'Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside!'.........

........especially on days like this.

The sun has been shining all day, a wonderful change from the rather gloomy and wet weather we have had recently and this prompted us to make the most of it by going for a drive in our freshly polished steed.

Wrea Green, with 'The Grapes' and church in the background.

First stop was a splendid tavern, 'The Grapes', between Kirkham and Lytham St Annes in Lancashire, where we quaffed some splendid real ale sitting outside in the sun. Whilst there, my wife pointed out that we hadn't driven the Mog along the promenade at Blackpool and that sounded like an excellent idea.

Lytham St Annes

After a brief stop at the RNLI shop in Lytham we travelled along the coast, enjoying a measure of sophistication, until the Blackpool boundary was passed and we entered a different world, a brash, gaudy, noisy place, built solely for fun.... not the sort of fun we enjoy, but many people do.

The 'Big One'

In its shadow.

There is no place like it and it is still the most visited resort in Britain, if not Europe. Gone are the times when thousands of people shuffled down the promenade passed my father's fancy goods shop in the 'Palace Varieties' buildings (long gone) and were crammed deckchair to deckchair on the beaches.

'Cinderella' presumably!

However,  Blackpool still draws the crowds even now, mainly for day trips or short breaks, but those glory days, when people from industrial Lancashire, Yorkshire and elsewhere used to spend their summer holidays here, before cheap holidays on the Costas became the vogue, are a part of history.

Sadly, the Tower is having some sort of paint job, that seems to be taking an inordinately long time to complete and is partially shrouded in polythene, so it's more graceful lines have been somewhat lost.

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