KEY POINTS:
Many of us dream about escape and adventure. Even more dream about escaping to France. Wine, food, flowers, romance and Paris to boot. Could any place in the world be nicer, apart from home?
That's what I thought the morning I decided to throw in my job and go adventuring in France - and found there can be another side to the great escape.
Early last year my wife Sally and I flew to Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. New Zealanders who'd done the trip as well as the intricate network of fact, experience and gossip on the internet held Holland to be the best and cheapest place to buy a canal boat.
We'd rented a cottage in the village of Schoorl about 40km from Amsterdam, through a website used by the Dutch to advertise holiday homes for rent. We drove our rental car through tulip fields striping the countryside with vivid colour.
It was March, but spring was warm that year. "You are very lucky," locals told us.
We wanted a pretty boat with a shower, double bed, good kitchen, dinette and living room, plus a decent cabin for guests. We found it after just one week: a 12m steel cruiser called the River Queen. It cost about $135,000, although you can buy a smaller, liveable boat for around $70,000, even less if you're prepared to rough it. Converted barges tended to be more expensive and bigger than purpose-built cruisers.
Next we had to master locks.
Our first, about 10km up the River Maas, looked rather like a cattle abattoir: a long concrete race leading to a huge gate behind which the business was done. Two ship-sized barges were inside already, along with a small cruising barge, and the lock-keeper was keeping the doors open for us. Escape was impossible.
We went through some 500 locks in the course of cruising more than 2000km of canals that year. Some were huge, some small. Some gave us a hard time, most did not, but if we became over-confident they had a way of putting us in our place.
We sailed through Holland and down the narrow tongue beside Germany, through Belgium and into France with no more than a few grazes on the paintwork to show for it.
Now we were in the Ardennes, the region where so much blood was shed in last century's wars. Battle scars could be found everywhere: military cemeteries, old trench lines, signs warning of unexploded shells and mines, even villages blown to bits and never rebuilt, such as Fleury-devant-Douamont, now just a pock-marked field filled with markers where houses once stood.
But ahead of us the River Meuse shone in the sun as it carved through heavily forested mountains.
Water lilies sprouted flashes of yellow. Irises laid gold along the banks. Fiery poppies grew thick in the fields. Clouds of soft white fluff billowed gently down the river. Iridescent blue butterflies danced in the warm air alongside huge dragonflies. Grey herons stood to attention as we passed. Water-fowl roosted in floating nests, fish rose to the surface, greatly agitating the fishermen evenly spaced along the riverbank, and a water rat, his coat a rich brown in the morning light, dived for his hole in the bank with a stroke of his strong tail.
The French made water rats into pate - pate de ragondin.
A lock-keeper took off his hat and bowed deeply when we thanked him for his efforts. He pointed at our little black flag with the silver fern.
"All Blacks!" he said, and gave us a thumbs-up. "Bonne chance!"
Understanding the French on their home ground was not easy. They ran their words together. Picking out individual words in a spoken sentence was like being presented with a dish of ratatouille and being asked to identify every ingredient - immediately.
Speaking the language was just as fraught. You might know the right words. Pronouncing them properly was another matter. If you got the emphasis wrong, you might as well be speaking English, which, however universal elsewhere, was not so in France.
Sally had never taken any French courses, yet she understood the language better than me, who had. When someone was speaking to us in French, they usually turned to her. I would be trying to understand the words; she'd be listening to what they were saying.
We spent most of our time on the canals running through rural France, a country very different from the guidebooks. We saw a lot of towns and villages and decided most were closed.
Actually, many were. The 35-hour week, which we'd admired from a distance, meant that opening hours were quixotic at best, especially in small businesses with few staff. When business was already slow, the short working week seemed to sap the energy from a town after an inexorable drift to bigger towns and cities had already taken its toll.
The villages were romantic, of course. They'd huddled amid their streets for centuries. The great stones and lollipop shades of blue and pink and yellow spoke of generations of lives lived. The village of Fontenoy-le-Chateau, for example, was full of past glories. The castle it was named after lay in ruins.
Sally went into an embroidery museum and was seized by its enthusiastic curator, who seemed short of customers.
This had once been the most important embroidery centre in all Europe. Its 700 skilled embroiderers had produced trousseaux for Princess Margaret and Grace Kelly. In the 1950s and 60s, their work graced Europe's top fashion houses. Now a single survivor silently embroidered in a corner of the museum.
The town was down to 700 inhabitants. Houses sported handwritten "for sale" signs. Abandoned cafes, charcuteries and drogueries dotted the streets. One sported a dead three-legged horse in its window. We wiped a hole in the dusty glass and discovered that it had been stuffed as part of the set for a French film. Shop and horse were for sale.
In Burgundy the countryside changed. Now we were in picture-book French countryside, full of vineyards, pretty houses and smiling people.
The lock-keeper laughed. His pretty daughter took our lines and laughed. The locks went wrong and wouldn't work. We all laughed. We ate eggs from a lock-keeper whose chooks roamed around his lock alongside five barking dogs and two dispirited magpies in a cage. Then we lay under leafy trees and gasped in their shade. The heat!
Life on the canals was slow. The speed limit was a brisk walk.
We'd planned to stop often, for long periods. We would find congenial towns and villages and live in them, possibly for months at a time. We would discover the best place to buy wine, patronise the finest boulangeries, stroll around in the evenings amid surroundings we knew intimately.
It didn't quite work out like that. Foolishly, we hurried.
I could live on a boat forever. Ashore, I hated small rooms, little houses, things to trip over. On a boat I loved everything: the order, the easy way one thing flowed into the next, the neatness, the joinery, the way the designer had fitted everything in, the sheen of wood in the yellow light.
Sally simply thought it small. She needed to step out of the boat, feel the grass and trees around her, go into town and buy food without having to ask the way.
Sally loved some of the towns and cities, but it wasn't enough, and we lopped off the second year of our planned life on the canals. We sold the boat to a group of New Zealanders who were to take it over when we laid it up for the winter.
Adventures are not simple events. They are complex, filled with delight and satisfaction, moments of complete happiness, danger, shards of hardship, fright and despair. Otherwise they would not be adventures.
We were living on the French canals in villages and towns that were said, by everyone, to be the most romantic in the world.
We were so lucky. Everyone said so. Not to enjoy every minute of it would be kicking luck in her teeth.
Yet we did not belong in someone else's country, no matter how much we tried. They made us welcome, or at least tolerated us. Some of their good things were ours, but not the critical elements of knowing and fitting that make home.
The balance sheet worked out like this: Sally liked living in Paris, on the boat, the endless choices of food and wine, the easy companionship and shared meals among canal travellers, the French countryside. She disliked locks ("dark and dank"), continually being on the move and being so long away from the South Pacific's clear light.
For me, throwing in my job was a roaring success. I liked the canal life in France so much I wrote a book about it: A Long Slow Affair of the Heart (Longacre Press, $34.95).
Our lives did change. In some ways for the good, in others... well, let's just say we're still working on that.
