Atlas Obscura

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Reporting on the obscure corners of the world: hidden places, lost histories, strange foods, forgotten people. Genuinely curious, never glib.

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Atlas Obscura’s Guide to Unique Romantic Getaways

Travel ideas for couples who don’t want the obvious. You’ve decided to go somewhere together. Maybe you just got married and you’re planning a honeymoon. Maybe you’re marking a decade together with an anniversary trip that actually means something. Maybe you don’t need an occasion at all, save for a wish to get out of ordinary life for a while and remember why you chose each other. Everyone expects you to go somewhere with an overwater bungalow and a fruit plate shaped like a swan. Here's our counterproposal: what if this trip gave you a story no one else you know could tell? The best couples’ trips aren’t the most expensive ones. They’re the ones where you turned a corner together and both stopped breathing for a second—because neither of you expected what was there. This guide is organized not by price tier or beach quality but by the kind of adventure you’re after. Find the entry that sounds like you. Then go. Built in the 14th century, these tombs were once the sumptuous resting places of the Merenids’ finest. dzamonja / Atlas Obscura User Surrender to Your Surroundings Fes, Morocco Fes el-Bali is held by many to be the world’s largest car-free urban zone. This commercial district within the historic city of Fes, largely unchanged since the middle ages, comprises nine thousand four hundred winding alleyways where getting lost amid the merchant stalls, mosques, and shops is part of the appeal. And you will: GPS navigation is notoriously unreliable on these tangled, narrow streets. Start at the Bou Inania Madrasa, a 14th-century theological college known for its intricate carved cedar ornamentation, and elaborate mosaic tilework. Walk toward the Chouara Leather Tannery and watch leather being dyed in vats of saffron, indigo, and poppy from a rooftop terrace above the stalls. The colors are medieval. The process is medieval. The two of you watching it together is not. Eat lunch at a riad hidden behind an unmarked door on a street whose name you won't be able to pronounce: order bastilla, the pigeon pie dusted with powdered sugar, and argue cheerfully about whether it’s the strangest thing you’ve ever loved. Walk to the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter, and find the brass-workers hammering in tiny ateliers no bigger than a closet. In the evening, climb to the Merenid Tombs above the city as the call to prayer echoes and the city turns gold below you. The romance of Fes isn’t in the amenities. It’s in the way the medina demands that you let go—of your plan, your navigation, your sense that you know what’s around the next corner. You don’t. This trip is about living in the moment. Stay at: A riad in the medina, not a hotel on the ring road. Riad Laaroussa or Dar Roumana both have inner courtyards where breakfast arrives as if by sorcery. Don’t miss: The Nejjarine Museum of Wooden Arts and Crafts—an 18th-century caravanserai converted into a museum of carved wood, with a rooftop café that has an incredible view of the medina. See thousands of glowworm hanging peacefully abovehead, forming a magnificent bioluminescent cosmos. Atlas Obscura User Embrace the Silence Waitomo, New Zealand Cave systems in the Waitomo region of New Zealand’s North Island hold a mesmerizing secret: their ceilings glow. Thousands of Arachnocampa luminosa—glowworms found only in New Zealand—have colonized the limestone caverns and created what amounts to a private planetarium. You float through on a small boat in total darkness and total silence, surrounded by cold blue-green constellations. It is profoundly strange. It is also one of the most beautiful things you will ever see. Beyond Waitomo, the surrounding Waikato region is full of the particular New Zealand magic of feeling like you’ve found somewhere the rest of the world simply forgot to claim. Walk the Mangapohue Natural Bridge, a massive limestone arch over a stream where you can find ancient oyster fossils embedded in the rock—this was once the ocean floor. Stand inside a crack in the earth where the walls are six stories tall and the light falls in strange columns. This trip is for couples who can sit with each other in silence and still feel completely present. If that’s you, this is your place. Stay at: Embrace the peace and quiet, and the stunning natural surroundings, by renting a cabin in the surrounding region. Favorites include Te Tiro Accommodation and Golden Ridge Retreat. Don’t miss: The Ruakuri Cave tour, which is longer and less crowded than the main Waitomo tour, includes a remarkable spiral entrance designed to honor the site’s Māori significance, and ends with a boat ride past the densest glowworm colony in the system. Explore the extraordinary moss garden at Saihō-ji. Mike Walker / Atlas Obscura User Travel Through Time Kyoto, Japan Kyoto is beloved by travelers for a reason, but the best way to see this historic destination is to get up early and take in the quiet moments before the rest of the city wakes up. Go to Fushimi Inari-taisha at first light, before the tour buses arrive. The shrine’s thousands of vermillion torii gates were donated by businesses over the centuries—each one inscribed with the donor's name on the back—and they tunnel up the mountain in a corridor of saturated orange-red that makes you feel you’ve slipped into another dimension of time. The hike to the summit takes about two hours. You will almost certainly have the upper paths to yourself. Sit on a bench at the top, look out over the city, and understand in your body why people have been doing this for thirteen centuries. Then go to Saihō-ji, the Moss Temple, which requires an application to visit weeks in advance and a copying sutra before entry, and has more than one hundred twenty varieties of moss carpeting its garden in every shade of green that exists. There is a quality of stillness here—the particular hush of a garden that has been tended continuously since 1339—that is unlike anything else. On your second day, walk the Philosopher’s Path along the canal in the early morning when the light is still low. Stop at the Ōtoyo Shrine, a small shrine protected by cat statues rather than the traditional lion-dogs. Eat at a counter-seat restaurant where the chef serves you one course at a time and you eat what you’re given. Drink sake from a cedar box. The Kyoto trip asks the question: What does it feel like to be somewhere ancient together? Not as tourists, but as two people who chose to show up. Stay at: A ryokan in Higashiyama—the traditional inn district—where you sleep on futons, wear yukata, and receive an eight-course kaiseki dinner in your room. Tawaraya, if budget permits. Don’t miss: Nishiki Market at opening time, before the crowds—the narrow covered shopping street known as “Kyoto’s Kitchen” where you can eat dashi-soaked tofu, tiny pickled vegetables, and skewered grilled mochi from stall to stall. Also: Kurodani Temple, a 12th-century Tendai temple where monks practice chanting in the early morning and the sound carries through the cedar forest. Mykines, home to a solitary lighthouse, is one of the most remote places you could ever visit. Sigfried Rabanser / CC BY 2.0 See the Edge of the World The Faroe Islands There are eighteen main islands in the Faroe archipelago. They rise dramatically from the North Atlantic between Norway and Iceland, and they look like something that was created intentionally with drama in mind: sheer sea cliffs, waterfalls that blow sideways in the wind before they reach the bottom, sheep grazing on grass so green it seems digitally enhanced, villages of turf-roofed houses clinging to hillsides above fjords of impossible blue. Few travelers come here. But you should. Hike to Trælanípa on Vágar Island to see a lake that appears to float above the ocean in an optical illusion that has to be seen to be believed. Walk out onto the promontory at Enniberg, the highest sea cliff in the Faroese islands, and stand two hundred seventy meters above the Atlantic with nothing between you and Canada. Go to Mykines, the westernmost island, reachable by ferry or helicopter, where a bridge over a gorge leads to a lighthouse and the bridge’s cables are occupied in puffin season by birds that appear to have escaped from a cartoon—orange beaks, dramatic eyebrows, complete indifference to your presence. In the evenings, eat lamb (the islands have three times as many sheep as people) and dried fish and Faroese butter, and watch the light on the water go from gold to pink to grey to a luminous white. Stay at: Hotel Føroyar above Tórshavn, where every room has a scenic view and the turf roof blends into the hillside. Or rent a cottage on one of the outer islands and have almost nothing around you for days. Don’t miss: Kirkjubøur, the tiny village on Streymoy that contains a 13th-century cathedral ruin, a fully operational medieval farmhouse (the oldest continuously inhabited wooden house in the world), and a population of roughly eighty people. The bishop of the Faroe Islands once kept his summer residence here. The view across the sound to Hestur island is one of the finest in the archipelago. Geology and the need for protection against invaders created a city unlike any other. gslohr / Atlas Obscura User Explore the Underworld Cappadocia, Turkey The landscape of Cappadocia looks like it was designed by someone who had read too much science fiction and not enough geology. Millions of years of volcanic ash hardened into soft tuff, and then wind and water carved it into thousands of spires called fairy chimneys, some of them thirty meters tall, some of them capped with harder basalt boulders that balanced improbably on top. Early Christians, escaping persecution, dug into the soft rock and built churches inside the spires. Then they dug deeper and built entire underground cities. Derinkuyu extends eighteen stories below the earth. It has living quarters, wine cellars, stables, a church, a school, and wells that reach the water table hundreds of meters down. Twenty thousand people could live here—and for periods of Byzantine history, they did, sealing the tunnels with enormous rolling stone doors when invaders came. You walk through it with a flashlight and your loved one and try to comprehend the determination required to hollow out the world beneath your feet in order to survive. Above ground, stay in a cave hotel (the rock has been dug into for so long that some of the best accommodation in Cappadocia is, quite literally, inside a fairy chimney) and take a hot air balloon at dawn over the valleys when the light is rose and gold and the rock formations below look like a strange lost city. Rose Valley and Pigeon Valley are both hikeable, and both lead past ancient frescoed churches carved into cliff faces. El Nazar Church, in Göreme, has frescoes from the 11th century that have kept their blue, their red, their strange archaic faces, against all odds. Stay at: A cave suite in Ürgüp or Göreme—Argos in Cappadocia is genuinely beautiful and built into a complex of ancient dwellings—but any of the mid-range cave hotels deliver the extraordinary experience of sleeping inside rock. Don’t miss: Ihlara Valley, a 16-kilometer gorge carved by the Melendiz River where more than a hundred rock-cut churches line the canyon walls, most of them with frescoes worth taking in. Walk the valley floor along the river and look up at the doors cut into the cliff face many stories above you. It’s not the drinks, this bar is actually spinning. Keri Kilgo / Atlas Obscura User The Gothic American Trip New Orleans, Louisiana New Orleans is the city where the Atlas Obscura sensibility was perhaps invented, though the city predates us by three centuries. It is a place that has always understood that pleasure and death are neighbors, that beauty and decay coexist in the same building, and that a good story is worth more than a good night’s sleep. Start in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, the oldest extant cemetery in New Orleans, where the dead are buried aboveground in whitewashed plaster tombs because the water table prevents burial below it. Some of these tombs contain generations of the same family—the bones of the previously interred were swept to the back to make room for the newly dead. The tomb of Homer Plessy—of Plessy v. Ferguson—is here. So is Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, whose tomb is always marked with X’s left by visitors making wishes. Walk through the French Quarter in the early morning before the tourists arrive and look at what the city actually is: wrought-iron balconies canting slightly over the narrow streets, plaster facades in faded ochre and salmon revealing the brick underneath where chunks have fallen away, courtyards glimpsed through carriageway openings where banana trees and jasmine and a single iron fountain constitute an entire private world. Eat oysters at the bar at Casamento’s (cash only, closed in summer). Drink a Sazerac at the Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone, which rotates slowly whether you want it to or not. Go to the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum on Chartres Street, housed in the oldest licensed pharmacy in the United States, where the cases contain leeches jars, poison cure-alls made of arsenic, and the earliest known cocaine preparations marketed as toothache remedies. Go to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in Treme, the oldest African American neighborhood in the country, where curator Sylvester Francis has assembled the most significant collection of Mardi Gras Indian suits in the world—towering hand-sewn beaded constructions that take a year to make and are worn once. Stay at: The Hotel Peter & Paul, a converted 19th-century church complex in the Marigny where the rooms are in the rectory, the chapel, the school, and the convent. Sleeping in a former church in New Orleans feels exactly right. Don’t miss: An evening Second Line, if one happens while you're there. A jazz funeral. The Beauregard-Keyes House on Chartres, which has its original furnishings and a ghost-free reputation that is entirely unearned by its atmosphere. Kayaking through Mosquito Bay. Courtesy Puerto Rico Tourism Company Bask in Bioluminescence Vieques, Puerto Rico Mosquito Bay on the island of Vieques holds one of the highest concentrations of bioluminescent dinoflagellates anywhere on Earth. On a moonless night, every movement through the water produces cold blue-green light—your arms as you swim leave trails like a comet, the wake of a kayak paddle glows, a fish disturbed from the shallows explodes in a small private fireworks display. The effect is so improbable and so beautiful that it’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there—making the shared memory all the more precious. Vieques itself is largely undeveloped—much of the island was a U.S. Navy bombing range until 2003, and the former military lands are now a wildlife refuge that contains not just Mosquito Bay but also pristine beaches accessible only by four-wheel drive, wild horses descended from Spanish colonial stock, and a remarkable herd of white cattle egrets who have figured out that the horses attract insects—and follow them everywhere with an air of complete entitlement. Spend the days on the beaches—like Playa Negra, made up of dark volcanic sand that holds the heat long into the evening—and on the old fort, El Fortín Conde de Mirasol, which was the last military fortification built by the Spanish in the New World and now houses the Vieques Museum. It has a view over the harbor and the wild horses grazing below the walls. Stay at: The small guesthouses in Esperanza, the fishing village on the south coast, are the right scale for Vieques. Inn on the Blue Horizon is a longtime local institution. Avoid the all-inclusives. Don’t miss: Explore the bioluminescent bay by kayak rather than by motorized tour—the paddle itself becomes part of the spectacle. And be sure to see Sun Bay Beach at sunrise, before the horses have moved into the shade. Black Hills Institute, home of the dinosaurs. Volkan Yuksel / CC BY-SA 3.0 Embark on a Paleontological Expedition Badlands, South Dakota + Rapid City For the couple whose first date involved a natural history museum. The Badlands are geologically young and active—the striped spires and eroded tables formed only in the last 500,000 years, and they’re still actively eroding at a rate of roughly an inch per year, which means fossils are constantly being exposed at the surface. Walk the Notch Trail along the top of the canyon wall and you will almost certainly see bone weathering out of the rock. The park has found Eocene mammals, saber-toothed cats, giant tortoises, and ancient three-toed horses here. The paleontology is everywhere. From the Badlands, drive to the legendary American roadside phenomenon Wall Drug—a drugstore that started advertising in 1936 and now has six hundred billboards across the state and a population of confused tourists larger than some cities. Then drive to Hill City and the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, which is a working commercial fossil preparation laboratory that you can walk through, watching technicians with dental picks working on specimens worth millions of dollars in surroundings that look like a very disorganized workshop. Stan, one of the most complete T. rex skeletons ever found, was prepared here. Sleep in Deadwood, which is a gambling town now but was a gold rush town before that, and before that was a Lakota sacred place where the Treaty of Fort Laramie prohibited white settlement until gold was discovered and the government simply decided the treaty didn't apply anymore. Mount Moriah Cemetery is here, where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried next to each other, and where Dora DuFran, the madam of the most successful brothel in Deadwood, rests nearby. They were all, apparently, friends. Stay at: The Hotel Alex Johnson in Rapid City, a 1928 Lakota-inspired hotel that has hosted presidents and rock climbers alike since it opened, and which still feels like it knows something it's not telling you. Don’t miss: Jewel Cave National Monument, the third-longest known cave system in the world, most of which has never been mapped, where guided tours take you past formations called frostwork, moonmilk, and hydromagnesite balloons that look exactly as strange as they sound. Choosing Your Trip: The Atlas Obscura Test Whether this is your honeymoon, your tenth anniversary, or simply the trip you’ve decided to take because life is short and you have a window, skip the reviews that rank beaches by the texture and color of the sand. Ask yourselves these instead: What’s the story you want to tell a year from now? The overwater bungalow story ends quickly. The underground city story, the cave church story, the glowing bay story—those take time to tell, because there’s more to say. The best romantic trips are the ones that become part of your shared vocabulary for decades. Would you go back? The best destinations are the ones that leave you feeling you only scratched the surface. If a place can be “done” in a week, it’s probably not the right place for a trip that’s supposed to mean something. Does it require something of you? Not discomfort for its own sake, but genuine engagement—learning a few words of another language, navigating without GPS, eating something you don’t recognize. Trips that ask something of you tend to return something that package tours can’t deliver. Is there something there that exists nowhere else on Earth? Waitomo’s glowworms. Cappadocia’s underground cities. Fes’s living medieval city. Vieques’s bioluminescent bay. The Badlands’s constant fossil exposure. These are the experiences that become, over time together, the stories you keep coming back to. The good news is this: wonder is not expensive. It requires curiosity, a decent tolerance for the unexpected, and a willingness to be in a place on its own terms rather than yours. That, as it turns out, is also a reasonable description of what makes a relationship work. Go somewhere astonishing. Come home changed.

Louise StoryAug 4, 2026

Atlas Obscura

8 Storybook Stays in West Virginia

Wonder can be found around every corner in the Mountain State. With lush forests, dramatic waterfalls, and unparalleled mountain vistas, West Virginia rewards those who make the time to take in the views—with no shortage of accommodations designed to help visitors do just that. Across the state’s small towns and mountain valleys, these lodgings turn an overnight stop into the heart of the journey. Bunk down in whimsical cabins and treetop hideaways, pitch a tent beneath the looming fins of Seneca Rocks, check into a century-old schoolhouse reborn as a boutique retreat, or unwind at a tiny roadside motel with a surprisingly spirited social scene. Each one pairs inventive design with a genuine sense of place—from the pastoral southern borderlands to the rugged high country. The Kilimanjaro Safari Treehouse is situated high above the creek at Four Fillies Lodge. West Virginia Department of Tourism Choose Your Own Woodland Adventure Four Fillies Lodge in Monroe County Spread across nearly 100 acres near the Virginia border, Four Fillies Lodge feels like a collection of fanciful hideaways gathered on one wooded estate. Guests can choose among antique Appalachian cabins, glass-fronted retreats, glamping pods, bohemian-style wagons, and an elevated safari treehouse, with select accommodations adding hot tubs, fireplaces, or creekside settings. The playful range makes the property especially appealing to families, couples, and groups who want more personality than a conventional hotel room offers. Rustic materials and pastoral surroundings set the tone of escape, while thoughtful modern comforts keep the experience inviting rather than overly rugged. Visitors at Fourth Moon Camp can sleep high up in a tree net or hammock. Courtesy of Fourth Moon Camp Camp Beneath a Legendary Skyline Fourth Moon Camp in Seneca Rocks Fourth Moon Camp places guests close to one of West Virginia's most dramatic natural landmarks, where the sheer rock formation of Seneca Rocks rises above a quiet rural landscape. Open across all four seasons and accessible by reservation only, the private campground offers primitive sites like Creekside Hollow and North Peak, vehicle-accessible spots such as Spearmint Patch, and elevated tree-net campsites like Moonshine. The emphasis is on an intimate outdoor experience rather than resort-style development, making it a natural fit for climbers, hikers, and travelers who prefer sleeping close to the landscape. Events and recreational experiences add a communal dimension to the camp's secluded mountain setting. The rooftop bar at the Schoolhouse Hotel. Courtesy the Schoolhouse Hotel Go to Bed in a Beloved Old School The Schoolhouse Hotel in White Sulphur Springs Built around the historic cornerstone of a 1912 school, the Schoolhouse Hotel gives a familiar civic landmark an imaginative second chapter. Its 30 boutique guest rooms draw inspiration from classroom subjects such as art, English, band and geography, creating an atmosphere that's playful without sacrificing polish. The fully accessible property also includes a restaurant, rooftop bar and flexible gathering spaces, and its location places guests within easy reach of downtown White Sulphur Springs. Original history and contemporary hospitality coexist throughout the building, making the hotel feel both nostalgic and forward-looking—a memorable base for exploring the shops, restaurants and mountain scenery of the Greenbrier Valley. The retro exterior gives the Billy Motel a recognizable personality. Courtesy of the Billy Motel & Bar Check Into a Mountain-Town Cult Classic The Billy Motel & Bar near Davis With just 10 rooms and a lively bar at its center, the Billy Motel & Bar transforms the classic roadside stay into a stylish mountain-town gathering place. The pocket-size property sits between downtown Davis and the entrance to Blackwater Falls State Park, positioning guests for waterfall walks, Canaan Valley adventures and evenings in nearby Thomas. Inside, a fireplace, cocktails and French-press coffee encourage guests and locals to linger, while the retro exterior gives the motel an instantly recognizable personality. The result is intimate, convivial and refreshingly unpretentious—a character-rich home base for travelers who like their outdoor escapes paired with good design and conversation. Rafting, hiking, and fishing are within easy reach at Country Road Cabins. West Virginia Department of Tourism Sleep Among the Treetops Country Road Cabins in Hico This wooded New River Gorge retreat offers far more than traditional cabins: guests can book treehouses, yurts, glamping tents, a geodesic dome and an Airstream. The round Holly Rock Treehouse is reached by a 37-foot canopy bridge and includes a private elevated hot tub. Just minutes from the New River Gorge Bridge, the property puts guests within easy range of whitewater rafting on the New and Gauley rivers, along with hiking, fishing and nearby state parks. Each accommodation comes with a fully equipped kitchen, making it easy to settle in for a multi-night stay in the gorge. Four unique apartments are available at Lafayette Flats. Courtesy of Lafayette Flats Check Into an Art-Filled Hideaway Lafayette Flats Boutique Vacation Rentals in Fayetteville Four individually designed flats occupy a historic building in the center of Fayetteville, steps from the small town's restaurants, shops and public art. Each accommodation combines the independence of an apartment with the careful styling of a boutique hotel, including original West Virginia artwork and details inspired by the surrounding New River Gorge. It's a fitting choice for travelers who want a downtown base with more room to spread out and settle in. The General Lewis Inn was named for a noted figure of the French and Indian War. West Virginia Department of Tourism Step Into a Collector’s Country Inn The General Lewis Inn in Lewisburg Built in stages across 1834 and 1928, the historic General Lewis Inn pairs individually decorated rooms with antique furnishings, refinished original floors, Persian rugs and a mix of classical and contemporary style throughout. Its 23 rooms, tranquil garden and courtyard, farm-to-table restaurant and atmospheric Thistle Lounge give it the layered character of a grand old house rather than a conventional hotel. The inn takes its name from General Andrew Lewis, a noted figure of the French and Indian War, and its East Wing began as an 1834 residence before a West Wing addition turned the property into a hotel in the 1920s. Its downtown location also makes it easy to explore Lewisburg's walkable historic district, antique shops, galleries and independent businesses. The Town’s Inn is a step back in time. Tyler Hora Stay Inside a Living-History Village The Town’s Inn in Harpers Ferry Occupying two pre-Civil War stone residences dating to approximately 1820 and 1840, The Town's Inn places guests directly within Harpers Ferry's Lower Town. Rooms are furnished in a style influenced by the historic boarding houses preserved nearby, while rivers, museums, trails and the train station are only steps away. Little about the experience feels updated for modern travel, which is exactly the point for guests seeking an unfiltered sense of the town's 19th-century past.

