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Great read. Thanks for the effort!

All this talk of bicycles on the forum got me thinking about moving this thread along.....

Last day. Over the previous two days coming north along England's spine, the Pennines, I had been laboriously traversing one steep-sided valley after another, I wasn't making big miles and it was getting old.

At that point I was overjoyed to find that Sowerby Bridge lay in the Calder River Valley, and that a canal actually ran along that valley, heading west, the direction I needed to turn.

Canals and old railroad bed trails; a cyclist's best friend when crossing though mountains.....





At this point I start running out of photos. I'm thinking that I felt that I already have enough (wrong, turns out you can never have too many photos). What happened was, when I hit the Calder River Valley and started knocking back the miles over level ground, a 65 mile day to Blackpool started looking very doable.

One thing that surprised me was how far west across England the streams and rivers draining to the East Coast extend. I was over by Manchester, England, heading west up the Calder River Valley, and STILL had not crossed over the divide to hit the Western slopes and the downhill run to Blackpool on the West Coast.

The official marked bicycle trails, as they often do, would have had me do a steep climb north out of the Calder Valley and resume my valley-hopping again. Fortunately this was a Sunday, and the roads were loaded with packs of British bicycle people, the lycra crowd. I got good directions from a guy at a stoplight who spoke my language, the language of grades and slopes and the lack thereof.

He understood my dilemma immediately. Turns out if I followed the Calder upstream to Todmorden, I could hang a right take the A646 going northwest. This road followed a rail line (always a good sign) and finally lifted me up and over the divide, threading me between and around the urban centers of Accrington, Burnley and Blackburn.

I made rapid progress, and only paused to take two photos of any note. This one is looking southwest towards Preston, from the high ground overlooking that town.




...and this one is mostly of note to those who know Blackpool, and its famous tower. This was my first view of Blackpool Tower, which sits on the seafront, taken from the perspective of coming from the east across the flat region known as The Fylde.



Not too long thereafter there I was, back at my cousin's place, after 40 days on the road

Here I am with the Black Shadow (Heck, its only a bicycle but it should have a name. It was given to me thirty years ago by a woman who loved me, sat around mostly unused for the next 25 years, but w in recent years it has carried me on some extraordinary journeys).



At that point I had a week left in England to enjoy the company of kin, but there was in there one more long day on my bicycle, pics to follow....

Glad you are enjoying yourself still!

Re Manchester...physically it is much nearer the West coast than it is the East...

However the water shed in this part of the UK does not run centrally north/south, but is off towards the east by a factor as you found out..The Calder eventually merges with other rivers and hit the sea on north east coast where as you needed to be going roughly North West to get to Blackpool!

Once you get out of the towns, the canals really do go through some lovely countryside...I've not been for many years, but I've an inkling to hire a barge and book a weeks holiday on the canals somewhere...

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.