Looking for a way to power down on vacation? Take the tiller on a canal boat, maximum speed 4 mph. On England's pretty inland waterways, stepping down the pace of daily life is a requirement.

You'll still need to pay attention, of course, even in low gear. Try not to miss the canalside pubs ... backing up a 60-footer churns mud and won't win points with fellow canal users.

On the Oxford Canal, north of London, skipper Bill Mills had a pub diversion well in hand. Tapping his cigar, he expertly eased our boat Dreamchaser — a mere tiddler at 40 feet — gently alongside the canal bank outside the village of Heyford. We passengers tied up the boat, crossed the tiny stone bridge swept with willows, and headed to a nearby watering hole for a ploughman's lunch and a pint of bitter.

During summer months, canals in England and throughout Europe attract a flotilla of pleasure boaters exploring the vineyards of France or the flower regions of Holland, or cruising Ireland's Royal Canal. Others simply want to disconnect for a while from the digital world.

Mills, a Hong Kong businessman and frequent visitor to the U.K., has been cruising England's waterways since the 1970s.

"Back then, the canals were still very quiet, with boatyards, little family businesses, and it was an entry into another world of 18th- and 19th-century countryside and fading industrial architecture," Mills said. "You could see England through a back door into history ... I was hooked by the combined beauty of the farms and industrial smokestacks that you can traverse in a day."

The smokestacks have gone, but these once-busy arteries of commerce — some 2,000 miles of waterways in the U.K. — offer dayhire excursions, guided tours and independent cruises through some of the most beautiful countryside in England.

Earlier that morning at the Oxfordshire Narrowboats boatyard in Heyford, we'd joined a day cruise on the Oxford Canal, which runs for 77 miles through quiet rolling countryside.

The trip to the Queen's Head pub near Banbury and back to the boatyard was less than 10 miles. Strangely, this filled the entire day.

But then canal life is all about slowing down; there is no fast lane. Boats motor along at 3 mph, slow enough to have a conversation with folks along the canal bank, steady enough to jump off onto the towpaths from which horses pulled canal boats 200 years ago. It's a pace that makes driving feel like breaking the sound barrier.

There may be better ways to see the English countryside in full summer but none comes to mind.

Far from traffic, Dreamchaser chugged past banks of foxgloves, dog roses, buttercups, hogweed, cowslips and daisies — a different landscape than Hawai'i's but no less of a paradise. Birdsong warbled down from the trees; grazing sheep and cows stared from fields on either side.

Narrowboats take their name from the 7-foot beam that fits inside the locks through which all must pass on the canals.

The big adventure onboard is navigating these locks, snug rectangular wells that raise and lower the boats by up to 5 feet. Once a full-time job for keepers who lived next to the locks, opening of the gates is now left to passengers. Each lock takes about 20 minutes to fill; three boats at a lock has the makings of a traffic jam.

Beginning around 1755, the canals spread a web of transportation routes across England, only to be made redundant by the arrival of the railways in the 1800s.

Peak service was around the time Jane Austen was writing her novels. Narrowboats, however, were strictly for commerce in that era. It's hard to imagine Mr. Darcy and Emma Woodhouse ever traveling this way.

"Laid back, good-tempered lovers of food and wine" are those best suited to canal trips, mused Mills, who has weathered — in the true sense of the word — good and bad canal experiences.

"Once, during a downpour on the Birmingham-Worcester canal but following a drought, there wasn't enough water in the canals," Mills recalled. "We constantly had to go ahead to open two or three locks to bring down enough water to float us to the next lock ... 23 locks in one day. Not pretty."

But on this day, thanks to the unpredictable British summer, the canals were full.

As we waited at the final lock, a rush of white in the reeds was followed by a splash, and a bank of swans moved out behind the boat: a fine show on a very deliberate day.