Nest

The former office building for the monumental factory houses Nest, an art gallery.

It was a pretty funky little place with experimental music concerts happening in a side room.

We took a major risk by not booking a table for dinner on Valentine’s Day, but happened upon a restaurant next door. Luckily Zaal 3, which normally only serves the local residents when they go to the attached theater, was willing to squeeze us in for a reasonable price.

Volta...

In addition to the cool urbex, the building housed Volta, two large kinetic installations by artist Oscar Peter whose works balanced on the edge of art and popular entertainment. Behind this red fabric facade, we wandered between 19 towers that shook, squeaked and creaked like architectural monsters.

The main attraction was definitely the wooden roller coaster complete with a loop that he made with a group of assistants...

 ...with works by various artists as the passengers.

Here’s some of the other passengers that take turns riding the coaster.

As you can tell by the high number of photos, we were thoroughly fascinated by the entire experience of witnessing art in motion in an incredible setting.

Urbex on Valentine’s Day...

Clearly this is not urbex, but rather The Hague Stadhuis (City Hall), which we often cut through to see if there’s any interesting art being exhibited.

On this particular day, the best art was the way the sun shined through the windows.

This night was all about art as we headed for a truly unique installation in an unusual destination: a former coal-fired electric plant.

This unremarkable steel door led into a cavernous industrial factory built in 1906.

You could easily imagine a chase scene from a spy thriller being filmed inside this huge space.

The Electriteitsfabriek (Electric Factory) is part of a still working Uniper power plant next door that uses natural gas and thus needs much less space.

It was no surprise that smoking was strongly forbidden.

Until recently, this empty space was used as an art hall a few times per year. The arts have been very hard hit by the pandemic, but hopefully they’ll be able to continue using this space in the future.

Meanwhile in Devon...

Veronica also did some running in January, but she was in Exeter. She likes cows, especially ones that suggest banning beef and milk.

She enjoyed exploring some towns and beaches outside of Exeter, including colorful Brixham.

If I didn’t know better, I would have thought this was Australia, not England. You can see more of the beautiful Shoalstone Pool in Brixham on Veronica’s drone video.

Another day, she and Dreda headed to a beach to take some portraits.

Jimmy was thrilled that he got to see Veronica when he happened to be in the area for a business meeting in early February. 

Veronica’s next weekend away was to Wales with the Expedition Society.

It was cold, but beautiful.

The scariest thing Veronica did in February was to participate in an Extinction Rebellion die-in held on campus at University of Exeter. In case you can’t tell, she’s in the middle with an 0 on her back.

A few days later, she and Brett went to Bristol to hear Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist teenager infamous for starting the School Strike for Climate, speak.

Winter Hashing...

We had several themed and special hashes in January starting with our AGM ~ Annual General Meeting that ended up with dancing and weird boy stunts in Slippery’s disco basement. 

For the Summer Dreaming Hash I wore a Hawaiian shirt. Here we are next to a t-rex sculpture at ARTIS Zoo. 

I looked even kookier for the On-On for Oz in Utrecht as we raised money to donate to the Australian firefighting unit from which a hasher volunteered for decades before dying trying to put out Australia’s horrific wildfires.

After 5 Pack bragged at the start about having done some home maintenance at this cute little yellow house, some of us ladies decided to take an appropriate photo for him. 

No Leeway, our lone hasher from Australia, brought his flag. We proudly raised €215 for the Belowra Rural Fire Services Brigade. 

It was cool that three flight attendants from the US hashed with us.

Hard Drive hosted another birthday hash for himself, but this time Opee laid the trail for him.

We had great turnout on a nice clear winter day.