Day 27 Catterall to Bolton-le-Sands

Day 27 - Up the Lancaster Canal. We set of on a beautiful morning up the road to Garstang, who's town sign announces it to be Britain's first fair trade town. We wondered what this actually meant, but didn't have time to find out. However, it was an attractive place with lots of character and did seem to have a lot of local shops rather than recognisable logos. The centre was crammed full of cars and delivery vans, which was a pity. We bought some trail mix - the nuts and raisins we nibble on the road - then continued on the road for a mile further to rejoin the canal. We are doing quite a lot of walking up waterways during this journey and, having now planned our approach to Glasgow in detail, will continue to do so. The reason is that they are level, easy on the feet and quiet. When you walking somewhere, you want views, or a climb or some other objective, but ours is to get distance behind us as attractively and painlessly as possible, and waterways going in the right direction are the business.
There were lots of ducks with big broods of tiny ducklings, a few coots and I saw a water vole swimming on the other side of the canal and tried to photograph it, but not very successfully this time. As the morning wore on, the cloud cover increased and by noon, it started to rain. We stopped for a bowl of soup at a popular craft centre cafe on the A6 then after that, the canal was in a large cutting most of the way to Lancaster, with woods on either side full of wild garlic and bluebells.
We entered Lancaster on the canal, but then were on it's noisy streets - there seemed to be a lot of trucks and other heavy traffic going through the centre, which we didn't enjoy after the tranquility of the canal, but we passed many fine stone buildings and a huge and very grand memorial to Queen Victoria with her sitting atop it on her throne looking very stern.
We crossed the River Lune which is quite wide through Lancaster, and the canal once more, then followed a rather grubby lane up into the hilly farms to the north of the city. A steady drizzle was falling from leaden skies, and it was a dark and dreary afternoon after the glorious start to the day. Walking in these conditions is very dull, so we decided to stop at Bolton-le-Sands (19 miles) instead of continuing to Warton in the hope of better weather tomorrow. We immediately found a pub that did B&B, and were able to get dried off. The bar was full of noisy local men having a few drinks on the eve of a long weekend. We we walked out later on to get a meal at the local chinese restaurant the sky had cleared and it was a lovely, if cool, spring evening.