Hello, UER! It's been a bit of a busy spring and summer. Lots of air travel.
Which not only isn't very much fun in its own right but also doesn't allow for much hey-what-is-that-thing-over-there-yeah-let's-stretch-our-legs.
I did, however, managed to get out to a couple of things the other week and take some pictures. Maiden UE voyage with my new camera. Couple of spots that folks here will recognize (and for which I appreciate the intel) plus a handful of other stuff here and there.
We've been flooding a bit. There's an abandoned looking house standing in a few feet of water off to the side of this road that I'll go back to, but for now, I'm ankle deep in the river in the middle of the road. Whee!
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That line of bushes is the ditch, generally. Beyond it was a cornfield and before it is the road. Mmm, agricultural runoff. Fields on both sides of the road were totally flooded.
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This little house was in southern WI. I didn't get many photos of it because it was very heavily overgrown and I could hear that I was disturbing raccoons on the other side. The floors upstairs and downstairs were too far gone to get into the house, too.
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Then, into the woods to the Winston tunnel! We wisely did this directly at midday when there was very little shade offered from the forest. It was an extremely sweaty affair, but not too awful other than that. First, earlier on the trail, the ruins of an old stone house up to its eyeballs in forest:
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The best thing about finally finding the old tracks and heading for the sound of water on stone was the cold air pouring out of the tunnel itself. The whole gully was cool and fresh with even only a trickle of the ice-cold water out of the tunnel. The bars on the gate are bent open there and my companion and I were both small enough we could have fit through but... we didn't have waterproof footwear. Or flashlights >.> and it just didn't seem like a totally wise idea. Nobody knew where we were.
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13. Trying to see how far down I could illuminate with the flash. Not very far, alas. Curve
14. Unfortunately, it looks like what buildings were left down here have toppled in.
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Then, on to the next area. Somehow, this place felt even more abandoned than most places I've turned up at, either via leads from here or elsewhere or by dumb luck. Maybe because most of what I've found out here are old private residences? I'm not sure. But way down at the end of an unnamed road, behind a cattle gate, the asphalt deteriorating more and more as you go down the hill well past any apparent DNR use... could have been the end of the world.
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And, just for funsies, this is what the inside of that place sounded like: (we are not making any noise in this)
http://crows.halfl...k/0614/bunkers.mp3