Last week, after a couple hours of research, I took some friends to an old abandoned house I found on Google Maps, marking my first 'real' urbex trip.
I'd been to a few places before, but they were all either open to the public or just off the side of the road.
Google maps initially showed 3 abandoned buildings a ways off an obscure backroad in Redmond, the most (and only) promising thing I'd found after hours of research. Turns out the satellite image was 2 years out of date and some rich person had a built a house there, leaving only one of the buildings still standing hidden in the forest behind their property.
Went there anyways, one end of the private road was plastered in no trespassing signs. There was also a camera surveillance sign, so we stopped to evaluate what to do about it.
Then someone's dog came and started barking at us. Fortunately someone who lived nearby was just taking their dog outside and it saw us and ran after us. Once the person got their dog we left before she could question what we were doing on a private road.
We then went to the other, more obscure end of the road and walked from there. There were pretty much no signs or anything. The lack of a camera surveillance sign and the fact that we weren't caught makes me think it was just a scare tactic.
We got as close as we could to the house via the road, then bushwhacked a long ways through a bunch of blackberry bushes and stinging nettle (which was painful, but we'd gone too far to give up) until we reached the house.
Here's some of the photos:
I'm hoping this will be the first of many explorations!