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Click above to go directly to the Canals page
You have found Allan & Debbie's Home Page. Here you can read all about us and our exploits on the canals as well as our journeys further afield to such places as the Norwegian Fjords, the Alaskan Coast, Russia, Egypt and Antarctica.
If you travel by canal and like watching TV, you may need help finding the Sky satellite. I have devised the Satellite Sundial which you may find useful.
I've added the details of our latest canal trip on the Thames and the Kennet and Avon Canal, to follow on from our spectacular 2009 trip which took us to Gloucester and the two recently-restored Pennine waterways the Huddersfield Narrow Canal (including Standedge Tunnel) and the Rochdale Canal before returning via Manchester, Wigan, Llangollen, Birmingham (for the Curly-Wyrley canal) and Oxford. Previous canal trips include a month on the Thames for the National Waterways Festival, visits to Boston including the Witham Navigable Drains and Chesterfield Canal, passage through Froghall Tunnel on the Leek & Caldon canals, a ride on the Anderton Lift, and a rough-weather trip from Sharpness to Bristol, so there are a host of new canal pictures for you to look at - as well as some old ones I have added with reminiscences from the 1940s, 1960s, and 1970s. These include the sights and sounds of the working boats at the 2001 festival in Milton Keynes.
2008 had been a fantastic year for our family, as both our daughter Vicki and our son David got married. We were lucky to have two such wonderful days in the year, and 2009 continued to delight us as David's wedding was followed after a suitable interval by the birth of our new grandson Thomas.
All the pages are packed with pictures; I hope you enjoy them. They are compressed to save file space but they are also available at higher resolution; e-mail me if you'd like any of them sent to you or if you'd just like to get in touch. On every page you will now find a handy link to a slideshow of its pictures on my Flickr photo-site.
One of our friends runs a sanctuary for rescued hens called Hen Heaven, at the appropriately-named village of Henfield in West Sussex. If you care about the welfare of these birds, please take a look at their website.
Allan and Debbie 2010
Milton Keynes, where even concrete cows do their Shopping
The canal pages have now got the pictures from our recent canal trips, as well as our earlier trips including the Bristol Channel, the Fens, the Great Ouse, the Thames and the Trent. Recently added are the stories of our two boats: "Thistle" the boat that survived two sinkings as well as being cut in half, and "Keeping Up" that we commissioned to replace her. You can also see and hear the working boats at the 2001 National Waterways Festival. There will be more trip reports and pictures added later, and hopefully I'll be able to scan in some old photos from our earlier trips - a task which I've just started with a few pictures and reminiscences of the River Shannon and the Norfolk Broads in the 1960s and 1970s, the canals in the 1970's, and our trips on Thistle from 1987-1991
The latest travel report from Russia with Love. In 2007 we spent 2 weeks cruising from Moscow to St Petersburg. There are pages of pictures and descriptions of the two cities and the cruise between them. I'm sure you'll enjoy these.
Another of our travel reports, our pictures from Egypt. In 2004 we spent 2 weeks in Cairo, on Lake Nasser, and on the Nile and I have selected the best from all the pictures I took there.
Next there are our pictures from the Antarctic and the Chilean Fjords. We went there in 2003 for a once-in-a-lifetime experience in the last unspoiled place on the Planet. I've just finished uploading our logbook and I've selected the best examples of the 1000 pictures I took there. If you really like looking at penguins let me know and I'll email you hundreds more pictures!
The second fjord trip, in 2001, was to Alaska on board the last remaining great American Steamship SS "Universe Explorer"
The first of our BIG holidays, in 1999, was our Norwegian cruise to the land of the Midnight Sun.
