Greenway South

That's probably going to be my next project. There's a bunch of space down there, and although realistically I should go back to the northern section and finish exploring it. See, what you couldn't tell from the pictures I took was how sketchy the whole area looks when you're there. Being there made me a little uneasy, though admittedly I AM a pansy white boy and therefore have no guts, much less the street smarts to know when to be brave and stick with it and when to high-tail it out of there.
Map Here
So I was there, going north on my way, and made it to the funny roundabout looking thing not very far down the line. My next project will be significantly more ambitious, and will probably take place this coming Tuesday, since that's the next block of significant free time that I have running around my schedule. That said, there's about six times the amount of walkable track to the south that there is to the north, so this should be a much longer walk. What this means in practice is that I'll need a lunch that can be eaten while walking, since out of the hour I spent by the tracks last time, about twenty minutes of that was spent eating and sitting. Now, assuming that I have about time and a half within which to walk, I'd have a total of an hour and a half. So if I hit the tracks at 1:00, and walk for an hour and a half, I'd get back to my starting point about 4:00. No good. So I guess I've still only got maybe an hour of walking time.

But that's three miles I can go, not counting time spent taking pictures... but that's negligible. All in all, I just did the math in Google Earth, I end up walking the better part of the walkable distance on those tracks in one day. That said, the last time I spent less than an hour walking, and made it significantly less than three miles. In fact, I barely even made it .8 miles. This is a big problem. So, I guess a week from today will be the big test to see how well I can gauge my walking speed. I'm pretty sure it was 3 miles an hour... considering I did two and a half in 40-45 minutes pretty regularly, it might even be faster than that. We'll just see, won't we? Not something for the faint of heart, I guess.

So, Greenway South, the 6th of November, 2007. I might not have pictures, I've heard that November in Vancouver is pretty rainy. So... with luck, I will. Without it... I may not even take the hike. But now that it comes to it, I'll want this to be a rain or shine sort of affair. After all, rain won't wait if it comes when I'm on the road to Duluth, now will it?

Vancouver branch, over and out.

The Greenway

So, I had my first shot at exploring today. I bused up Broadway to Granville, then walked down Broadway the opposite way I had come until I came to a railroad crossing the street north to south. I was already on the north side of the street, so I decided to go that way. This is what it looked like, looking southwards.

So I headed down the tracks, and after a couple twists and blind corners, came to this place:
This is looking the way I'm about to go.

And this is the way I had come.

I walked on a bit further, and found this really bloody annoying intersection where the cars came at exactly the wrong intervals for a pedestrian to cross. So after waiting a time altogether disproportionate to the width of the street, I went across and found a convenient bench to sit down and eat on.
That's another weird thing about this railroad. It's technically owned by Canadian Northern Limited, and is therefore private property, and therefore your can be prosecuted for walked down it, but no one gives a shit. There's all sorts of chairs and benches and even a couple of tables set up by the tracks, so you can sit down and eat your lunch if you want, which is what I did.
By the way, the reason I call it the Greenway is because it runs north-south and is mostly overgrown. It's a reference to Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, the road that the rangers use that runs through Bree north to south.
Anyway, I sat down on one of the benches and ate lunch, and looked around and took a picture of what was across the way from me, which was a manufacturing plant for Mercades Benz. It smelled kinda icky, a strange chemical scent that seemed to stick to me, but it's also very subtle, so that you don't notice it until you've been there for a while, but after you sit there and eat for a while, it gets to you. Here's what it looked like:

That's not a good photo, because it doesn't give you a good image of the rooftop, much less the kinda creepy windows with the weird piping inside, but it does give you a good sense of the barbed wire around it. That's a bit of a turnoff for me, I'll probably not try to get in there. Besides which, I'm not really Urban Explorer yet. I'm more of a wanderer than an explorer. I'll switch to explorer when I've got the time and the resources, as well as have a few people who are with me on it. Not something I'll do alone. But I'll stick with this blog, since I like it. In any case, after lunch, I headed further down the tracks until I found a place I affectionately refer to as the AIDS corner:

I continued along, eventually coming to a turning in the track, so I took another photo.

Then I came to the ultimate point on my walk, the Car Graveyard:

So at that point I thought I was out of time, so I turned around and headed back. I got back to the university a little later, and now I'm typing this entry.

I apologize for the X inversion on the photos, by the way. I was too lazy to flip them.

Vancouver Branch over and out.

The Beginning

I have to start somewhere, and frankly... here is as good a place as any. I'm actually not in Saint Paul, even though that's listed as my hometown; I'm starting in Vancouver, because that's where the idea has caught me. I've done some scouting with Google Earth and will probably do my first expedition on Tuesday or so. Today being Sunday, that's a little ways off. So I've got time. But for now, I'm content to wait. It's not exactly a long term dream, though Urban Exploring has been.

See, that's really why I want to do this. It's because there's a side to cities that I don't see, I love the feeling of infinite distance, I love the feeling of possibility. And trapped in my dorm room, with only a tiny window and a computer as means of contacting the outside world, possibility is something I'm certainly starved of. Obviously, it sounds a little emo to say that every bit of creativity has been squeezed out of my life, but it feels that way. That's why the culmination of this little project will be, at least in the short term, a rather long walk from Saint Paul to the Temprence River on the north shore of Lake Superior and
back. The logistics are rather complicated.

In any case, I'm going to run off for now; I may or may not have pictures from my exploits. We'll see.

Vancouver Branch, over and out.