In my home town was a café I had frequented for around two years. I loved them because of their service, which was so friendly you actually could imagine the staff being your friends when buying a coffee.
I bought a latte there every day on my way to work, exchanged latest things in my life with the staff and eventually we became friends. Whenever they were having breaks they sat in my table, we started having beer together and for my 30th birthday they served free sparkling wine and bought me flowers. I loved them.
I think I introduced around 10 people to urban exploration that summer, so it was no surprise when one day when picking up my take away order, the barista said:
‘You photograph those abandoned houses, don’t you? I want to come with you one day!’
Of course she said yes, so a few days later she arrived to pick me and one of her colleagues up in a bright beautiful orange car from the early 70’s. I had picked three locations for us, two of which I hadn’t visited earlier.
So we drove to a suburb, parked at a store and started walking the last part of the journey. We didn’t want to park the orange car at the front door, that would have attracted too much attention.
What I expected to find was a rather large one family house with lots of personal items from the early 2000’s, something like the House of Dirty Stories. What we found was this.
The house was gone and the rest of the rubble was still in small piles on the yard. We were no more than a month late, but had to concede defeat.
Their urban exploration journey might have started with a failure, but our next location wasn’t far away and it turned out to be a real gem.