Slaughterhouse

While we were in California, my son Ben got to visit with my cousins’ daughters, I~ and A~.  A few days before we arrived Aunt S~ had taken I~ to this abandoned slaughterhouse down the road from her house, out in the middle of Central California farm country, to look around. 

As you can see, it has been turned into a sort of work of art by graffiti artists and paintball aficionados. Big blank walls, all sorts of places to hide…who could blame them?  Since I~ had all sorts of fun poking around there by herself, she thought it would be even more fun with her cousins and therefore insisted that Aunt S~ take them down to the slaughterhouse so they could explore, even though Aunt S~ had done her best to convince I~ that the place was full of hobos. 

Unfortunately for the kids, I went along and cramped their style.

The photo above only shows part of what’s on the property.  There are some other small buildings, one of which we headed toward after we got out of the car.  We walked in its direction until we saw a dozen rats scurry out the door.  The girls chucked that idea and we made our way to the main building.

The owners of this marvelously attractive nuisance obviously don’t swing by to check on it very often, so besides being used as a graffiti gallery/paintball arena/home of various carriers of rabies, it is also used as a convenient place to dump that trash that is just so hard to get rid of:

Note how the tires, stove, and other debris have also been covered with graffiti and paintball splats, so they don’t subtract from the ambience of the place.

As the kids practically leapt into the building to examine this nifty masterpiece here, they were accosted by a pigeon, which led to a few seconds of shrieking and declarations of how much they disliked birds. 

 

In this photo, Ben is standing just under a piece of the wood door framing that was completely consumed with dry rot and hanging at an alarming angle (not sure why I didn’t get a photo of that)…

 

Next they went into another room, where they found this…

 

and this…

 

And this:

 

But all I saw was this…

and this:

 

I didn’t take any photos of myself, but I probably looked something like this:

or this:

 

But the kids didn’t UNDERSTAND.

Needless to say, I did not let the kids go up the stairs.  I couldn’t see the stairs but they were most certainly rickety, and I’m sure there really WERE hobos up there.  Scary, stinky hobos. And bats.  Not the nice bats that eat mosquitoes, but deranged, rabid bats.  Big ones, like on “The Bat People”. Thankfully we made it home alive.