Daniel McDermonAug 3, 2026

Atlas Obscura

These Five Unique Events Are Worth a Detour This Weekend

Looking for something fun to do? Check out our event listings. If you’re looking to liven up your weekend plans, we’ve got you covered, with unique event listings around the world. Find exciting events in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. In New York, you can dive into the world of thrift and vintage fashion at ThriftCon NYC, where hundreds of vendors bring together curated streetwear, designer pieces, and nostalgic collectibles waiting to be unearthed. Each visit holds the promise of unexpected discoveries, from limited-edition drops to rare finds that tell stories of eras gone by. After hours, the California Science Center in Los Angeles transforms into an unexpected backdrop for an evening of craft beer exploration at the LA Brewsology Beer Fest. Dozens of local brews await discovery among the museum's exhibits, turning a familiar institution into something altogether more surprising. Sample your way through the offerings, uncover new favorites, and connect with fellow enthusiasts in a setting that makes the experience feel like anything but an ordinary tasting event. Shoppers at ThriftCon NYC. Each summer, London becomes a stage for one of the most vibrant celebrations of Ghanaian culture in the diaspora. Ghana Party in the Park draws thousands of attendees into a world of pulsating music, bold fashion, and a marketplace brimming with unexpected finds. Performers, artisans, and food vendors come together to offer a genuine window into the living traditions and contemporary energy of Ghana. Whether you're deeply familiar with the culture or encountering it for the first time, this annual gathering is an invitation to explore, connect, and celebrate. Each summer, Prague transforms into a vibrant hub of LGBTQ+ celebration, advocacy, and culture during its annual Pride Festival. A lively parade winds from Wenceslas Square to the sweeping Letná Plain, accompanied by concerts, workshops, debates, and theater performances that illuminate the diversity and layered history of the LGBTQ+ community. As one of Central Europe's largest Pride events, the festival draws thousands of participants and visitors united by a spirit of inclusion and a shared commitment to equality and human rights. Every August, San Francisco pays tribute to one of its most legendary native sons at Jerry Day, an annual celebration held at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater in McLaren Park. The event draws thousands of devoted fans for a full day of live music performances from local and national artists, all in honor of the Grateful Dead frontman whose spirit remains deeply woven into the city's cultural fabric.

Daniel McDermonJul 29, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Find Something Fun and Unique to Do With Event Listings on Atlas Obscura

Looking to jazz up your weekend plans? We’ve got you covered. You can now find exciting and unique events around the world on Atlas Obscura in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C.! From quirky festivals and behind the scenes museum tours to food experiences, performances, lectures, and seasonal celebrations, AO’s new Events listings help people find experiences that are as unexpected as the places themselves. The feature debuts in 14 cities, with plans to expand to additional destinations over time. For nearly two decades, Atlas Obscura has inspired millions of people to explore hidden wonders through its community driven database of remarkable places and award winning storytelling. With the addition of Events, that spirit of discovery now extends beyond destinations to experiences happening every day around the world. Every Friday morning from April through September, the ancient Waagplein square in Alkmaar, not far from Amsterdam, transforms into a living relic of Dutch mercantile history. Dutch Cheese Markets Alkmaar

Atlas ObscuraJul 28, 2026

Atlas Obscura

These Five Fun Events Are Worth a Detour

Looking for something fun to do? Check out our event listings. If you’re looking to liven up your weekend plans, we’ve got you covered, with unique event listings around the world. Find more exciting events in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. Flevopark becomes an unlikely stage for the unconventional when No Art Festival takes over the Amsterdam green space with a lineup of boundary-pushing performances and pioneering sounds. Hosted by the independent No Art label, this is less a party and more a curated provocation, designed to challenge what art and music can be when freed from traditional constraints. Each summer, Chicago's Chinatown Summer Fair comes alive with one of the city's most spirited street celebrations, drawing over 40,000 visitors into the heart of a neighborhood with deep cultural roots. Lion dance processions wind through the streets, kung fu demonstrations command attention, and stage performances offer a window into living traditions that stretch back generations. Each summer during Seattle’s Seafair Weekend, the waters of the Pacific Northwest transform into a roaring arena where hydroplane racers push the limits of speed and engineering, drawing crowds to the shores of Lake Washington for one of the region's most beloved annual gatherings. Seafair Weekend is a multi-day spectacle that layers thundering boat races with breathtaking aerial performances, waterfront activities, and a festive atmosphere that has defined Seattle summers for generations. Beyond the adrenaline of the races and airshows, the event unfolds as a living portrait of Pacific Northwest culture, where locals and first-time visitors alike find themselves swept up in something that feels genuinely irreplaceable. Attendees at Otakon in Washington, D.C.. peyj_turner / CC BY-SA 2.0 Otakon is a major annual celebration of Asian pop culture, anime, and music, drawing thousands of fans to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Attendees can immerse themselves in a dynamic atmosphere filled with cosplay, panels, concerts, and a bustling dealer’s hall. The event is known for its diverse programming, special guest appearances, and opportunities to connect with fellow enthusiasts from around the world. Along the Meguro River in Nakameguro, the Washu Festival transforms one of Tokyo's most beloved springtime settings into a celebration of Japanese sake culture. Thousands of visitors gather each year to sample offerings from renowned breweries, with the blooming sakura overhead lending the event an almost otherworldly atmosphere. Stage performances and the warmth of Japanese hospitality round out an experience that goes far beyond a simple tasting.

