| Ruins of Fortifications on Corregidor Island, Philippines |
[16 Sep 2012|12:00pm] |
Took a short trip to the Philippines almost a year ago and entirely forgot to post about it!
While there we took a day trip out to the WWII ruins on the heavily fortified island of Corregidor at the entrance to Manila bay, off the Bataan peninsula.
For those unfamiliar, Corregidor was the headquarters of the Allied resistance under Gen. Douglas MacArthur against the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. The Japanese laid siege to and eventually captured the island on May 6, 1942, but not before MacArthur had evacuated and famously stated "I came out of Bataan and I shall return".
The island was then later RETAKEN by allied forces on 26 Feb 1945, following another long and bloody battle. After the battle, the island was pretty much left in ruin "as is" and eventually turned into a historical monument.

Many bandwidth intensive photographs are located behind the cut, please enjoy!
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Thank you for reading! Comments and questions are always appreciated.
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| Pearl, Texas |
[01 Sep 2012|11:29am] |
This is what is left of the house my great-great grandparents lived in. They died in the 1960s, but my grandfather used it as kind of a vacation home until he died. My family and I detoured from our road trip to Austin to see it. It has only been abandoned since about 1995, but there are so many trees growning through it now that you can barely tell it used to be a house. Sad really.
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| Abandoned cobblestone gas station |
[05 Aug 2012|06:43pm] |
East of Rochester, NY is the small village of Williamson. Right on the main street is a nicely detailed cobblestone house, built about 1835, The house was converted to a gas station in the 1940s, and then abandoned about 20 years ago. The pumps have been removed.
Cobblestones were a popular building material across upstate New York from the 1820s to the 1850s. The stones were plentiful along the shore of Lake Ontario, or could be picked out of the farm fields. About 800 cobblestone buildings survive, all but about 40 of them are in a band between Buffalo and Albany.

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| Post-War and 2012 comparison photos from Guam |
[19 Jul 2012|06:40pm] |
Thought this might be of interest to this community.
July 21st is Liberation Day here on Guam - celebrating the retaking of the island by US forces from Japan in 1944. I spent the day running around to a few of my favourite sites. Unfortunately, I only had low-res versions of the old photographs displayed on my phone to work from, so they're not exact, but... still a fun exercise! Post-liberation photographs of Guam, and the same location/perspective (or as near as I could manage) in 2012!
Please click to enlarge.
 Japanese gun emplacement - Gun Beach, Guam.
 Ruins of the Spanish built Fort Soledad, Umatac Guam.
 Umatac Bay, Guam
 St. Joseph Church, Inarajan Guam.
 The main street in Inarajan, Guam.
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