Urban Exploring - Hobby of yours?

[xikyle]

i LOVE urbex. unfortunately anything that was interesting locally is either burned by the cops or the local party kids use them to get loaded. i need to branch out more and drive out further i think. we have some abandoned dairy's nearby too, but they've been fenced off recently due to squatters and gang related nonsense. anyone in SoCal want to get an outing together? I figure 4-5 people max is enough to stay low key, but still get some cool shit going. more eyes is always better

people with ideas for locations would be good too. i've always wanted to check out rock-a-hula, but i cant justify driving all the way out there by myself for that.

down

[kts]

I have wanted to go there since seeing that "Life After People" show on TV a while back. Perfect example.

It was very cool to see. At the same time it was interesting to see how scrapped the area has been over the last 25 years. A lot of windows are gone from people stealing the metal frames, and the vehicle graveyard which used to house thousands of fully intact vehicles now only have a couple of hundred well picked over shells left.

such creepy places!!! the ones from over seas look exactly like that one map in cod4.... especiall the pool its almost identical including the steel work/window frames.....

It was cool playing the game just before I left again to compare it to reality. They got a lot of the buildings pretty dead on, they only moved the locations of some of them around a bit to suit the game storyline.

[MAXELHOFF]

The joint

Dinanm3atl- I went to the prison a while back. OPPRESSIVE! Solitary door.

[MAXELHOFF]

joint ladies

dinanm3atl- Nice shots btw! Prison chicks.

[kts]

Chemical Plant - Italy

This place was awesome and tricky. Somehow I managed to squeeze my fat ass through a tiny hole in a thick cement wall and dodge the active security that patrols the place. Inside were all kinds of awesome ruins and a full chemical laboratory.

Looking down


The top


Across


Just go around


Cage the machines


Near the base


The tower of death


Guess where the birds usually sit?


Dirty


Yet another hallway


Walkway


Kettles


Kettles


Have we seen enough kettles yet?


OK, last kettle shot


Viva La Revolution! (in calendar form!)


Chem lab


Chemicals


I should have centered this better. Oh well.

[5Toes]

Fucking awesome stuff above. Im jellyyy

Love the editing, very dark feel

[LJ851]

dinanm3atl- Nice shots btw! Prison chicks.

Nice shot M, why are your nipples blurred?

[Pac1373]

Nice shot M, why are your nipples blurred?

This IS r3v, clearly he did not want any one jerking off to pic's of his manly nipple parts.


Cool pic's, there is little in the way of ruins around here to explore, I would be all over this as a hobby lol. (when I was a kid, they called it trespassing, I like urban exploring better....)

[Civilian]

This stuff is extremely cool. The first video to grab my interest was UNDERCITY

Here's a trailer for those who don't want to watch the full 27 minutes.

And the full video here

Enjoy! :D

[kts]

My favorite little spot in my state. It's the admin building of a long closed (and mostly demolished) TB hospital.

[kts]

since I've used up all my vacation leave for quite a while I'm finally going over the last 2 years of photos I have to process.

These are all from a little trip to Europe I took in May/June 2010.

Any names listed are the online names of fellow urban explorers.

kts' European Vacation, part 1

The alarm goes off and before I even realize it I'm up, alarm is off, and I'm in the shower. It's 4am. I didn't even finish packing until 11pm and didn't really get to sleep since the excitement was building up inside me. Why?

Because it's time for my European vacation!

Around 5am mANVIL showed up and a short while later the Super Shuttle arrived to take us to the airport. All I wanted to do was sleep. Although I live few short miles away from an airport we ended up flying out of a much smaller regional airport which is a pain to get to, especially in rush hour traffic. Adding to that we have to fly 600 miles in the wrong direction only to fly back over my house and then on to the right direction. Why? I still have no idea other than when you are using frequent flier miles to pay for a flight the airlines make it as hard as possible to get you to your destination as a 'reward' for being a loyal customer. Oh well, the flight was free right?

We left DC and headed south to Raleigh to sit around for 3 hours before flying back over DC on our way to New York. From New York it was a 4 beer layover until it was time to head to Brussels. The Raleigh to New York and New York to Brussels flights featured screaming children everywhere and really smelly people. The things I will endure to explore awesome abandonments.

We land in Brussels and have to wait to msb to show up since he wisely, paid for his trip so he didn't have to enjoy the multiple flights and long layovers. We have now been up for 24 hours and I am ready for bed. However now it's time to hop in the car and drive.

Belgians have some very strange rules for rights of way, something I was unaware of for the first half of this trip and now explains why we nearly got into countless accidents, and at every intersection I was honked at and yelled at by everyone. Doh!

Our first stop were the horror labs but unfortunately that day there was a bit too much activity going on around the building so we jetted off to Hasard Cheratte, everyone's favorite castle-like coal mine.

Walking past some guys working on 4 wheelers and dirt bikes down a dead end street with cameras is not suspicious, no not at all. We found a pallet someone had tied to the corner of a brick retaining wall which made a nice ladder to get up the hill and on we went into the place. Inside it's what you would expect from a large place such as this that has been abandoned for so long it's pretty scrapped, tagged, and otherwise rundown. At the same time there is still a lot of coolness about the place.