Atlas ObscuraJul 24, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Explore More: Field Notes on Exploration, Discovery, and Adventure

Atlas Obscura and The Explorers Club are celebrating the many ways people experience our remarkable world.

Atlas ObscuraJul 22, 2026

Atlas Obscura

The Birthplace of Kool-Aid

This quintessentially American soft drink has its own annual festival in Hastings, Nebraska. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Walk with me for a bit through the halls of the Hastings Museum in South Central Nebraska. You can see models of the dinosaurs that once roamed the Great Plains. There’s giant rocks and crystals that can be found in the area. And of course, there’s an endless collection of historical dioramas. But there’s one thing in this museum’s collection that really jumps out. It’s this big, round fiberglass mascot suit. Teresa Kreutzer-Hodson: I’m gonna say it’s probably about five feet in diameter. It’s pretty good size. So it is a hard shell. It has a metal frame harness in it that you would put across the top of your shoulders. We actually had one of our staff members get into it. And he’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is so heavy.” And like, it was killing his shoulders after like, 10 minutes. He’s like, “I can’t, I’ve got to get this off.” Amanda McGowan: The suit is shaped like a big glass lemonade pitcher, though in this case, specifically, it’s filled with a bright red liquid. This pitcher also has legs and a face. Maybe you see where I’m going with this. This pitcher is the Kool-Aid Man. Ohhhhhhh, yeah! Yeah, the Hastings Museum is a proud owner of the original Kool-Aid Man suit from the 1970s. Teresa: You look at some of those old commercials where the Kool-Aid Man is running through and I can go, “Yep, that’s the fiberglass suit. You see this poor guy trying to move it, or woman, I don’t know, whoever’s in it. It’s like, oh my goodness, knowing how heavy it is, I feel sorry for him. Amanda: If you’ve ever walked through an American grocery store, I’m sure you know what Kool-Aid is. It’s a powdered beverage that comes in an envelope, and you add sugar and water to it. It’s actually been around for almost 100 years. But in the city of Hastings, Kool-Aid is a big deal. There’s even an annual festival dedicated to it. And that’s because the Kool-Aid man is a local legend. Not this mascot, but the actual Kool-Aid man, the guy who invented Kool-Aid, which happened right here, 100 years ago, in Hastings. I’m Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today’s episode is brought to you in partnership with Visit Nebraska. And today we’re going to dive into the most famous rags-to-riches story of the Nebraska Plains. It’s about the real Kool-Aid man, Edwin Perkins. He was kind of a cross between an ad man and a mad scientist. Picture if Beaker from the Muppets and Don Draper were fused into one person. There’s something very American, to my mind, about Edwin Perkins’ tale. It’s about coming up with something brand new and then figuring out how to sell it to as many people as possible. And in the process, transforming one small town in south central Nebraska. That’s after this. This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. The Hastings Museum is home to a massive collection of Kool-Aid ephemera. Courtesy of Hastings Museum Amanda: Hastings, Nebraska is a city of about 25,000 people. It’s less than two hours outside of Lincoln, and it’s had a few claims to fame over the years. It was the largest navy ammunition depot in the country during World War II, and for a time, it was known as the cigar-making capital of Nebraska. We’ve also done an episode about Hastings, ‘The Goose Who Wore Nikes.’ I’ll post a link in the episode description. I can’t even describe it in one line, it won’t do it justice. But today, what Hastings is arguably most famous for is for being the place where Kool-Aid was invented and the story behind it. It’s kind of like a classic Horatio Alger rags to riches tale, you know, the one that we love to tell in the United States, but with a 20th century twist that involves chemistry, patent medicine with laxatives in it, and the Kool-Aid Man. So let’s get into it. It all started back in the 1890s when the Perkins family made the trip out west to Nebraska from Iowa. Back in Iowa, the family had been in the general store business. In Nebraska, they were hoping to become farmers, but their timing was just not great. There was this drought all across the state. And as the story goes, their young son, Edwin, came up with the family’s plan B. Teresa: As Edwin says, he convinced his dad to go back into the general store business. I don’t know how much of that’s true. He was only 11 at the time, but... You know, it makes for a good story. Amanda: This is Teresa Kreutzer-Hodson. She’s the director of the Hastings Museum in Hastings, Nebraska. Teresa: And I have spent the last 30 years researching and doing exhibits and telling stories and even writing a book about the history of Kool-Aid. So I’ve been getting to know Edwin Perkins and his family very well. Amanda: So 11-year-old Edwin Perkins convinces his father to open a general store. And soon Edwin became the most enthusiastic child employee that they had ever seen. He was especially interested in this new product called Jell-O. It was a powder, but if you added water to it on the stove, it became a solid dessert. Edwin thought this was just totally magic. Teresa: He just kind of started getting curious about products. And he sent away for this magazine to get formulas to mix things up. He would mix up concoctions in his mother’s kitchen and stink it up. And that was one of the family stories, too, is that, you know, it was always he was concocting something. Amanda: His first big break as an amateur chemist was this product called Nix-O-Tine. Nix-O-Tine was an herbal remedy that was supposed to help you quit smoking. But the ingredients were pretty interesting. It included silver nitrate and laxatives. So whether it worked or not has been lost to history. But in the process, Edwin found that this whole making products thing was less about what you sold and more about how you sold it. He targeted a very specific market with Nix-O-Tine, which was World War I veterans. See, cigarettes had been put in ration boxes. So many soldiers coming back from the war all of a sudden had new smoking habits that they were trying to kick. And with the success of Nix-O-Tine under his belt, Edwin started a brand new business called Perkins Products. Teresa: He ended up with like 125 or 126 different products. And they ranged from like food coloring and food flavorings to like motor cleaner and perfume and hair products and cleaning products. Yeah, it was like all across the board. Amanda: So it was a bit surprising that their most successful product was something that you could drink. It was called Fruit-Smack. Fruit-Smack was a drink concentrate, you know, like the kind they would have at soda fountains to make soft drinks. But unfortunately, it was sold in glass bottles, and these bottles kept breaking as people brought them door to door and tried to sell them. So Edwin began to wonder if there was a way around this problem, if he could maybe invent around it. He thought back to his childhood at the general store and to Jell-O. And he started tinkering. Like a mad scientist in his lab, Edwin set out to transform Fruit-Smack into a perfectly portable powdered potion. And after some trial and error, and as Teresa tells me, some possible help from a compounding pharmacist in Florida, Edwin came up with a winning formula. He called it Kool-Aid. First, it was actually spelled “Ade” (A-D-E) but that gave them a little bit of trouble with the Food and Drug Administration. Teresa: If you had A-D-E in the name, it actually needed to have real fruit juice in it. which is still a thing today. So, you know, his were all artificial flavors, so he had to change it. Amanda: It was changed to Kool-Aid (A-I-D) and that’s what it is to this day. But as Edwin knew, coming up with a new product was only half the battle. Now we had to figure out how to get people to actually buy it. And I should point out, this was a period in time when American shopping habits were going through this pretty drastic transformation. So in the early part of the 1900s, if you wanted to buy groceries, you would go to a general store like the one that Edwin’s family had. You would order flour and the clerk would scoop it out of a big barrel and give it to you. Kind of like shopping in bulk. But by the 20s and 30s, around the time Edwin was working on Kool-Aid, you started to see specialized grocery stores with aisles that the shoppers would wander up and down. And there were brands on the shelves and they were competing for your attention. So Edwin did some research. Teresa: One of his nephews talks about going to a grocery store with him. And he said it was not a quick trip. He would scour the grocery store shelves looking for new products. And then he’d stand there and study them. And he’d look at the ingredients. And he looked at the packaging. And, you know, a grocery store trip for a carton of eggs and a gallon of milk was a two-hour adventure. Amanda: What he came up with was a super bright and colorful store display for Kool-Aid. He called it the “Self-selling silent salesman.” The guy has a way with names, you have to admit. Teresa: That’s a mouthful. But it’s basically the box that you put the Kool-Aid in and set on the counter and, you know, by the register where you get that impulse buying. You know that there’s things in that aisle when you go to check out that you’re going, “Mom, mom, mom, I want this!” You know. He knew how to work it. Amanda: No doubt this was the bane of the existence of every parent shopping with a child at the time, but it was successful. And speaking of marketing to kids, Edwin also figured out how to get customers hooked on Kool-Aid. He came up with this prize system where if you mailed in enough Kool-Aid packets, you would get stuff. like an aviator cap or a decoder ring or even like a little circus playset. Teresa: He just knew how to reward people. That’s where I really think his genius is, is just in that ability to connect with people. Amanda: Kool-Aid was successful pretty much right off the bat. It debuted in 1927, and by 1931, they were already shipping nationwide. Not even the Great Depression slowed things down. Teresa: In 1933 he lowered the package price to five cents and he made more money than he did when he had it at 10 cents because it was so cheap to buy and you could get a treat without spending a lot of money. Amanda: But Kool-Aid hitting the big time also meant leaving Hastings behind. Edwin had invented Kool-Aid in Hastings. He had based Perkins Products there for many years and he produced Kool-Aid in a small factory in downtown Hastings. But in 1931, he decided to pick up stakes and move the business to Chicago. He could have a bigger factory there, and they could ship to more places around the country more easily. But it seems Edwin always viewed Hastings as his real hometown. As he neared the end of his life in the 1960s, he requested to be buried in Hastings, and that is where Edwin Perkins is buried today, in the city’s Parkview Cemetery. Funny enough, the Kool-Aid Man character that is so famous today didn’t really come about until after Edwin left the company. He sold the business in the 1950s to General Foods, and the Kool-Aid Man was a fever dream, shall we say, created by an advertising executive who worked there. Teresa: As the story goes, he was watching his kid draw faces in a frosted glass, and he came up with the idea of using a frosted pitcher and putting in symbols. And that kind of continued until they developed the Kool-Aid Man, which made his first appearance in 1975. Amanda: But Teresa says over the last 30 years, there’s been a lot more interest in Hastings and reconnecting with the history of this famous product that was invented there and with the story of the town’s real Kool-Aid Man, Edwin Perkins. It’s been a little bit of a challenge sometimes because Edwin didn’t actually leave many papers behind when he died. Teresa and her colleagues have had to get a little bit creative with their research methods. She told me about a time in the early 2000s when they visited the old original Kool-Aid factory in Hastings. At the time, it was being used as a furniture store. Teresa: We went in and we took some pictures and everything and we went upstairs. There was these two glass bottles in the corner and they had Perkins Product Company on it. So we were like, “Can we take these?” Amanda: Today, Kool-Aid’s history is a huge draw for Hastings. They even have this entire summer festival dedicated to Kool-Aid called Kool-Aid Days. This might seem a little bit odd, a town so entwined with a product that they have an entire festival oriented around it. And it is, you know, great advertising for Kool-Aid, I’m sure. But this is a very real part of the town’s story. And Teresa tells me it’s a source of local pride. Teresa: Hastings has embraced the birth of Kool-Aid location. And so we have developed the Kool-Aid Days festivities. It happens the third weekend of August, typically. There's a very large parade in our downtown. There’s other activities and games and a very large Kool-Aid stand that goes out to our fairgrounds. Here at the museum, we do some smaller activities. We have the five of the six original flavors that are left that we serve. We kind of go with the historic side of it. And we do some smaller games and activities. And of course, then we highlight the exhibit as well. It’s fun. It’s a little crazy around here. Amanda: If you’re in town for Kool-Aid Days, you can also swing by the Hastings Museum. They have a substantial exhibit dedicated to the history of Kool-Aid. And Teresa says they like to tell young visitors that if they set up a lemonade stand or a Kool-Aid stand in their front yards, they’re kind of following in Edwin’s footsteps. Teresa: They’re young entrepreneurs just starting out and stuff like that. So, you know, you can come from humble beginnings and, you know, you work hard and you can make something, you know, which is kind of that American dream too. Edwin was kind of that living proof of that. Amanda: I’ll post more information about visiting the Hastings Museum and Kool-Aid Days in the episode description. And I’ll also point out that if you’re in Hastings, you can swing by the original Kool-Aid factory. It’s today been converted into apartment buildings. So I guess you could live there too if you are that into Kool-Aid. But they do have a display in the front window that's all about the Perkins family and the history of Kool-Aid. And you can check it out. I’ve got to get something to drink. This episode is making me thirsty. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM Podcasts. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Kelly McEvers, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.

