big red dragon

I've brought plushies into disused road tunnels more than once now, and today's tale is of the tunnel i brought a squishable red dragon plush into.

But first, a bit of background on why tunnels exist. A tunnel lets you go from one place to another, in usually a more direct route than a road in the open would (which might need to zigzag over a mountain). But this is not always the case! Sometimes a tunnel is built to replace a road because the road is too dangerous, like a narrow road on the side of a mountain, or a road that frequently has rocks falling onto it. This was the reason behind the existence and closure of the tunnels in this story.

Someone built a road along a fjord sometime in the 1920s, but the area was prone to falling rocks and eventually two tunnels were completed in 1974 to bypass the most dangerous areas of the route. But, the non-tunnel parts of the road were still dangerous, and in 2014 a new and much longer tunnel replaced the entire road along the fjord. There's a funny sign visible on streetview from when the road was still in use:

Okay anyways, let's go explore a dangerous road!!! (dont do at home (dont live on danger road))

Unfortunately, the first tunnel was closed with a gate, and this one did not have any exploits like the one from my previous post. I didn't mention it in that post but the gate of that tunnel had multiple exploits that allowed someone to clip through to the other side if their collision hitbox was narrow enough. This was not the case here. So me and dragon plush went home and cried.

Just kidding! The old 1920 road was still there in some capacity, and even if it was just a footpath in some areas, it was usable. Someone had even built a small wooden bridge to make it easier to cross a stream of water coming down from the mountainside.

After a long time of walking, we reached the other end of the gated tunnel, and sadly the gate was shut on this side too. We didn't let that bother us and continued along the road, and soon we spotted the portal of the second tunnel, and the thing we were hoping for came true: the gate was open!

An open gate like this is practically an invitation saying "hey wouldn't you want to explore this dark hole???+". So we went in, and there was a lot of planks stored near the entrance. Storage is a common use case for closed road tunnels; they can be used as very long garages for local farmers. The tunnel in my last urbex post had a bunch of farming equipment and a caravan parked within (although the caravan had disappeared or transformed into a car by the time i made my second visit). Planks are nothing new, so we ventured further into the dark ness.

This tunnel wasn't as interesting as the one from my previous tale, but we did find an iron door on a concrete wall, and behind it was a side tunnel leading back outside to the 1920 road. Maybe the tunnel was shorter originally, and extended at some point, or perhaps this was just a service tunnel used during construction, who knows. We found a bunch of shotgun shells in the side tunnel, but not much else of interest.

We figured it would not be worth it to explore all the way to the other tunnel portal, as the chance of that gate being open might be low, and we were running out of time to explore. But the journey had been successful, and I got lots of pictures of a silly little dragon plushie exploring a tunnel.

The last interesting thing we came across was a stash of animal bones along the 1920 road - someone had had a good meal. We also heard some shuffling noises coming from the bushes near the bones but nobody popped out to greet us (they were probably shy like us)