Tour Report: Hotel "Rockinghorse"

In November of 2018, we paid a visit to my mother-in-law, and since she has been going on explorations with us since 2013, we decided to go check out some abandoned places.

The first spot we had chosen to explore was an old abandoned house on the edge of a small town. It had been turned into a bar or club of some kind, and the combination of an old house and a possibly modern bar seemd like a promising combination. We parked the car in town and walked to the location, because there was no real parking place close to the building - and of course, we didn't want to arise suspicion with our out-of-town license plate.

So we walked to the old building and checked for a way in. There was none. We checked every inch on the outside, but there was no open door, no open window or hole in the wall where we could enter, so we had to leave without having seen anything.

Luckily, the the next option we had on our list was an abandoned hotel only about half an hour away, so we hoped that we were going to have more luck there. The hotel sits on a hillside right next to a highway. We could have parked right in the driveway - but this is something that we don't really like to do, so we looked for a parking place a bit farther away, and found one in town pretty much right across on the other side of the highway. So we gathered our gear and walked across the bridge that had led people right to the hotel and restaurant for many decades in the past.

As we approached the abandoned hotel, we noticed that many of the windows were broken and thrash was lining the path that led up to the building. We didn't have high hopes regarding what we were going to see - and we were right.

Although the outside (with the exception of the broken windows) still looked pretty good and displayed beautiful architecture, the inside had obviously been ravaged by vandals for quite some time. Furniture had been broken, and there was some damage from a fire that had been made in the fire place and that probably got a bit out of hand.

The rooms had clearly been used by squatters and/or junkies - we found artifacts pointing to both. Surprisingly enough, there was very little "real" decay. Apparently, most of the roof had withstood vandalism, weather and time for eight years between the closing of the hotel and our visit. Only a few spots displayed the early stages of water damage and the corresponding decay.

However - despite the lack of decay and the amount of vandalism, we took our time checking every room inside the place, and we did manage to get some photos to bring home. We finished our exploration with a thorough inspection of the outside of the building, before we headed back to the car and headed for the next location.

To find out about the history of this place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.