It's your berfday!

How am I celebrating my birthday this year? By taking a road trip to the US with Matt and a couple of friends to do more urban exploration. ;)

We left Toronto on Thursday evening after having a quick dinner near our place. This way, we would have reliable access to good food and kill some time. Leaving during rush hour would have been a bad idea. After dinner, we packed up the rental car and headed out. The border crossing was short and virtually hassle free. We arrived at our hotel shortly before midnight. After settling in, we decided we would try to leave by 7am the next morning.

After a mostly leisurely breakfast, we headed to our first urbex location. It was located beside a correctional facility. When we arrived, we immediately noticed the very new looking fence around the property. We did a walk around the building and did not discover any easy access through the fence. We decided it would be too much hassle to attempt entering the property and headed to our next location.

Our second urbex location was not any better. We arrived at the parking lot outside the building and it was practically full. This was a bad sign. We slowly circled the building in the car. It did not look abandoned and a small construction trailer was also present. Well. We suddenly had a lot of time on our hands. We hit the road once more and stopped at a coffee shop to review our plan for the rest of the day. Once we finished our beverages, we headed out.

Our next stop was successful. We explored an abandoned public bath house building and an abandoned hotel that were a few blocks apart. The bath house had many small rooms for spa treatments. Many of the rooms still contained massage tables and chairs. The hotel was a u-shaped building that had 5 floors. All the rooms were still intact with almost complete furnishings: beds, chairs, dressers, old television sets, lamps, and telephones. The beds were mostly bare but some bedding remained. Some of the mattresses looked almost brand new. Many of the rooms had very colourful wallpapers and equally colourful carpeting. One of the rooms contained wall to wall television sets, all of them stacked neatly in rows on top of each other. Someone went through a lot of time and effort to arrange them this way for their own amusement. There were obvious signs that people lived in the hotel rooms after it was abandoned.

When we were done, we continued our trek to two more destinations. They too, were inacessible. With a success rate of 30%, we headed to our next hotel. Since we had finished up earlier than anticipated, we had time to do a bit of research on where to go for dinner and book our next hotel. We settled on a local Belgian restaurant called the Merry Monk for dinner that had favourable reviews. On our way to the restaurant, we passed a gentleman sitting on a park bench with a grocery cart full of belongings and ... a laptop. He was chatting with someone using a webcam. Wow. When we finished dinner, we passed him again. He was still chatting.

When we returned to our hotel, the lobby was bustling with activity. An auction had just finshed up and people were leaving with their purchases. Very strange.

It had been an interesting and eventful day. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings.