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Barging through Warwickshire

photography | travel
An iron bridge crossing a river

So, 2016 was the year of an… interesting… new experience. For the first time ever, I stepped foot on a narrowboat and journeyed slowly down a small section of the River Avon in Warwickshire back in July. The whole thing came about as an idea from my Mum when we asked her how she wanted to celebrate her 60th birthday. A friend of hers had raved about how fun it was and so she wanted to give it a try.

Which is why we found 7 of us, on an 8-berth narrowboat, chugging down the River Avon earlier this year, looking forward to a relaxing week and seeing the local sights.

Here’s a friendly tip for you… don’t do it.

Ok, that’s not the friendliest tip. Nor is it strictly true. I should be more specific. Don’t do it with that many of you, cramped together with nowhere to escape to when tempers become frayed. And, if you’ve never done it before, don’t choose a river as your first experience. It was bloody hard work. And everyone we met along the way all said the same thing… we should have done a canal first.

But hey! You live and learn, right? I learnt how to do the locks, how to steer a narrowboat and how to tie knots. I also learnt that my patience levels are pretty low and that my sister and I can survive in each others company for a week without killing each other! I’m not going to lie, it was a pretty stressful week. But, thankfully, we can all look back and laugh at it now, even though things didn’t really seem funny at the time.

I thoroughly enjoyed the weather we had though and Stratford-upon-Avon is a beautiful city, one I’d like to re-visit again at some point. Here are a few images I captured along the way…

Landscape shot down the river with a bridge in the distance

canal boat on the river Avon looking at the bank

Mum, Dad and daughter cuddle up together on a river bank

A boat rows under bunting in Stratford-upon-Avon

An iron bridge crossing a river

It’s funny how I can look back on this trip with fondness now and you certainly can’t tell all the frictions that were felt in these photos, thank goodness! So, take from that that some trips might not be the best at the time, but you’ll still have some great memories of them later on down the line!