The Podcast TeamJul 14, 2026

Atlas Obscura

These Five Fantastic Events Are Worth Traveling For

While the U.S. celebrates the Fourth of July, there's a lot more going on. The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday this weekend, but there are loads more events to get excited about around the world this weekend. The International Festival of Life transforms Chicago into a living crossroads of Caribbean rhythms, African traditions, and global culture. Live performances fill the air while vendors offer a marketplace of crafts, goods, and stories from around the world. Jamaican heritage anchors the celebration, but the spirit here reaches far beyond any single tradition, weaving together sounds, flavors, and perspectives that span continents. Stretching more than 900 kilometers through the Lazio region, the Rally di Roma Capitale transforms the streets and countryside surrounding Rome into a stage for world-class motorsport competition. Over three days, talented drivers navigate a mix of urban terrain and open roads, bringing high-speed racing to one of Europe's most storied cities At the Hippodrome de Vincennes, the storied Paris racetrack transforms into an unlikely stage for one of the city's most electrifying cultural gatherings. Festival Yardland brings together the creative forces of France, Africa, and the Caribbean through live performances spanning hip-hop, R&B, amapiano, and afrobeat. High above the streets of Berlin, the rooftop of Gesundbrunnen Center transforms into a lively open-air marketplace where secondhand clothing, forgotten objects, and pre-loved treasures find their way into new hands. Sellers and shoppers gather beneath the open sky to browse, barter, and connect, all while local food, drinks, and live music set the tone for an afternoon worth savoring. ptrktn / CC BY-SA 2.0 Each June, the streets of Taito, Tokyo come alive with the delicate blooms of the morning glory flower during the annual Iriya Asagao Festival. Thousands of potted flowers in an astonishing range of colors and varieties line the festival grounds, transforming the neighborhood into a living gallery of botanical artistry. Find more exciting events in Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C.

Atlas ObscuraJul 1, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Podcast: The Black Surfmen Behind One of the Greatest Water Rescues Ever

