I did it in July 2015 with Gti Junior, both of us on Roubaix bikes. We dumped the car near Lancaster station and took the train to Barrow, which is an impressive town clearly accustomed to doing big engineering. Rode to the beach on Walney then followed the Bay Cycle Way all the way back to Lancaster, chucking in a there-and-back along the old railway line to Glasson Dock and back in the hope of hitting 100 miles but giving up when we realised we were running out of daylight. The idea of starting at Barrow was to get help from the prevailing wind.
We missed the trail in Gleaston and took the small road south to Scales by mistake, which took us down to the coast road but probably avoided some uppy-downy stuff. And for the same reason, from Ulverston we chain-ganged along the A590 to the small bridge over the Leven. From there, a very pleasant track took us to the foot of the killer climb over to Cartmel, where we enjoyed a well-deserved lunch stop. It’s the biggest climb on the route so the cafes of Cartmel were welcome. The rest was straighforward except that my favourite cafe in Silverdale, at Wolf House, was closed by the time we got there. There’s a climb out of Silverdale but not as bad as Cartmel. From Carnforth the route is pretty traffic blighted and approaching Morecambe is really horrible, especially with a south-west wind in our faces. The old railway to Lancaster is flat but watch out for glass and robbers.
We did 86.95 miles in 6 hours 17 of moving time giving 13.7 average, with 3650 feet of climb. As we got back into Lancaster from Glasson Dock we realised we couldn’t remember where we had left the car and only found it by chance, in fact it was about 2 minutes down Westbourne Road, which was the nearest we’d been able to find to the station that didn’t have parking restrictions.
Next time we do the ride we will definitely pay the extra for an early train and start much earlier in the day so as to give time for refreshments at Wolf House and Glasson Dock as we were getting tired by then. It took our legs a good week to recover from the effort, I being 59 and GtiJ 16 at the time. The Sustrans map of the route is good but watch out at Gleaston, where the little blue signs seemed to disappear.