Welcome to The Olivia Rose Diaries. I began this blog in March 2020, when Michael and I left the UK and arrived back at our boat ‘Olivia Rose’. She was moored on the Moselle and we intended to spend our summer cruising the canals and rivers of France. Four days after we arrived the country went into lock-down.

This blog was initially written to give an insight into living on a boat through a pandemic in a foreign country, after which it would follow us once we finally made it back out on the water. However, it has since broadened to cover our lives on land as well. In order to be able to stay in France on a full-time basis after Brexit we had to buy a property, not something we ever wanted to do again. We were lucky enough to find an off-grid cabin near the Pyrenees, which has added a new dimension to our lives. Determined not to let our new home tie us down, we spent the winter of 2021/22 house-sitting all over France and have found it to be a great way to explore new areas.

In the spring of 2022 we returned to ‘Olivia Rose’ once more, hoping for a ‘normal’ season on the water.

 If you would like to know more about our lives I have written three books. ‘Just Passing Through’ was my first book and is an account of our travels on the water, whilst my second book, ‘A Simple Life’, shares the challenges of living off-grid and settling into a foreign country. My newest book (available June/July 2022) is called ‘The Turning of the Seasons’ and is about a very different time of our lives, when we had a smallholding in Wales. As the prequel to ‘Just Passing Through’ it also explains why we left it all behind to live on a boat. All books are available on Kindle and paperback via Amazon.

Whether it be through reading the books or following the blog, welcome aboard! We hope you enjoy our adventures as much as we do.

Mary-Jane Houlton