Day 206

206/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

Today we went exploring and I had a lot of fun playing with color.
 
On the other end of Isla Vista there is a place called West Campus, or Devereux. It used to be a facility for people with mental disabilities until it was shut down. Rumor has it there were some misconduct charges and allegations, but I don't really know for sure. It's a huge complex and it has been boarded up for a long time, so we went at night to go see what there is to see. 


It was super creepy. Straight up. They are renovating parts of the area for reuse, and other parts have been untouched for years. We found an old newspaper inside of one building that had been lying there since 1980-something. I had a bunch of photo gear with me, which freaked me out, because it's hard to run away from zombies when you have 20 pounds of camera equipment strapped to your back. It did help me make some cool pictures though. This was one of the patio areas that we were walking around in, I dig the way the colors turned out and I think it captures everyone's curiosity pretty well.

We went inside the building and saw some cool things, like this chandelier:







But this creeped me out the most:




It was in the basement of the building and there were 3 identical rooms like this. They had giant, ominous locking doors on front that were numbered 1-3 with this creepy old english font. It looked like a kind of holding cell for isolation or something. Just thinking about someone being put in there gave me the willy's, I couldn't stay in there for very long. 


I got some really cool shots that weren't of the place, but we'll save those for tomorrow. That's the beauty of starting your expedition at 11 PM, you can get two days of your 365 out of it!