boats.

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

(If you haven't read The Wind In The Willows...why not?)

If you have Amazon Prime, you have access to the profoundly uneven and weird selection of Prime streaming video. One of its more rewarding options is Cruising The Cut, a homebrewed docuseries by a guy who appears to be some sort of video-making professional, who decides to buy a narrowboat and go spend long stretches traveling England's canal system. It's incredibly soothing (and also seems to be available on YouTube).

I'm not unfamiliar with England, and I grew up around boats, but this whole thing is absolutely wild. I barely know where to start.

• Britain's canal system had 4,000 miles of canal at its peak. There's 2,000 miles of it still.
• His boat is steel, 56 feet  (~17 meters) long. That is a damn big boat. It steers like my high school friend's 1977 Cadillac, which one would ordinarily say "steers like a boat," but.
• Like all narrowboats, it's 6-7 feet wide, and the narrow canals and locks can almost all handle 2 boats at once.
• My sailing adventure was in a boat 42' long, 14' at its widest.
• They run on adorable diesel engines with a usual max speed of 4-6 mph, but the correct speed is 3 mph or less. In the boats I know, this is essentially idling forward.

Navigating open water is a question of compasses, charts, lighthouses, foghorns, island contours, water towers (and GPS, if you're into that sort of thing). There's...not really navigation. It's a canal. It's a highway for boats. There are simple maps, but also posted signs with arrows.

The idea that there's 2,000 miles of waterway that you don't have to navigate and is generally 6' deep or less is just...some idea from another planet.

Much like with a train (at least in the U.S.), the canals are often in a secret world inaccessible or invisible by road. There are quite a lot of sheep, farms, and houses, and in one stretch, downtown London.

An aqueduct that carries a canal over a roadway is not at all a new idea, but it never stops looking weird to me. And then this thing, which is just amazing.