Pea Island is a wildlife refuge, and one of the most untouched parts of the Outer Banks. But a century ago, this small piece of land was the site of one of the most remarkable water rescues to date. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit the Outer Banks of North Carolina and unearth some surprising history about a place known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic because of how many shipwrecks have occurred there. It was also home to early efforts at lifesaving and a precursor to the U.S. Coast Guard. Kelly McEvers: If you drive down the coast of the Outer Banks in North Carolina, you get to a point where you get the feeling you're going nowhere. You're on a single-lane road and civilization just starts to disappear. There's fewer and fewer houses, no more restaurants, sand to the left, sand to the right with just a few beach grasses poking through. This is Pea Island. And today it is a wildlife refuge, one of the most untouched parts of the Outer Banks. And out here you will see a sign. It's nothing special. All it says is the name of a bridge. Captain Richard Etheridge Bridge. It's the kind of sign you might just drive past without even thinking about it. But there is a story behind that sign. A hundred years ago, this small piece of land in the Outer Banks was the site of one of the most amazing water rescues ever. And it was led by a person and a team who, until recently, were mostly unknown. I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura. A celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today's episode is brought to you in partnership with the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau. Today's story is about how just 30 years after the Civil War ended, a black man led one of the most successful life-saving teams in the country's history. And how their incredible rescue required them to go off book. That's after this. Richard Etheridge, left, with his crew in front of Pea Island lifesaving station, circa 1896. Public Domain If you visit the Outer Banks today, it is clear you are in vacation town, right? Cute bookstores, mini golf courses, big houses for rent right on the ocean. But in the late 1800s, the Outer Banks was a different world. Dave Zoby: They thought of the beachfront as like wasteland. They thought of the beachfront as a place you wouldn't want to live. Kelly McEvers: This is Dave Zoby. He's a writer, and he used to visit the Outer Banks as a kid with his family during the summer. The Outer Banks, if you don't know them, are a series of barrier islands, which means they're basically a long strip of sand that runs parallel to the actual coastline. Like this outer buffer zone between the coast and the Atlantic Ocean. Which means, especially back in the day, things could get rough. Dave Zoby: It was a hard place to live, you know. There was malaria, there was storms, there was blowing sand everywhere. Before the bridges were built, the only way to get out there was by boat. Kelly McEvers: But the sandy strip of land was always shifting. And in the days before radar, sailors couldn't see them or see when a storm was approaching. Dave Zoby: So there were ships driven ashore. Sometimes they found dead bodies on the beach because people washed up. Sometimes 300 people would lose their lives. The only... metaphor we could come up with is maybe the analogy would be a modern plane crash. Kelly McEvers: At one point, there were these two big disasters that really got people's attention. The first was in 1877, when a ship named the Huron sank just 200 yards off the North Carolina shore. Ninety-eight out of 134 people onboard died. Less than two months later, another ship called the Metropolis went down. Another 85 people died. That's when the story of how dangerous the Outer Banks were got out. Dave Zoby: Because the newspapers loved that kind of sensationalism, and they sent newspaper men down from Norfolk, and they got to the beaches in time to see people dig into graves. So it was really grisly, and the country was paying attention. And when the country started paying attention to these disasters, they said, these deaths didn't need to happen. We needed to do something about all these Americans just drowning right there within sight of the coast. Kelly McEvers: So Congress established a rescue service called the Life Saving Service, basically a precursor to the Coast Guard. They built life-saving stations along the coast and staffed them nine months out of the year. Crews came from the mainland to live and work at these stations. One of those stations was on that empty strip of land that is now a wildlife sanctuary, Pea Island. And it was staffed by a team that would turn out to be one of their best. David Wright: Richard Etheridge was the first keeper of the Pea Island Lifesaving Station, which was the first and for a long time believed to be the only all-Black station in the history of the Lifesaving Service. Kelly McEvers: This is David Wright. He's a writer and professor at the University of Illinois. He and Dave Zoby wrote a book together called “Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers.” Zoby learned about Richard Etheridge one day when he was visiting the Outer Banks Aquarium. He saw a photo of Etheridge and his crew on display. Zoby mentioned the photo to Wright, and they were both fascinated by this person they'd never heard of. So they started digging. Richard Etheridge was born into slavery in 1842 on North Carolina's Roanoke Island. Zoby and Wright figured out that he was actually the son of his former enslaver. Richard learned to read and write. He became an activist and fought for the Union Army in the Civil War. David Wright: He'd written this letter that was just really moving about the mistreatment of Blacks back on Roanoke Island. So he was, you know, I had his rank. I had his unit. We could trace his unit. They were in it. They were fully in the Civil War. Kelly McEvers: After the war, Richard came back to Roanoke Island. He joined the Life Saving Service and started working as a low-ranking crew member. The service called them surfmen. But then the keeper of the Pea Island station messed up handling a bad wreck and he was let go. So in 1880, just a few years after reconstruction, Richard became the first ever black man appointed to run a life-saving station. But not everybody was happy with this. David Wright: When Richard got the head job, the white crewman left, which was completely predictable. And then he took the remaining Black surfmen from the rest of the Outer Banks stations and brought them in, and that formed the all-Black crew. Kelly McEvers: And then, shortly after Richard's appointment, the station of this all-Black crew was burned down. Zoby and Wright think they know who did it. David Wright: It turns out that the arsonists were his cousins. Kelly McEvers: Remember, Richard's father was his enslaver. So his cousins were two white men. They worked at a nearby life-saving station, and they were trying to get better jobs for themselves. David Wright: They were aspiring to these positions, and then all of a sudden, their former slave, former family slave, gets appointed keeper. So when the life-saving service came from D.C. and investigated, it turns out that it was these two cousins who were very likely had been responsible for the fire that set it. Kelly McEvers: It was a setback, but the Pea Island life-saving crew soon got a chance to show that they knew what they were doing. It's October 1896. Richard and his crew are at their station. David Wright: They're out there on Pea Island, which is fairly isolated, and a storm blows in. Kelly McEvers: The storm washes away the entire beach, like basically no more sand. Crews in the other stations decide to get in their lifeboats and row to the mainland. David Wright: Richard Etheridge decided to stay. And then sure enough, in the middle of the night, one