Odyssey Day 1 - The places you don't look at hold sights you can't imagine.

So its taken me a little while to get around to writing this up, for various reasons. But a couple weeks ago I took a little tour of the north in order to catch up with some old friends, some old sights and to generally recharge a little after a lot of tense work times.

So, off I headed on a Friday morning. And by the time I got back on the Sunday evening, I had covered close to 500 miles, and been to the Trafford Centre, Preston (and a number of areas of the city), back over to Manchester (and an even bigger number of areas of the city), out via Werneth Low, through and up Mam Tor, clambered over Stanage Edge, through Sheffield, down to Bubbenhall (near Coventry) and then finally home.

In Preston I had the honour of catching up with some old friends that I hadn't had the chance to see in about two years. We had an absolutely brilliant time at the Continental in Avenham Park, involving a fair amount of Erdinger and general merriment. Now, in this blog I'm making a conscious attempt to not identify individuals, since there are no elements of protection in the limited fashion that occurs on sites like Facebook. So let me simply thank them for an amazing evening of laughs.

One of the parts of the visit that stood out to me was exploration of some of the central areas of Preston that I knew extremely well. But as with all such things, the more you think you know a place, the more surprises you can find.

Seeing that there was going to be a spectacular sunset that evening, I had originally wanted a good vantage point from my hotel, but in the end I decided to venture out and try to find a high point within the city to capture it from. As I wondered through the city, with only Daft Punk as my soundtrack, I came to one of the main multi storey car parks in the city (just on the ring road) and had an idea.

So, I went into the car park and found that the top floors were unused and sealed off from cars. But not from people. The stairs were still open and the top floors deserted. And as I had hoped from looking at the orientation of the building, it was utterly perfect to gain an impeccable view of the sunset, framed directly between two of the high buildings in the centre.

The truly fun thing about it was that there didn't seem to be another single soul in the area. Certainly I was the only one up there watching the spectacle in from of me, and frankly that was something I could barely believe. It was a stunning sunset. And a thought occurred to me then and stays with me now; Sunsets are like Sakura. You can spend your life seeking the perfect one, only to realise that they are all perfect.

So there I was, in a part of a city I thought I knew like the back of my hand, but just by looking at a building I'd passed countless times, I managed to find something truly new, and completely mine.