously I realize) to scratch most of the itches we have, and the flight time between Detroit and London is shockingly reasonable. It is of course a lot more expensive and takes a lot more time than Chicago to Grand Rapids for example, but you truly could do a long 4 day weekend in Grand Rapids if you lived in London (and money wasn’t a huge concern).

To have the money needed to live comfortably in a great part of the city with great walkability I think would require real drive, and at this point when I compare London to Tokyo which is (I’d say)much much more affordable, it’s not clear to me I’d have the drive today to move to London unless somebody handed me 3 million USD, at which point I do think I’d consider it.

Second, a houseboat on the Trent and Mersey and Caldon canal

With the idea of splitting time in the UK in mind, we’ve talked about a potentially more affordable option of buying a narrowboat. You can buy an older, modest but comfortable enough narrowboat for around £60K. You can get a permanent mooring in a marina and bam, for a few grand a year you have a home base to visit in the UK (and you can of course travel, slowly, around the UK for a very low cost). Before thinking TOO much about the possibility of buying a narrowboat we figured we should perhaps start by renting one for a week to test the waters.

I suppose I should also mention what the whole narrowboat thing is, briefly at least: there are canals that run all over the UK (and many around Europe, and the world of course). These canals were used for moving commercial goods (e.g. coal, pottery, wood, etc). The canals are very narrow, and so the boats on them are quite narrow – you might call them narrowboats – now used(mainly) for recreational use. They are generally 6′ 10″ in width, and average 60ish feet in length (there are plenty shorter though). They go very slow (more on this later), generally with diesel motors.There are many small locks that are typically manually operated, and you can go all over the place on these canals, mooring up (basically tying up to the side of the canal) almost anywhere to sleep for the night, and in this way you can live on these boats while slowly traveling throughout the UK.

Note: If you have any interest in narrowboats, there is a huge collection of content creators on youtube as you might imagine !

Starting out

We took a train from London to Stafford. The plan was after Stafford we’d bus to Great Haywood where we’d start out on the Trent and Mersey Canal for seven days. This started out uneventful enough. We got on the train, excited to be on the way.

Then, about 1/3rd of the way to Stafford though, we were told that the train would not continue on as there were animals on the track. We HAD to get to the Greater Haywood marina by 3PM to pick up our narrowboat, so ended up taking an hour+ Uber the rest of the way (somehow it wasn’t as expensive as you’d think, around $80 USD I think).

We took the Uber straight to the marina which ended up working out great. Upon arriving to the marina (or actually across the street to a small restaurant and farm store with amazing pastries) we saw this very exciting (to me) fresh milk dispenser. It is maybe a small thing, but to us it was a sort of exciting “OK, you’ve done it, you’re about to start out on a very cool adventure and you’re going to do it with a bottle of fresh milk straight from the farm” feeling. The milk was around £1.75 I think.

We arrived two hours early but the boat happened to be ready so we were able to head out a bit earlier than expected.

The boat was amazing. I think we both had fairly low expectations, excepted it to feel like an older musty-ish camper perhaps. It is a bit tough to explain but it ended up being much much nicer than this. It was clean, very well appointed with everything you could possibly want for a week (the galley/kitchen had a stove, pans for baking, all the cookware and glassware you might want, etc), and generally just felt like a really cozy, comfortable, and surprisingly large home.

This is a pretty boring video but if you wanted a walkthrough of the boat, here it is:

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. When we picked up the boat we first ran into what I’m going to call The Guinness Situation. It turns out we rented during a promotion where the hire company was giving away Guinness when you picked up the boat. They asked if I like Guinness, and I told them I love it (which I do), and they shocked us with TEN cold Guinness beers which we put in the fridge right away. The refrigerator worked great btw. Anyway, the problem is that we had schlepped 4 Guinness with us from London that we had bought but not drank, leaving us with a total of 14 Guinness beers. Several cities later (in the future, as I type this) we’ve only just recently finished drinking all of this beer.

The company was great. A guy from the rental company, Charles, took us out on the boat for the first time. He did a full walk-through, explained everything a first-timer needed to know and even rode with us to the first lock and went over the process of going up / down a lock. At the top of the lock (we were going up the canal the first half) Charles hopped off the boat and walked back to the marina, and we were truly off on our own heading up the canal to the potteries near Stoke-on-Trent.

From this point around 1:30PM we made our way up to Stone. You can see almost the exact route on Google maps if you want, but it was around 10.5-ish miles and we got to Stone around 8:30PM. Roughly speaking that’s 1.5 miles per hour. Not fast. There is a path that goes along the entire canal length, the “towpath” it’s called, and there are people casually strolling along the towpath faster than you’re traveling on the narrowboat most of the time. But of course the walkers aren’t carrying a house with them.

That first day going to Stone was a bit stressful. Handling the boat isn’t so difficult except for the occasional time when you have an oncoming boat coming around a blind corner when you quickly need to stop and grab a line to pull the boat to a towpath the the other boat can pass. But the locks which Lindsay handled exclusively were stressful because the first day was super busy with lots of people standing around watching as you operate the locks and it feels like a lot the first few times you go through them. Luckily we ran into nothing but helpful, kind, easy going fellow boaters who helped us on the first day or two on most locks.

There are a lot of locks. I don’t know exactly how many locks, but a lot. One day I think we did something like 20, maybe even more. They each take 10, 15 minutes assuming you’re not waiting for anybody.

As far as what we actually did on the boat for 7 days, each day went roughly the same: wake up, make a cup of tea. Take a shower maybe. Sit in the front of the boat with the doors and windows open reading and enjoying the relaxing views outside. Maybe run to the grocery store if there was one nearby to do some grocery shopping.

