Tour Report: The Poetic Villa

In March of 2019, we were on the way home from a day-long excursion through the northern part of Germany, and we still had a little time and enough daylight to check out one more location. I knew about this place, but I couldn't remember seeing any photos from the inside. The abandoned villa sits on a vast plane right next to a horse farm, which is why I didn't think that we'd have any chance of checking it out, but we tried anyway. There were no inconspicuous parking spaces anywhere near, so we had to operate under the rule that "impudence wins", and we drove right up to the villa and parked right in front of it. Two local cars might look like someone was a potential buyer and looking at the place, we thought.

Now for the way in. The villa looked in great shape - no smashed windows or apparent vandalism - this might be a tough one to get into.

Or so we thought at first.

I went up to the building with little to no hope of getting in -  and the front door was open! This was a pleasant surprise :)

The good exterior condition of the villa was confirmed by the interior. There is some natural decay, but the lack of vandalism has kept most of the humidity out, so the decay is not as advanced as you would expect after more than 10 years of abandonment.

There was no furniture, and apparently, the place was cleaned of trash by an investor at some point. Still, we could imagine the former splendor of this villa where two German "poet princes" met in 1883.

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

Tour Report: The Theater of Nature

I had seen a few photos of this abandoned theater before, and when in March of 2019 the opportunity came up to visit this place during a short tour of the area, of course we took it! It is more or less a public place, and there is still hope among the people that it will be able to open it again at some point in the future.

There are parking places nearby, and there were many other people around, mostly to collect wild garlic which grows there in ample amounts. So we just had to unpack our cameras and take photos - there were no fences that we had to climb over, and no other things that might keep us from taking photos.

Solely the abandoned café right next to the theater was locked and equipped with video surveillance - a clear sign that someone still want to reopen the place. We could see through that the café was completely empty, so it wasn't interesting to photograph, and we focused on the theater - and on picking wild garlic :)

We took home an amount large enough to make a lot of delicious cream cheese - and we've been doing that every year since!

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

Tour Report: HAWK-Missile Launch Site G.

After we had checked out the old Jaguar, we only had to drive a few minutes to get to the next location - an abandoned site of the German "HAWK-Belt".

At the height of the Cold War, 36 systems of the MIM-23 HAWK - an American medium-range surface-to-air missile -  were deployed in nine anti-aircraft missile battalions (later squadrons and groups) of the German Air Force. In the NATO alliance, together with Dutch, Belgian and US units, these HAWK formations formed the so-called HAWK belt, which stretched from the Danish border across Germany to the border with Austria.

Eight of the HAWK-systems had been set up in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Most of them have been taken over by local farmers or other businesses. One has been been turned into a small amusement park with a summer toboggan.

I had explored this place once a few years earlier, and it wasn't really spectacular. We only went there, because it was close by, and it is always interesting to see how a location develops over the course of a few years.

Since there isn't really a regular place to park, we had no choice but to drive right up to the front gate and park there. The access was still the same. I don't think that it was the same hole we went through four years earlier, but that doesn't matter anyway :)

The place still looked the same, but less of it. A few buildings had been removed. I think that the buildings containing tanks had to be removed due to risk of contamination. There are quite a few farmers around, and I think they wouldn't be too happy if the groundwater was laced with gasoline or worse.

A HAWK-base isn't a huge installation, so it didn't take us too long to walk around once and go back to the car and head towards the next location.

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