Twice Brewed Inn & Amazon Fulfilment Centre
After last month’s trip to Appletreewick, the Burnley and Pendle kicked off March with a visit to The Twice Brewed Inn near Hexham and overlooking Hadrian’s Wall kindly organised by Barbara. Lunch was at Larch Cottage Nursery and then a superb drive over Hartside Pass to Alston. Up in the wilds – I can well understand why the young Romans wrote home for warmer underwear – we were inside the borders of the Kielder Dark Skies area. One of the great attractions of this venue – apart from its micro-brewery – is their link up with Kielder Observatory. Their professional staff visit to host dark skies events and, after an excellent meal and an introduction, we went outside to the 8” reflector telescopes and views of Jupiter, its moons and some stars though, unfortunately, cloud obscured the moon. Back in the warm we continued in the lecture theatre and planetarium. The following day dawned bight and frosty and we toured the extraordinarily scenic uplands of Cumbria and Northumberland. This included a fascinating visit to the ancient Hexham Abbey, with its helpful and knowledgeable volunteers, its museum and ecclesiastical costumes, which we could try on … The Inn is comfortable, brilliantly staffed and has lovely food and is well worth a visit.
Later in the month, twelve of our members visited The Amazon Fulfilment Centre at Bolton, organised by Roger and Olive. Roger tells us that the building was as large as 14 football fields, and can hold millions of products at one time. It was a bright, huge buildings with orange robots transporting towers of goods, miles of conveyor belts carrying inventory in every direction, and shipping labels practically flying onto boxes, blown by puffs of air. On our tour, we saw how products in your online shopping cart get from Amazon to you. It’s a symphony of people and technology that allows them to deliver orders quickly and efficiently to customers around the world. A really enthusiastic team showed us around the warehouse, which involved about nearly 2km of walking and a few stairs.
We had great day out followed that by lunch at the nearby pub on the complex.
