Slow going up the Loire, more to savor than to see

Yet people pay thousands of dollars a week to float through the countrysides of various nations by barge. My parents became obsessed with barge travel - so much so that they planned a rare family trip around it, hosting their adult children for a week afloat in the Loire Valley. And when they asked, I said yes.

Normally, this is the part of the story when the writer talks about being won over by the slow pace of life, the lush and rolling countryside, and the cagey but charming locals. And yes, maybe these things did happen. But the image that sticks with me from my week on the canals of France is something quite different: the moment when I turned, horrified, to see my father about to be cut in half by his very own barge.

It happened on the third day of the trip. We were trying to moor the barge by pulling it against the shore, and my father’s feet slipped off the edge. Suddenly his body was about to become a bumper between our massive boat and the rusty, unforgiving canal wall. My brother pulled him aboard in time, and my father was unshaken by his close call. But the incident suggested that there are some inevitable surprises when you travel on a vessel that you are also, the whole time, learning how to drive.

Barge travel is a lifestyle for Europeans, especially retirees, thousands of whom drift through country waterways for months at a time. These people have a certain expertise with barges: They can maneuver their long boats through tiny bridges, turn them around crisply, even venture out of canals into wilder rivers.

For the inexperienced, though, barge travel requires skills that most of us do not have. (There are luxury barge companies that guide you through France with a captain and crew, but that’s a whole other vacation.) When you are not accidentally scraping the side of a lock or another moored boat, the novelty is part of the fun.

My parents rented our barge from Le Boat, an enormous operation that rents barges all over Europe, from England to Italy. Our trip started a few hours south of Paris, where a canal runs roughly parallel to the snaky curves of the Loire River. We got our boat on a Saturday afternoon in a town called Decize.