2024-04-11 20:54:04
Jennifer Patricia has always been close to ships. Her father passed on her passion for the rudder in her childhood. So when, as a single mother with two children, she was deciding whether to buy an apartment and pay off the mortgage in retirement, she preferred the cheaper option and had a boat designed for her with borrowed money. The house on the water is exactly what she imagined and is the longest of the boats on the Grand Union Canal in the UK.
The canal in England is part of the British canal system. It is the main navigable route from London to the Midlands, on which dozens of people have chosen to live. Jennifer, who shares her adventures on Instagram under the nickname “Water gypsy”, has lived on the channel since 2021. “I love this lifestyle. I feel free, disconnected from the pressure of social norms, I don’t have a mortgage and I’m in touch with nature. It’s like a never-ending vacation,” he highlights.
Her job also allows her to live a nomadic life. She has a massage course and teaches yoga that can be done pretty much anywhere. Every year she has to sail 32 kilometers on the canal in order not to lose her license. “We move every two weeks. Being somewhere different every time is an advantage because our garden is always changing,” she says. Life ashore is a little more difficult in the winter, when temperatures on the ship reach as low as five degrees Celsius. Since Jennifer has two young children, she heats the house with a wood-burning stove or a radiator.
Solar panels generate electricity in the summer, and gas bombs are used for cooking and refrigerators in the winter. Every ten days, he has to fill the 870 liter water tank at the bow of the ship. “Our friends shake their heads at how much water we use. Maybe it’s something I should try to work on and stop being a spoiled princess,” she writes on her Instagram account.
The ship, which is almost twenty meters long and three and a half meters wide, was given to the mother of two children unequipped. She fine-tuned the interior herself and today it is furnished like an apartment inside. It has a kitchen, a living room with a dining room, which sometimes serves as a massage center, two rooms for children, a bedroom and a bathroom with a shower.
“The first reactions of my friends were usually: ‘Jeez, you have a normally big bathroom and that toilet looks real too.’ When you use it, you have the same feeling as in an apartment, it’s worse when we have to take out the compostable toilet or add water to the tank,” he admits.
Look at the photos of the home for two and a half million.