Whilst not as nice as yesterday – I think it rained over night – today was still “good enough” for an outdoor ride. Fairly warm, no wind (hurrah!), a little wet and slippery but not enough to put me off.
What nearly did stop everything was that I couldn’t find any clean kit. After much searching I found a long sleeve base layer inexplicably hung up in the bathroom (I’m sure that made sense to someone at some point), but where my other bib tights are is still an on-going mystery. Fortunately I had my old / original ones, but the pad on them is … well, it’s not good.
Much like yesterday I had no route in mind when setting off. Figuring I’d head into town and then see what was happening, I had the genius / nerdy idea to follow the train line from Preston up to Leyland. That felt like it would give a decent hour or so, with a few hills in the way to keep me on my toes… literally, as I’m still using my terribly setup old cycling shoes for outdoor riding.
On the subject of my old shoes, I have no idea how I put up with them for two years. The right cleat is so weirdly twisted I’m amazed I can still walk. Before I next go out, I need to adjust that as it’s painful. What was I thinking?
Anyway, when I got to Leyland I thought – why not go and see what has become of my old offices? My first job involved working really close to my house at a satellite office, and then they had their HQ on the rather grandly titled Lancashire Enterprises Business Park. Truly the title was grander than the cold, bland and brutalist slab sided buildings that made up the old outbuildings from Leyland Trucks.
Excuse the crappy hacked google maps, but I needed something visual in this post and this is the best I could do. Sadly it doesn’t really do it justice.
Turns out the place I worked (the red dot, my office) is now segmented into many smaller offices. Makes sense. The company I worked for – Business Link – went the way of the dodo with a government change about 20 years ago.
One thing I never did when I worked there was to walk around and explore. That’s because there was frankly sod all going on, and I was a fat and lazy little tyke. Today, I corrected that by pedalling around and finding… well, I hadn’t missed much 🙂
A thing I spotted on my way into the business park was rows upon rows of Amazon Prime delivery vans (the big red area above). It triggered a memory of a one-sided conversation my dad had had with me ages ago, about how he found the Amazon facility and was taken aback by just how huge it was. I really wish I’d had my camera to take some pictures – again, much like last weekend with the super cars, it sucks to not have a working phone. Not that Amazon vans are quite as cool as bright green Lambos, but interesting all the same.
Running out of time – I had to be back by 10:45, and it was now about 10:20 – I carried on around the mile or so of interior roads, spotting the large Leyland Trucks building just as it used to be. But the new thing was the Amazon facility. Truly huge.
What struck me was that even on a Sunday there was white van after white van snaking their way towards that huge warehouse. Staggering as the size was, I had two thoughts that really put it into perspective. Firstly, I imagine that was only a small to medium sized warehouse. It must only serve the wider Preston area – maybe what, 20 miles squared? There must be similar or larger sized facilities all over the country… nay, the world.
And secondly was that just one of these facilities would make the owner a double digit millionaire. Whoever owned that, had it not been Spacey Jeff, would be almost certainly one of Preston’s richest people. So extrapolate that out, and a quick Google tells me there are 20 other similar facilities in the UK… it’s difficult to fathom just how much money they are making per second. Amazon, to me, is a website – just like any other – but when you see the physical ‘stuff’ behind it, all in one place? 🤯
So that’s two places to go back to, once I get my new phone … speaking of which, if only Google had the bloody delivery infrastructure that their rain forest dwelling friends enjoyed, I might not have had to sit waiting for quite so long…
Anyway, not a bad ride to end the week on. I’m looking forwards to a rest day, as I often do. Then it will almost certainly be back to turbo training as the sun is due to bugger off once more, back to where ever it goes when it’s not here to keep me warm.