Part 5 - Camping Family, loud Family. Dead Family, quiet Family.

Aerial view of an eerie mausoleum.

In this blog and ongoing series, you can follow Abandoned Nordic's urbex road trip as we journey from Finland to France along an extended route. The trip will take about a month, and along the way, various things unfold. We are currently moving from Denmark to Germany.

The drive from Rubjerg Knude in Denmark to Flensburg in Germany takes just over four hours, so we drive. Late in the morning, we stop at a shopping center in Aalborg to grab some food. After eating, we notice an empty cart shelter in the parking lot and decide to hang our wet tent and other gear under its roof, letting the brisk wind dry them. Once the gear is somewhat drier and the car a bit more organized, we continue our journey. The drizzle persists.

We make one more stop before Germany to check out a location on our list. In a rainy forest, our shoes get completely soaked as we search for the spot; the coordinates aren’t entirely accurate, so it takes a while. A small, once-picturesque stone house by a pond, which was on the verge of collapse in photos from a few years ago, has now completely crumbled. We expected as much, so we’re only slightly disappointed and continue on our way.

We arrive in Flensburg early in the evening and check into our accommodation. After doing some laundry and maintaining our equipment, we head out to explore the city. Flensburg seems quite interesting, but with such a short stop and a lot of maintenance to do, we don’t have time to dive in properly. It’s a shame, but we call it a night.

The next morning, it’s pouring rain as we pack the car and hit the road again. We have another three hours of driving ahead to reach our next photo location. We drive, taking turns, mile after mile. I start to see my route plan as the devil’s handiwork.

We inch our way through Friday traffic on the major roads, further slowed down by a traffic jam caused by an accident. Near Kiel, we take a break to stretch our legs and visit the German U-995 submarine from World War II - an impressive sight. Afterward, we merge back into the traffic. The stretch between Hamburg and Hannover is packed with trucks, one after another. To pass the time, we start spotting the country codes on the trucks, and the variety is astonishing..

What should have been a three-hour drive on the map ends up taking nearly the entire day. But now, we’re close to our first photo location in Germany, and it’s time to find a campsite. This turns out to be a completely different experience! Until now, the campsites on our journey have been quiet havens of peace. As novice campers, each stop adds to our knowledge. Thankfully, this wasn’t our first experience - it might have been our last.

Germany is roughly the size of Finland, but while Finland has fewer than six million people, Germany is home to over 80 million. This is an important context when reflecting on how this experience felt to us. Perhaps the thousands of Germans here found the area peaceful - that’s entirely possible.

The campsite is a vast field filled with large RVs, and as is typical in Germany, it’s extremely well-organized. The square plots are numbered and precisely marked. Following the map given to us at reception, we drive to our assigned spot and step out of the car. The neighbors greet us cheerfully and offer detailed instructions on where to set up our tent.

It’s clear that people have come here to relax and enjoy themselves. We, however, feel like complete outsiders. Our routine at campsites is simple: take a quick shower, sleep, and hit the road first thing in the morning. Our gear and philosophy are minimalistic - we’ve packed only the bare essentials. In stark contrast, these campers have brought every imaginable item made of plastic, in every color, to outfit their massive RVs. They’ve even set up their own garden fences to enclose their grassy plots so their dogs can roam freely. Garden tables and chairs, all kinds of folding chairs, beach chairs, and even bean bags - the array of toys and games is endless: balls and goals, rackets and nets, slides, bikes, and pedal cars. And of course, the space in front of each RV is adorned with ornaments like windmills and garden gnomes - all topped off with strings of Christmas lights. My vision of hell looks exactly like this.

In many tightly packed squares, champagne bottles are popped open, and drinks are poured into plastic champagne glasses amidst cheerful exclamations from the large, buzzing groups. Entire families, with all their precious belongings, comfortably occupy these spaces. It’s an overdose of plastic and an explosion of colors - bit too much for us, so time to leave behind the vibrant, noisy, and bustling families; our attention now shifts to a silent, forgotten family and their solemn final resting place.

The abandoned mausoleum of the Behr family lies deep within an idyllic forest in Lower Saxony. As we walk along the path towards the coordinates, birds sing softly, and a few deer watch us warily from the shadows of the trees. The scene is so peaceful, so beautiful, that if heaven existed, it would surely look like this.

The guardian angel of the Behr family and the old, rusty, open door of the tomb.

But as we approach the mausoleum, the mood shifts. The structure is breathtaking in its eerie solitude. Built in the early 1900s for the Behr family, who had lived in the area since the 1400s, the tomb is now surrounded by a darkening forest—a perfect setting for a horror story. The rusty, ornate iron door to the tombs stands ominously ajar, as if inviting us into its gloomy depths. Above it, a large stone angel cradles the family crest, adorned with a bear. Inside, the emptiness is haunting; the family coffins are long gone, leaving behind only a suffocating sense of dread. The small, oddly shaped windows, some still holding fragments of decorative lead glass, allow just a faint, muted light to seep into the tomb’s cool, oppressive darkness.

We take photos and immerse ourselves in the grim atmosphere, and when it finally becomes too dark to continue, it’s time to leave. This quiet place is somewhere we could have lingered longer. Over the past two days, there’s been a stark disconnect between what we want to do and what we have to do first to make it possible. And when all that essential work has taken so much time, only a brief moment remains for what we’ve been eagerly anticipating. It's sad how often this is the way things go.

Now, we have to head back to that dreadful plastic campsite. A quick shower, then into the tent, and that’s enough for me - that’s all I want from this place. In the morning, we continue toward new adventures.