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Pete, I have a twenty-something nephew lives on a canal boat, more about that later.

And I must apologize Sir for not finding the time to meander through Wales, not meeting you in person being one of the few things I missed getting done on this trip.

Anyways... back to the thread.

Back with my cousins and their kids, a couple of days went by and I was missing riding the bike. Thirty plus miles away to the northeast of Blackpool is a scenic pass in the western fringes of the Pennines called the Trough of Bowland.

Back in the 60's when I was a kid, relatively few folks in England owned cars, my granddad had one, and in the years before we left my father would fix up and drive old cars, I'm recalling three, two Austin sedans and a van, all of which had to be cranked by hand to start 'em up much of the time.

The Trough of Bowland was a place us kids would get driven to on occasion, for a picnic by a roadside stream there. Mid-week during my last week I took off for a seventy mile day to the Trough and back, a surprisingly easy and rapid journey without all my stuff aboard.

Some pics from that last day on a bike...

The purple stuff is heather, I flushed a covey (flock??) of red grouse riding through.



Red Grouse are the British Isles race of the Willow Ptarmigan, seemed sorta odd to see a bird with Arctic roots in this essentially mild and wet locale.





One picture I wish I woulda took on this day trip is when I came across a couple of hundred half-grown ring-neck peasants running loose around a farm house, in an adjacent field, and running in the road. Either just released or escaped.Seems like pheasant are pen-raised and released by the thousands all over England, for the hunting season in late summer and fall. Semi-tame pheasants walking around were a common sight the whole time I was over there.





With this last day-trip my vacation was about done. Time to pack up the bike, airlines take 'em as oversize luggage if they pack small enough, I had found a used travel case with wheels for mine before I left.