This is the first of a series of four books that follow the voyages of the Dutch barge ‘Saul Trader’ from the River Severn in Gloucestershire to Bordeaux in the South West corner of France.  Stories of the people and the places, the ups and the downs of travel on a barge around Europe, told with a liberal helping of tongue-in-cheek and enlivened with a fair smattering of anecdote and humour. We navigate the sometime treacherous waters of the Severn Estuary and drag the bottom of the Kennet & Avon Canal to the River Thames and London, before braving the busy shipping lanes of the English Channel to reach France. We suffer the first of several flooded bilges, climb through the four Belgian boat lifts and get serenaded at a music festival, dodge the massive ships in the water motorways of Holland and enjoy the spectacle of the Dordrecht in Steam weekend, before savouring the delights and dangers of Amsterdam to Friesland along smaller more typical Dutch waterways , lockless and lined with windmills. Finally we return to France after a hairy passage of the turbulent Albert Canal and  the excitement of the Ronquierres Plane and brand new Strepy-Thieu boat life, to winter in Cambrai.