Buy a 90-year-old Dutch canal barge and cruise the canals and rivers of France. Eat snails. Drink Burgundy. Sounds like a retirement dream. Sometimes. In On a Barge in France Harvey Schwartz tells of the four years he and his wife, Sandra Hamilton, spent on Hoop Doet Leven on the French waterways. Each chapter presents a vignette of French country life and life in the unique linear village of international bargees traveling extremely slowly through the most beautiful, historic and mind boggling areas of France.

This is a story of shucking the briefcase, losing the tie, and floating 26 tons of riveted iron through France to Paris. The perky young Vice President of Human Resources touched me on the shoulder and said, "Have a nice life." That moment, standing in the parking lot with my personal possessions in a cardboard box and my severance papers stuffed in my pocket, I thought, "Why the hell not?" The anarchist inside me was urging me back into the building to play carelessly with matches, but instead I went to Starbuck's. Sitting in the sun, sipping a cappuccino, it occurred to me that sometimes your life falls apart just enough to allow you to put it back together in an entirely different way. So I did the most logical thing. I bought a barge in France. Then my wife and I set out to fulfill a lifetime dream of living in the shadow of Notre Dame on the Seine in Paris. From Here to Paris is the story of how we climbed out of our well-worn corporate trench and, together, set to work creating our dream life, alternating between our cozy Victorian art studio in Sausalito California and our 56 foot, 1925 Dutch barge, Phaedra, cruising the canals and rivers of France, inching toward our ultimate goal, the Seine and Paris. This is a story of facing up to the emotional and ego hooks so deeply embedded in the trappings and symbols that define "success." Of selling the over sized house, shredding the credit cards and abandoning the mind-numbing commute in favor of a joyful struggle toward a fresh life. One lived in jeans and filled with long, leisurely afternoons floating along glass-still canals through medieval villages and rolling vineyards in the heart of Burgundy. It's also the story of realtors, moose horns, a mysterious black boat, catastrophic engine failures and how your life can pass before your eyes when you put those tons of iron into reverse and it keeps going forward. It's about learning the proper gender of things in French, cheating at Trivial Pursuit, cajoling France's sexiest boat mechanic and why real men don't do yoga. It's about realizing that getting to Paris can take years, so you better enjoy the journey.

The hilarious and true story of two senior-citizens and their whippet dog who hatch, plan and carry out a “lunatic scheme” to sail from Stone in Staffordshire to Carcassonne in the South of France.

Through the French Canals has probably tempted more people to explore the beautiful waterways of France than any other book. First published in 1970, it's been the key authoritative title on cruising the French canals ever since. The revised new edition is the essential comprehensive planning guide for anyone wanting to cruise through the French waterways or take their boat from the English Channel through to the Mediterranean via the inland route. It includes: over 50 routes fully described and illustrated, with positions of locks, towns and villages through routes from the English Channel and Atlantic to the Mediterranean, plus distances, and assessment of suitable boats for the canals. It also provides dimensions of locks and operating times, details of bridge heights, canal depths, fuelling points, waterway signals, a guide to the cost of living, shopping and stores, sources of weather information, haltes for overnight stops, and ports de plaisance. As well as new photography, the new edition is updated throughout with new information on local facilities, new haltes and ports de plaisance, new VNF License fees, revisions to cruise hire companies, updated references to holding tanks, the availability of diesel and costs of cruising and much more.

Richard Goodwin, producer of over twenty five feature films (including “Romeo and Juliet” by Franco Zeffirelli, “Murder on the Orient Express” by Sidney Lumet, “Seven Years in Tibet” by Jean-Jacques Annaud) is also the director of a documentary series, “Barging Through Europe.” Funded by Central TV UK, it was sold to forty television channels around the world, and was a huge success. The episodes about France were especially popular and helped promote the country as a tourist destination around the world. In a series of five books, of which this is the first, Richard takes us by water from Paris to the Mediterranean, through Burgundy, the Rhone Valley, Provence and south-west France.