I've done an overnight and the following day on a canal boat. If I'm cynical the friend called me up to crash overnight on the boat he had hired with his girlfriend because the day I was there we had to do about ten locks. Good experience though. Things that I learned on that barge -
1. Ducks are evil. Sure they look nice and who doesn't like to hear a good quack, but seeing two ducks trying to drown a third changed me.
2. Swans are also evil. But they are stupid with it, brave but stupid. A lone swan attacking the rear of a barge is an amusing sight. A swan flying directly at your face when you are stood on top of the barge because it is flying to reach the rear to attack it is a bit scary.
3. Opening lock gates quickly turns into a macho game of 'who can push the most water resistance and so open the gate earliest.'
4. Spending an hour travelling around the edge of a valley to reach a point 100 metres away from where you entered the valley is actually not in the slightest bit frustrating. It's really rather pleasant.
5. Spending a whole day travelling, opening gates and generally trying to push on as fast as possible because you are running a little behind schedule, and then having to catch a bus back to where you left the car, and the bus ride taking 30 minutes is also not frustrating. It's sort of amusing, a real change of pace.
6. German girls, upon seeing your reading material (I was doing some work on the immediate pre-war period), will tell you about living near Bergen-Belsen and then get a strange look on their face.
7. Three average sized males can sleep in a small double-bed together. They just don't talk about it afterwards.
I enjoyed it, but you won't see a whole lot of England in a short period of time. And although the countryside sections are scenic, the canals used to serve an industrial purpose so some of them don't go through the most picturesque parts of the country. If you do it and decide to do the Worcestershire canal network then I'll meet you at 'The Lock' in Wolverley for some of their good food. That section of the canal is one of my dogs favourite places.
