Colossal Cave Adventures

It is dark. It is likely that you will be eaten by a grue. At the bottom of a long ladder, there are two passages, both alike. One goes nowhere. The other leads to a long, dark, endless tunnel. Your headlamp is not bright enough to see very far, so you continue on into the blackness. Suddenly, something reeks. You look around at the walls, and see this alien life form. It lets you pass into its chamber. Sound behaves strangely here. (Most of) our intrepid crew; Josh and Rachel wandered off somewhere, we should probably look for them sometime...…

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Lost Art

Rochester is lucky enough to have four huge, legal graffiti areas. This is one of them, the abandoned water tanks at the top of Cobbs Hill. The art changes completely about every three months or so; on any sunny weekend there are a few painters around the towers making their art. It's one of the few places that one can actually see graffiti in action, since there is no fear of being caught at the legal walls. ...and one stray shot from another of these legal walls: the abandoned subway Plenty more graffiti shots here

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Fluid Dynamics 102

Back to the Kleen Brite factory... not all that much to say about the place, but you can't go wrong with industrial rust. The company went under, and left everything, right down to half done experiments in the labs This place must have been a nightmare for the plumbers Need any caps for anything? Photo album here

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Into The Monolith

So this is it. The big one. The white whale. The greatest and last frontier for Rochester exploring. Like everyone else, I've had a few goes at it. Nothing any good, there's almost never a way in. So you can imagine my surprise when Ian calls and says it's open RIGHT NOW. Even then I didn't believe it; there had been enough of these kind of false starts before that the only thing they found is the same high up window again. But this time was nothing of the sort: the FRONT DOOR (!) had a wide open board. And…

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Black Cats and Step Ladders

(Part 5 of my Detroit/Cleveland adventure) Right out of the cold storage, this came along meowing at me. I wanted to bring him home with me. But instead he just seemed to bring typical black-cat luck through most of the day! Four locations, and four U-turns, into the day, Mike still needed to wrap his head around the fact that not all of us can climb like lemurs... this was a perfectly doable entrance for him, and a perfect way to fall and break something for me! And nothing but more of the same at St Luke... no way in…

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This Great Dead Town

(Part 4 of my Detroit/Cleveland adventure) Highland Park itself, if possible, managed to be even more desolate and Detroiter than its Detroit surroundings. After a local financial crisis bankrupted the town in the late 90s, Michigan took it over, and consolidated its government functions, leaving what was probably once a proud municipal square to decay: city hall, courthouse, police and fire stations surrounding a deserted square. OK, you got me this time Guilty as charged! (These cells lock. I don't know what we would have done if someone didn't helpfully leave the keys, and a sign, right outside there!) I…

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