Then around 9 or 10AM we’d generally set out for out for wherever we were going next. Our main destination was up to the potteries in (or near) the city of Stoke-on-Trent. If you’ve ever watched The Great Pottery Throwdown, some of the more notable locations are filmed at a place called the Gladstone Pottery Museum.

We wanted to see the potteries and then if time allowed, continue on a different Canal called the Caldon to get as far as we could towards the city of Leek. Along the way, stop at small local pubs and drink a real ale. Try to tackle the Guinness problem, thirst allowing.

We went through Stoke-on-Trent and took a (rather long) walk to the Gladstone Pottery Museum, so that was main mission completed.

To be completely honest, and this was a major takeaway from the entire trip, the time it took to get through Stoke-on-Trent was perhaps not time well spent. Stoke-on-Trent is I’m sure a very lovely city but the path the canal takes through it is long, industrial, and not particularly pleasant. If, or when really, we rent a narrowboat again, we’ll not take this trip through Stoke.

After Stoke we eventually turned onto the Caldon, which was a narrow but very beautiful canal. It’s interesting to compare one stretch of a canal to another and see little differences. I’d say the Caldon, at least the stretch we were on towards Leek, was very “cozy” feeling.

We didn’t make it all the way up to Leek because we wanted to take it SLIGHTLY slower on the way back towards Great Haywood. It’s a bit akward to have a 7 day period on the boat because you have to turn around at some point, and on the day you turn around you of course are going to be going right back through everything you just saw that same day. We made the decision on the day we turned around to speed well past Stoke so that we could be out of the industrial and loud (people on loud motorbikes in the middle of the night, etc) area.

The day we turned around we ended up having to go around 1.5 hours further up the canal, away from where we wanted to be going (only to backtrack that 1.5 hours right away!) because we had to find a “winding hole”, basically an area with enough space for you to be able to turn the narrowboat around. Keep in mind these boats are very long and not very maneuverable so you can’t just turn them around anywhere you want.

Anyway we made it past Stoke and moored up somewhere pretty for the night and on nights 4, 5, and 6 we took it relatively slow the rest of the way back to Great Haywood.

I won’t ramble on a ton more but the last three days were excellent, very comfortable with the boat and the locks at this point so very little stress and enjoying the feeling of confidence, not to mention that beautiful scenery.

I’d say we ate on the boat about 50% of the time. Along the route there were grocery stores (Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Aldi, and one Lidl perhaps) that we shopped at. We made sandwiches, at a lot of muesli, eggs, relatively simple food. Other meals we ate out at pubs, though if I’m honest I can’t really remember super specific foods we ate. Looking back at our photos it seems we ate a lot of baked goods and snacks. Also crisps, but that’s for another post.

Another small memory that was nice was a fishing tournament we happened to be moored up over night in the middle of. We woke up in the morning and the canal was absolutely packed with young kids with their parents in a fishing tournament. It was a very chill, relaxing sort of fishing tournament but really wonderful, positive vibe. There was another narrowboat setup near us that sold coffee and tea and baps, baps being in this case what we might consider a hamburger bun with a bit of bacon on it and brown sauce. It’s sort of magical to wake up, walk down along the towpath and get a tea and snack and sit and read and watch the kids along the shore fishing.

We ended up making it back to Great Haywood and staying on “Tixel Wide”, a sort of mini-lake that the canal fed into. We had to return the boat by 9AM and this place was only 20-30 minutes away. In the morning we got back on time, dropped the boat off without incident, and were on our way to the train station (and Liverpool).

A few more notable things just so I remember them:

• Lindsay was opening a lock at one location and there was a naked man standing in a field with a black balaclava mask masturbating (here is a link to a mainly safe for work photo, you can see the man with the mask on and no shirt but nothing below the waste)
• I was worried the first night near Stoke because there are lots of stories of young people breaking windows on narrowboats and it wasn’t clear to me where it was safe to moor up
• One morning when unmooring I left the “piling hooks” behind stupidly and was very frustrated with myself, not knowing how expensive they would be to replace (turned out to be around $20 bucks or so, could have been worse)
• We had a few very long conversations with various family and didn’t realize we were paying $0.20 a minute :/
• We didn’t hit anything or run into any boats or have anything else particularly bad happen.

This was a great experience. If I did a similar trip again, and we might, I would almost certainly try to do a 2 week long trip around the “Four Counties Ring” – this still goes through Stoke, but only once, and I would have enjoyed having more time on the boat I think, without backtracking through areas we’d already seen.

Will we buy a narrowboat?

Continuing with the idea of evaluating potential paths to split time between the US and the UK, the entire time we were on the boat Lindsay and I were talking about if we could see ourselves buying a narrowboat and living on it.

The answer in short is “probably not right now” – I absolutely loved the trip and it already (peak behind the curtains: it’s been 3 weeks off the boat so far) feels like a dream I had. That said, one thing we really felt while on the boat is that we wouldn’t feel like we were investing in one community. The transient nature of narrowboats, especially if you are cruising along the canals, makes me wonder if I’d feel like I was really building a home away from home in the way that I think we want.

If you talk to / read about / watch youtube videos about narrowboaters, it seems clear that you end up building a community with the other narrowboaters themselves. People sit outside and have bonfires or cookouts along the towpath and you get to know people as you pass them throughout the seasons, potentially seeing the same people many times over a period of days if you’re traveling the same route. But for me, I think if I was going to try to invest in something “permanent”, it might be nice to get to know our neighbors and feel like we were investing in a specific community.

That said I will think about this trip often I think, and I really do think we could live on a narrowboat for months or more out of the year. I’m thinking for now, for this stage of our lives, looking into a narrowboat share (where you “buy” into 1/8 of a boat for example and get to use the boat 6 weeks a year) might be something to look into next time Lindsay and I find ourselves equally jobless.

OK, now onto Liverpool, York, and Ireland.