Top tips for a Canal Barge Holiday

A canal barge holiday is definitely not your typical holiday or maybe not something you’d choose over a week abroad but I can assure you that these holidays are up there with my favourite ever family holidays!  There are hundreds if not thousands of miles worth of canals in the UK that are surrounded by beautiful scenery and towns perfect for a relaxing week away.  In this post, I’m going to do my best to persuade you to try a new way of travelling by giving you my own experiences as well as some top tips to make your trip even better!

This leads me onto my first tip for packing…. On all of our family barge holidays (which usually consist of 11 people and 1 dog) we only ever pack our clothes into large ikea bags.  Sounds so random, but they are so easy to fold up and take up very little room where as a suitcase is impossible to even get into the barge no matter open up and store!  Similarly for food, we do a small food shop before setting sail and will take everything in as little plastic bags as possible so that they can be folded up and stored with the Ikea bags.  We’ll then do our main food shop for evening meals and refrigerated food at one of the nearest shops after we’ve set off.

How do we know where the nearest shops are you may ask? Or you most definitely didn’t but I’ll tell you anyway… A week or so before we leave we will print off a couple of large maps of the ring we are doing which has all shops, water points, locks, pubs and a distance scale marked clearly.  We then make a key using various highlighters and will highlight all of those key points on the map.  Then, to make our trip even more organised, we work out how many miles we think we can do in a day (this has to include the time it takes to do a lock) and then mark out on the map where we think we should be stopping by the end of each day in order to complete the ring in the week.

Every ring around the country will be different, some will go through cities while some will feel like they’re completely in the middle of nowhere.  We’ve done a selection of rings including the Avon ring, the Warwickshire Ring, the Stourport ring and more.  The Warwickshire ring passed through Birmingham city centre and was a much more city based canal, where as the Avon and Stourport ring were much more rural canals, surrounded by beautiful scenery.  On canals in rural areas there are still plenty of opportunities to get off and visit the nearest town or city, it just requires that little bit more planning.  When we did the Avon ring we took a slight detour and a quick train journey to Stratford-Upon-Avon for an afternoon away from sailing and it was the perfect way to break up the trip.

Each ring will also have a very varied amount of locks to complete, this of course depends on how flat the city is or not.  The locks can be hard work, but if you’re with a larger group they can be the highlight of the trip, lots of teamwork and laughs as well as a good bit of holiday exercise.  If you’ve never seen a lock before, it’s basically a way of going up or down hill on the water, which involves; driving into the lock (that usually just fits one barge at a time) then closing the doors either end, unlocking the underwater doors with a steel key you’re provided with and then letting the water either fill up or drain, before you open the doors again and continue sailing.  All of that is usually estimated to take approximately 20 minutes but we’ve managed to get it down to 6 minutes in our family, we’re a bit competitive if you can’t tell! Often you’ll just come up to one or two locks straight after each other but sometimes, in steeper towns you’ll be faced with a staircase of locks which can be up to 30, one after the other!

If you’re looking to really chill on your barge holiday though, there are plenty of rings that have minimal locks so that you can really take your time and not feel like you’re at an intense boot camp.  

Last but not least, how to book your canal barge holiday… This will all depend on the ring that you choose as you’ll have to find a barge hire company that sits or has access onto that specific ring.  However a lot of them span across most of the uk, for example we have used ABC Boat hire numerous times and have never had an issue, they have a wide selection of barges as well as locations and were fantastic help for our very first barge experience in teaching us to drive and the basic safety procedures.  AngloWelsh are another company that we have used as they have loads of boats of offer for different group sizes, all of which have great layout options and lots of destinations to choose from.  Prices can vary massively depending on the group size and length of time you want to be away but this is a fabulous budget holiday idea and one that I would recommend to all families, I can guarantee a good time for everyone!