After the long trip over to Belgium and hitting the ground running off to abandonments mANVIL, msb, and myself were pretty damn tired. We slept in at Chateau Formule 1 for most of the morning and then headed off to a wonderful lunch at Chez Delhaize (Known as Food Lion here in the states) and then off to an old saw mill. Lots of traffic and a wrong turn or two we finally found the mill. It was a lot smaller than we thought it would be and to get to it we had to quickly hop through someone’s yard, over a low fence and then around another. It was at this mill we discovered the first of many “Belgian Fences.” It seems in Belgium it is quite popular to build a fence around only part of a structure and that is “good enough” to keep people out. Since I hate fences I am very OK with the idea of a Belgian Fence.
I really don’t know much about this mill over than it was pretty old, a lot of it had collapsed, and it was in the middle of a residential neighborhood. You could hear children playing in the yard next to this place, people riding their bikes on the streets around the mill, and see people hanging up laundry in their backyards right next to this place.
While this place was small I thought it had a lot of interesting things to shoot.
I use this stuff in my car, it was pretty cool to see a 30+ year old bottle of it
This room was very dark and hard to get some shots of this thing since it was a small and narrow room yet the whole thing was pretty bad ass.
After this we headed out to see a monastery that someone had recommended to us but it was unfortunately very recently welded shut so we moved on to a nice brewery that we very much wanted to see only to find a ton of people hanging out right around the big gaping hole in the fence. We looked for another way in but found none and with the people by the big gaping hole eyeing us suspiciously we decided to come back later.
We then decided to drive back towards our hotel to see a popular abandonment, the Fort de la Chartreuse. Built in 1817 by the Dutch the fort has had a number of occupiers over the year from Belgians, Germans (twice), Americans, and then back to Belgian control. It is secured and taken care of by a caretaker who we were hoping we could talk into letting us in.
When we got there we parked and looked down the street to where the street dead ends into a gate for the fort complex. A tarp had been thrown over the gate and some barriers had been set up in front of the gate. We could hear a lot of people talking from inside the gate. We began to walk towards it only to have a car pass us filled with what looked like Russian soldiers. They honked their horn and the gate opened. Inside were more Russian soldiers wielding AK-47s and cheering for their comrades who entered the gate. Inside you could hear very Soviet era patriotic music. What the hell was going on here? Have the Russians invaded Belgium? I mean we have been a little out of the loop with the news since arriving here but you would have thought we would have heard something.
We walk up to the gate and discover the soliders are speaking French. mANVIL knowing a little bit of French started talking with them and we find out that no the Soviets haven’t regrouped and invaded Belgium, they are just some airsoft people camping out at the Fort for the weekend before they and the Yankee scum they are fighting have an all out airsoft war. They invite us in and tell us to take all the photos we want of the place.
Inside the fort is very cool, a lot of old well built brick that has held up to years and years of neglect and has lots of very cool graffiti from the various occupiers of the fort from over the years. Most of it is from around WW2 timeframe and it’s just damn too to look at.
The 3 of us spend a few hours looking over every inch of this place and also noticing how the place has changed from the photos we have seen of the place taken a few years ago. The old caretaker only let select people into the site where as his son who took over when the old caretaker passed does let in people from time to time to go paint balling or do airsoft. The trees and some buildings in shots taken by Motts, NickSan, and others who were here only a few years before are now gone, replaced by rubble and a large demolition crane. The caretaker was not there so we could not find out what the future holds for this place but from the rubble and clear cut woods it doesn’t look good.
The doors appear to have been setup to use as cover points for the coming airsoft war
With the sun fading and more airsoft soldiers running around it was time to head out. We grabbed dinner at an awesome Doner Kabob place we found near the hotel and then headed back to the hotel to get ready for the next day which would be a busy and long day of exploring with Bartje and Martino. Later that night we had a loud banging at our door and they had arrived. They quickly forced us outside of Chateau Formule 1 so we could drink some beer with them. I like beer, beer is good. Bartje opens up his cooler and tosses us some Palm beer. Things are going well until I notice that this beer is room temperature. Mmmmm room temperature beer! The 5 of us stay up late swapping stories, drinking, and generally pissing off everyone else at the Chateau Formule 1 with our loud noises and cheeky antics. We run out of beer and decided to head to bed around 12:30-1am which is a good thing since we are waking up in a few short hours to begin our awesome weekend exploring of awesome.
Europe, watch out.
I <3 that place.
