adventure 001 - October 2nd, 2007
aprox 3:00 am, est::
I was hiking around downtown when I saw this sign. You can't really tell from this picture, but that road actually ends a couple hundred feet down the street. It certainly does not go on for miles.
On my way toward my main objective, the tallest building in town, I spied an old train station with silhouette paintings in the fake windows. One of them appeared to depict a murderer.
Upon reaching my main objective, the aforementioned tallest building in the city, I surveyed the site. The building itself appears to be an abandoned farm silo of some kind. Last winter I donned a heavily protective thick jacket, gloves, and a flashlight. I used these tools to climb the tiny, rusty service ladder in what used to be a tiny elevator shaft.
At some point I hope to get pictures from the top vantage point, but it's technically illegal to venture into such an area and doing so during daylight hours for the sake of a few pictures may not work out for me in the end. At any rate, I got a couple of semi okay shots from the parking lot type area.
the top, with the moon!
building profile
It may not look like much, from this vantage, but I am about a block and a half away from the base of the building, if that puts it into prespective for anyone.
I then went looking for a park.
Because my sense of direction is crazy wonk (98% of the time it's madly accurate, 2% of the time I'm super wacky crazy lost) I ended up walking several blocks past the park, past a mayola milk distribution center (with all kinds of crazy cow themed buildings and paint). I eventually realized my mistake and pulled a 180, doubling back until I found the park, laughably, less than a block away from the silo.
While at the park, I spied a train coming in across the river. I took several pictures but the only one that came out even half decent was this one. Realizing that the train was almost certainly going to cross the tracks nearby, I booked it.
It took me a few moments to set up, during which time I captured this image of the train speeding up, and this video of the train.
I apologize for the darkness of the video, my ability to edit gamma sucks at this point in time.
Anyways, while recording that video I notice a crowd forming on the other side of the tracks. I'm fairly sure they were probably workers for the maola place I passed earlier, but the area I was in borders a relatively bad part of town, and I didn't feel like taking any chances.
I packed up the tripod and secured the camera and casually fled for my life down the street until I reached an area where it turned, about a block and a half away.
En route, another train comes from the opposite direction, very slowly. When I reached the area where the road curved, I hung back and casually observed the area from which I had came. After the original train had passed, the group had traversed the road, before the second train crossed that area.
Instead of proceeding in the direction of the maola plant, they turned and headed in the direction I had gone.
I felt it was time for a quick decision. The second train was still going extremely slow, probably due to the whole about to cross a river/bridge thing. Several of the cars were your standard boxcars and tankers, but a few of them were small tanker type vessals, with low ladders and a sort of walkway around them.
I briefly contemplated if I was acrobatic enough to actually pull this off, or whether I should abandon the idea or go even further in my darwin-award winning idiocy and attempt to roll underneath.
Siding with a necessity for an obstruction between me and this group of unknown people, I scampered up a ladder, slipped around the walkway and leaped off the other side, which was only about four feet off the ground. With the train still moving incredibly slowly, the whole operation only moved me about ten feet.
Ever curious (and foolish), I hid in a nearby ditch and observed the other side of the street from the view beneath the train cars. Within a minute or two, the group of people wandered by, and continued down the road I had been on. I waited another minute or so just to be sure.
At this point, the train increased in speed dramatically. Apparently it had made it across the bridge, or something. I managed to get a few pictures of the train cars whizzing by, but only two of them were clear / interesting enough to save.
supersonic!
hey cool an optical illusion!
At this point I made my way back downtown and ended up somehow back at the sign of which I initially stopped to take a picture of, about a mile away from where I parked my car for the whole adventure. Figuring I had already walked about four miles to begin with, I decided to pull another mile out of it and walked around downtown for a while.
I saw several power conduit electrical type boxes with a funny sign on them, but it took me a while to find one with decent enough lighting to get an okay picture out of. I didn't feel like busting out with the tripod so it's not as clear as it could possibly be, but I'm okay with the results.
Just look at that cute little leathal ball of electrical energy!
would be proud!
On my way home I stopped in at wal-greens and saw they carried the new jolt cola beverages. Cracking one open was quite an experience, and I initially wanted to record the second can, but the lighting was terrible on it and two videos of bad lighting is just too much for me to force upon the world all at once.