After we had taken it all in we headed out only to find our nice pallet ladder was not in fact a ladder, it was barrier to prevent people from entering the site that way which was reinforced with a large stump and some other things to keep people out. Well that wasn't very nice of those 4 wheeling hooligans to block us in like that. We decided to take the ~9 foot drop down the retaining wall for our exit. mANVIL and msb got down quite gracefully, I on the other hand decided to add some showmanship to my drop and ended up face up after having done a nice fall and roll down covering myself in dust and dirt. Awesome.

We went to the front of the place and between taking exteriors of the town being dwarfed by this imposing castle of a mine we chased a ton of free range chickens that wander the city.

It had been a long 36 hours and we were ready for food and sleep. We drove past a random place that was open called Buffalo Grill (big mistake, I really do not recommend that place, it was terrible) and then headed to our hotel, Hotel Formula 1, which is a whole different adventure.

[kts]

kts' European Vacation part 2

After the long trip over to Belgium and hitting the ground running off to abandonments mANVIL, msb, and myself were pretty damn tired. We slept in at Chateau Formule 1 for most of the morning and then headed off to a wonderful lunch at Chez Delhaize (Known as Food Lion here in the states) and then off to an old saw mill. Lots of traffic and a wrong turn or two we finally found the mill. It was a lot smaller than we thought it would be and to get to it we had to quickly hop through someone's yard, over a low fence and then around another. It was at this mill we discovered the first of many "Belgian Fences." It seems in Belgium it is quite popular to build a fence around only part of a structure and that is "good enough" to keep people out. Since I hate fences I am very OK with the idea of a Belgian Fence.

I really don't know much about this mill over than it was pretty old, a lot of it had collapsed, and it was in the middle of a residential neighborhood. You could hear children playing in the yard next to this place, people riding their bikes on the streets around the mill, and see people hanging up laundry in their backyards right next to this place.

While this place was small I thought it had a lot of interesting things to shoot.











I use this stuff in my car, it was pretty cool to see a 30+ year old bottle of it


This room was very dark and hard to get some shots of this thing since it was a small and narrow room yet the whole thing was pretty bad ass.
http://uesuperfunhappytime.com/gallery/europe2/saw8.jpg[/img]

After this we headed out to see a monastery that someone had recommended to us but it was unfortunately very recently welded shut so we moved on to a nice brewery that we very much wanted to see only to find a ton of people hanging out right around the big gaping hole in the fence. We looked for another way in but found none and with the people by the big gaping hole eyeing us suspiciously we decided to come back later.

We then decided to drive back towards our hotel to see a popular abandonment, the Fort de la Chartreuse. Built in 1817 by the Dutch the fort has had a number of occupiers over the year from Belgians, Germans (twice), Americans, and then back to Belgian control. It is secured and taken care of by a caretaker who we were hoping we could talk into letting us in.



When we got there we parked and looked down the street to where the street dead ends into a gate for the fort complex. A tarp had been thrown over the gate and some barriers had been set up in front of the gate. We could hear a lot of people talking from inside the gate. We began to walk towards it only to have a car pass us filled with what looked like Russian soldiers. They honked their horn and the gate opened. Inside were more Russian soldiers wielding AK-47s and cheering for their comrades who entered the gate. Inside you could hear very Soviet era patriotic music. What the hell was going on here? Have the Russians invaded Belgium? I mean we have been a little out of the loop with the news since arriving here but you would have thought we would have heard something.



We walk up to the gate and discover the soliders are speaking French. mANVIL knowing a little bit of French started talking with them and we find out that no the Soviets haven't regrouped and invaded Belgium, they are just some airsoft people camping out at the Fort for the weekend before they and the Yankee scum they are fighting have an all out airlift war. They invite us in and tell us to take all the photos we want of the place.



Inside the fort is very cool, a lot of old well built brick that has held up to years and years of neglect and has lots of very cool graffiti from the various occupiers of the fort from over the years. Most of it is from around WW2 timeframe and it's just damn too to look at.





The 3 of us spend a few hours looking over every inch of this place and also noticing how the place has changed from the photos we have seen of the place taken a few years ago. The old caretaker only let select people into the site where as his son who took over when the old caretaker passed does let in people from time to time to go paint balling or do airsoft. The trees and some buildings in shots taken by Motts, NickSan, and others who were here only a few years before are now gone, replaced by rubble and a large demolition crane. The caretaker was not there so we could not find out what the future holds for this place but from the rubble and clear cut woods it doesn't look good.



The doors appear to have been setup to use as cover points for the coming airsoft war










With the sun fading and more airsoft soldiers running around it was time to head out. We grabbed dinner at an awesome Doner Kabob place we found near the hotel and then headed back to the hotel to get ready for the next day which would be a busy and long day of exploring with Bartje and Martino. Later that night we had a loud banging at our door and they had arrived. They quickly forced us outside of Chateau Formule 1 so we could drink some beer with them. I like beer, beer is good. Bartje opens up his cooler and tosses us some Palm beer. Things are going well until I notice that this beer is room temperature. Mmmmm room temperature beer! The 5 of us stay up late swapping stories, drinking, and generally pissing off everyone else at the Chateau Formule 1 with our loud noises and cheeky antics. We run out of beer and decided to head to bed around 12:30-1am which is a good thing since we are waking up in a few short hours to begin our awesome weekend exploring of awesome.

Europe, watch out.

[dkbmxer002]

a girl whos butt i was peeing in for a period was into it, pretty cool to do sometimes.

[Lof8]

a girl whos butt i was peeing in for a period was into it, pretty cool to do sometimes.

pics of said butt?

[10Toes]

Kts all of those pics look great, I especially like the chemical plant.