The canal…again – 11 sep, 2018
Day 35 Land’s End to John O’Groats – Preston to Galgate
Distance: 30km
Cumulative distance: 888km
For Mum and Dad’s last night we went out to a burger place I’d found on Trip Advisor called We Don’t Give a Fork and it was positively and utterly scrumptious. If I ever return to Preston, it will be for that burger place. Anyway, that was our last tea-time meal together, and this time when Mum and Dad dropped me off to my resuming point in the morning we all said farewell – they were off to Bristol to return the car and then over to Heathrow to fly back home tomorrow. The next time I see them they should be grandparents! It was so good having Mum and Dad here to see what I was doing, and to walk with them both was absolutely brilliant. Plus let’s be honest, they dead set spoiled me rotten.
The first 10-12km today was more urban pounding. The goal was to pick up the Lancaster Canal which would carry me much further north, and the quickest way of finding it was through the northwest suburbs of Preston. This was all pretty unremarkable stuff, except for one incredible piece of fortune at a little place called Woodplumpton. Now allow me to set this up a little…you may remember that all the way back in Hay On Wye I’d bought myself about 10 books at the various bookshops in town, and they’d all ended up in Mum and Dad’s luggage back to Australia. Well almost all of them – I kept with me the illustrated history of Rotherham United. Clearly some further explanation is required here. At the and of my last post I referenced a good friend of mine, the always hospitable Jonathan Dawson who I met on the Camino in 2014, and whose wedding I attended in July. We hit it off instantly on the Camino because I ascertained pretty early on in the piece that he was a Rotherham fan, and he ascertained soon after that I actually knew a thing or two about the almighty Millers – a south Yorkshire English soccer club who do their best in the lower divisions of the football league. Anyway, Jonathan has let me stay with him countless times in Doncaster when he lived there, and more recently in Berlin with him and his lovely wife Jules. Back in February, he and I went to a Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden and it was one of the greatest things ever. So when I strolled into this bookshop in Hay On Wye and saw the Rotherham book staring back at me, I grabbed it instantly and vowed to post it across to Berlin as soon as possible. Now that Mum and Dad were gone it had been transferred to my pack, so I figured the sooner I lightened the load the better. There was a pub in Woodplumpton and on the door it advertised a post office which was open on Tuesdays between 10-11.30am. A quick check of my phone confirmed it was Tuesday, just after 10.30am, so I stormed inside brandishing the Rotherham book and asked if the chap could send it off to Berlin. After a quizzical look ‘Why is there an Aussie in Woodplumpton here wanting to post a Rotherham book to Berlin?’ and a razor-sharp quip ‘If it was about Manchester City I’d read it first and then post it’ he assured me the book would be off to Germany at the soonest available opportunity. Success!
With a slightly lighter load a pressed on to the canal which was just up the road now, and dropped down to its bank for some much nicer walking. As an added bonus the weather kept improving with each step after rain in the morning, and a not-so-promising forecast on my phone. The shortcut I took saved me about six miles I reckon, or about two hours so it was definitely worth it. I stopped just before Garstang for lunch and bumped into a fella walking from Preston to Lancaster in one day for charity, an undertaking of some 35 plus miles I’m pretty sure. I certainly wasn’t going that far. The poor bugger seemed to be struggling but he didn’t mind too much when I told him there was still a good 20 miles ahead of him. Apparently there were two other chaps doing the same thing but they were clearly a lot further advanced than he was. This was a really nice section of canal walking with plenty of old bridges, and tree-lined banks. I never caught up to the other two on the charity walk, but I passed a few people coming the other way who had seen them, and were wondering if I was doing the same thing.
Just south of Galgate I had a good chat to a retired English chap who was on an extended holiday with his wife floating around the country’s canals. He’d been a deep-sea fishing captain for 42 years and had spent most of his days since then on his canal boat. He showed me a map of the extensive canal network in England and I quickly realised I could have used them a lot more throughout the walk if I’d have wanted to. There were so many! And by the sounds of it he and his wife had covered a fair bit of ground. He told me of a few places upstream where I might be able to camp for the night given the afternoon was getting on, and I was starting to tire. As it turned out only a km or two further up was a bridge which took me to the pub in Galgate so I went in there and asked them their opinion on the best places to camp around here. Fortunately for me the manager was sat at the bar eating her tea, and she very kindly told me I could simply pitch up in the beer garden. Half an hour later my tent was up and I was back in the pub having a pint and perusing the dinner menu. What a result!
