You already know the story, as I’ve told it so many times. I travel a lot by train, and I mean a lot. Until the spring of 2023 I did it weekly, and I accumulated around 60 000 kilometers on the tracks yearly. After that the mileage dramatically decreased, as I stopped going to my former home town on a weekly basis.
I had travelled the route so many times, that knew it by heart. I could look out of the restaurant car window in the middle of the night while being completely wasted, and within a minute I could locate where we were. That’s why I also knew the abandoned houses on the railside by heart. And had already visited many of them, some more successfully than others.
This time my location was a small and unremarkable yellow cottage, which I had been looking at the past four years. Its windows were smashed, its door was open. I was almost certain, that nothing could stop me from gaining entry number 30 that year.
Except the excavator. The house had still been there a month ago, but I guess a lot can happen during summertime.
The less glamorous part of the hobby.