Narrowboat canal trips are all the rage in the UK, the latest fashionable way to drift through the countryside at four miles an hour and call it wellness. But if you want a stateside Rat Pack weekend with a little grit on the glass, look to upstate New York and the Erie Canal. It’s not a cruise; it’s a road trip that forgot the road.
On the Erie Canal, it feels less like you’re “boating” and more like you’ve rented a studio apartment, bolted it to a barge, and pointed it west. You’re puttering through the scar tissue of American industrial history, past brick mills and grain elevators and towns you assumed flat‑lined when mules still had a union. Turns out, around Fairport and its neighbors, you can stitch together a surprisingly dense little canal‑town playground of food, booze, and live music, all within stumbling distance of where you tie up for the night.
The hysterical part is you drive the damn thing yourself. No captain, no crew—just you, a throttle, and the vague hope you read the orientation binder correctly. You bounce through a couple of locks with a retired guy in an orange vest watching you like he’s seen every kind of idiot and is ready to meet a new one. Then you putter into a village where the big drama of the evening is about to be you and your friends stepping off the boat like the boys are back in town, whether the town ordered that or not.
Next day, the town ends where the water slows down—a thin brown vein of canal sliding past clapboard porches and rusted swing sets, pretending not to notice it outlived its original job description a long time ago. Morning comes in layers: mist hanging low over the water, diesel cough from a passing workboat, bacon fat blooming out of a diner door that’s been propped open since the Nixon administration. The map will tell you this is farm country, but from the towpath it feels more like a forgotten front porch—cottonwood fuzz in the air, herons on patrol, someone’s laundry snapping on a line above a waterway that once moved empires and now mostly moves gossip and houseboats full of middle‑aged delinquents.
Out on the canal, the world drops to five miles an hour. Cornfields unspool like old film. Church spires pace you on the horizon. Every few miles, another town clings to its waterfront like a last good habit it refuses to quit. By late afternoon, the light turns syrupy and slow, smearing itself across the water, and you start to understand why nobody here is in a hurry to fix anything that isn’t clearly on fire. The highway forgot these places a long time ago, but the grill is still hot and somebody’s grandmother is still back there, quietly holding back the dark with pancakes and pie.
At canal speed, fight‑or‑flight doesn’t have much to do. There’s nothing to outrun. The trip becomes a kind of accidental retreat—no yoga teacher, no curated “experience,” just miles of flat water, low bridges, and time you physically cannot turn into productivity, no matter how addicted you are to the grind. Your days shrink down to three simple questions: How far are we going? What’s the weather doing? Where are we tying up and eating tonight? Somewhere in that narrowing of focus, your brain finds room to wander, to file old thoughts, to let a few new ones in.
By the second or third day—somewhere between the soft slap of water on the hull and the faint, regrettable stink of dead cigars overflowing in the ashtray—you realize what this really is. Not a vacation in the brochure sense, not an “escape” with a spa menu and a checkout time, but a temporary transfer of custody. You’ve handed your life over to the canal and these towns for safekeeping. They hold onto your worries for a while, tuck them behind the bar with the lost scarves and forgotten credit cards.
When you hand the keys back and step off the boat, nothing measurable has changed. The emails are still waiting. The world is still on fire in all the usual places. But your head is quieter. Your shoulders sit lower. Some small, important part of you remembers what it feels like to live at human speed—to let places reveal themselves slowly, to drink cheap beer on a dock with your friends and call it enough. That alone feels like treasure.
A long, low weekend drifting up the Erie Canal in a steel shoebox with your favorite idiots will prove something simple and unfashionable: bad jokes, cheap liquor, and friendship still float. Barely, sometimes. But they float. And for a couple of days, so do you.
If you plan it right, (and why wouldn’t you?) an Erie Canal boat weekend can be a legit eat‑and‑drink crawl with plenty of character. The best clusters of bars and restaurants are around Rochester‑area canal villages like Fairport, Pittsford, Bushnell’s Basin, Spencerport, and Brockport, plus some good stops farther west and east.
Fairport: bars, patios, live music
Fairport is one of the strongest bases for food and nightlife right on the water. Within a short walk of the docks you get:
Nice Ash Cigars & Lounge – Offers a large walk‑in humidor, leather seating, TVs, and a members/non‑members lounge area; it is often described as one of the largest and best‑equipped cigar lounges in the Rochester area, with thousands of cigars and regular events.
Pittsford & Bushnell’s Basin
Pittsford’s Schoen Place and the Erie Canal Heritage Trail area are thick with restaurants and bars right on the towpath. Highlights include:
Spencerport & Brockport
These western villages make solid overnight or dinner stops with easy dock‑to‑table walks.
Boat Rentals
For a weekend on the Erie Canal, the sweet spot is a self‑piloted houseboat charter or a waterfront rental in one of the canal towns like Fairport or Pittsford. These give you that “floating apartment on the rust belt” vibe you’re chasing, without committing to a full week on the water.
These outfits are designed for beginners, include a safety and handling orientation, and explicitly market 3‑day itineraries, which works perfectly for a rat pack weekend cruise between small towns and lock‑side pubs.