After our stay in Manchester, we headed for Lancaster where our hosts put us up in the charming Sun Hotel, a traditional English pub and hotel with a history going all the way back to 1610. The Sun is located in the center of Lancaster, which is a vibrant university city with cobbled streets and stone houses filled with a wide array of shops, bars and restaurants. Allen and I were struck by the number of boutiques and specialty stores we saw featuring such high end brands as Barbour and Patagonia, and specialty items like binoculars, telescopes, bikes, model trains and fishing gear. With a population of about 46,000, Lancaster seemed rather small to us, but apparently it’s a constituent settlement of the wider City of Lancaster, which has a population of almost 135,000 and includes several outlying towns.
On our first night in Lancaster, Derek and Yoke Sum took us to their beautiful home in nearby Garstang, and I was delighted to finally meet their lively and affectionate Lucinda Dog, a standard poodle, who I’ve heard tell about on countless occasions but never met.
We walked to a neighborhood pub for a meal of fish and chips and other local fare. It turns out, dogs are allowed in pubs in England and Luci came along. She had some important business to tend to on the way, so Derek lead us through a wooden stile to a lush open field and Lucy did her thing, and got a little running in as well.