If it weren’t for Jai Alai, I probably never would have discovered urbex and everything it lead to and everyone I met through urban exploring/urbex.
Throughout 2006 I played Jai Alai and another player told me about a couple of abandoned frontons (buildings where Jai Alai is played) up in the North East. He suggested I check out a website that would have photos of some frontons up in Connecticut. I joined the website and it got me thinking about abandoned places around Central Florida. After meeting a few local people and seeing there wasn’t a centralized community online for Florida, I decided in November 2006 to create www.FLURBEX.com, Florida Urban Exploration, which continued until around 2016. A place where people from Florida and all over the world could network together to discuss urbex, share photos and stories, and if members stuck around long enough, we would even trade locations with those that we got to know. Some of the earlier members were Sovits, Carpemuffin, IncredibleHonky, Pancakes, Bullet, Squid, Grahamux, Peeps, and Bishop_X, just to name a few.
Those ten years were some of the best years of my life that couldn’t be traded for anything. So many amazing places but even better than the abandoned buildings were and are the people. Without the people, without you, there never would have been a FLURBEX in the first place. I was exploring by myself before the website existed and it just wasn’t working out for me. Not only is it not safe to go alone, it surely wasn’t fun. I focused on trying to meet people in Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa and before I even knew it, the site had a lot of members and we were exploring in groups. Thank you to everyone and anyone that ever joined the site and ever explored with me. You’re awesome.
Nomeus
“The journey is the destination”