of the crewmen thought he saw a light. So he summons Richard Etheridge. They see a red rocket, which was a sign of distress. Kelly McEvers: At the time, there were two main ways of rescuing people. One, get in a rowboat and paddle out there. But that's pretty risky in a big storm. Two, the more difficult way was called a beach apparatus. The crew would haul a giant cart with what is essentially a cannon, officially called a Lyle gun, onto the beach. They'd plant an anchor in the sand to keep everything steady and then use the cannon to fire a line to the sinking ship. Then they would set up what basically looks like an old school clothesline and reel people back into the shore. David Wright: The night of the E.S. Newman, he has to make a decision. Do we take the boat or do we take the beach apparatus? And Etheridge decided on the beach apparatus. Why, we'll never know. But he decided that it was probably going to be the best way to rescue the crew. Kelly McEvers: So Richard and the crew start dragging this cart, which, by the way, weighs a literal ton, about a mile and a half through the sand and water until they are across from the ship. David Wright: They can see it. It's not that far off the coast. It's maybe 70 yards off the coast. And they can hear the people on the ship, like, raise this you know, cry of joy when they realize that lifesavers are there. Kelly McEvers: Richard and crew get ready to fire the Lyle gun with the line out to the ship when they realize there's a problem. In order to fire the gun, they need to dig an anchor in the sand to keep everything stable. But remember, the beach was washed out. They can't plant the anchor, which means they can't fire the gun. David Wright: And so in that moment, you either... take your crew and go a mile and a half back to the station and come back with the boat or you try to find another solution. What he realizes is that the Newman is, it's coming apart, right? And so there's no time to go back for the boat. So what he decides to do, Richard Etheridge, he decides that what they can do is two men lashed together and secured with another line can take the line out to the Newman and The nature of the Outer Banks is that it's super showy. Sometimes it'll be knee-deep, sometimes it'll be waist-deep, sometimes you'll have to swim. So between sort of running as best they can, walking, trudging forward, swimming at times, they're going to carry the line out to the ship. The other problem, though, is because the ship is coming apart, there's like wood planks that are spiked with nails and other things in the surf. Kelly McEvers: Two men volunteer to brave the surf and take the line out to the boat. In all, they make nine trips back and forth. And the Pea Island life-saving crew saves every single person on board. So, the rescuers bring the crew back to the station. David Wright: This all-white, largely all-white crew, I'm sure, with these Black surfers in this very tight space. When the storm blew over, the captain of the ship went back to the scene, and he ended up finding the sideboard that said E.S. Newman, and he gave it to the crew to thank them. Kelly McEvers: Someone took a photo of the crew, all lined up. And then? David Wright: That was just it. That was it. And then, you know, they got up the next day and they did their duty and they did more rescues. Kelly McEvers: And that was kind of the end of the story. Just a few years after the rescue of the E.S. Newman, Richard Etheridge got sick. It was so bad, the crew couldn't move him. And in 1900, when he was 58, Richard died inside the Pea Island Lifesaving Station. It's easy to hear the story of Richard Etheridge and think, wow, this crew of heroic men pushed past some major racial and social barriers of the time. But things don't always shake out so neatly. In some ways, the Pea Island life-saving station opened the door for Black folks. But in other ways, it just led to more segregation. Dave Zoby says over the years, all Black watermen, no matter how talented they were, were sent to work at the Pea Island station. And then we're just stuck there. Dave Zoby: And in 1915, when it became the Coast Guard, they still had this one Black station there along the coast of North Carolina. And most of the Coast Guard people, it was segregated, and you didn't have that much mobility. And many of the men at Pea Island, the surf men, could take the test, could qualify to be boatswain mates, and should be able to go on and become officers. They weren't able to do it. Kelly McEvers: The Pea Island life-saving station kept operating with an all-Black crew until 1947, when it was decommissioned. The building was dismantled. But just because the story is imperfect doesn't mean it's not worth knowing. Today, Richard Etheridge's story is coming back to life across the Outer Banks. The photo of the crew after the rescue hangs in the aquarium. That's the one Dave Zoby saw and how he and David Wright started their research. There are plaques around the islands and a museum about the Pea Island crew. As for Pea Island itself, it has been repurposed into a wildlife refuge. It's one of the most pristine spots in the Outer Banks. In the winter, giant flocks of snow geese hang out there. If you want to feel the full story of Richard Etheridge and his crew and imagine what it might have been like for them to be holding watch over this narrow strip of land, do what Zoby and Wright recently did one night. David Wright: Zoby and I one night, we weren't supposed to, but when we were doing our research, we wanted to get more of an experience of it. And we thought we'd do something akin to a beach patrol one night. Dave Zoby: We decided to go out there and walk the beaches at night, because that's what the Pea Island surfmen had to do. If you were a surfman, you had to patrol the beach. And we went out there at night, and the first thing that happened was we got attacked by all kinds of horse flies. But when we got out there and walked the beach, it was pretty spooky. There's no lights out there. There's no houses out there, because it's a wildlife refuge. David Wright: I mean, I was with Zoby, and he's like a big, sturdy guy. I mean, it's scary. I mean, those guys were just walking the beach. I was like, you know, a little afraid, no, but... on watch, uneasy. It was a rough life. I could not have done it. That was a long-winded way of saying I could not have done it. Dave Zoby: We were trying to imagine what it would have been like for these men to do this. It is one of the few places in the Outer Banks where you can go and get a glimpse of what it used to be like. Of all the places down there, it's the one I think that retains the feeling that you might have had back in those days. Kelly McEvers: In 1996, Richard Etheridge and crew were posthumously awarded the highest Coast Guard award, the Gold Lifesaving Medal. And today, there are a bunch of ways you can learn more about them while visiting the Outer Banks. The Pea Island Cook House, which used to stand next to the Lifesaving Station, has been moved to Manteo on Roanoke Island. It's now a museum. Then there's the North Carolina Aquarium, where the photo of the Pea Island Lifesaving Crew still hangs. and where Richard Etheridge is buried. There's also the historic Island Farm on Roanoke Island and Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station, where you can watch a reenactment of a beach rescue using the Breach's buoy, aka the beach apparatus. And of course, you can visit Pea Island itself, check out the wildlife refuge that's there, and imagine what it would have been like to be a surfman patrolling the shores late at night. This episode was produced by Johanna Mayer. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM Podcasts. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Camille Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manuela Morales, Jerome Campbell, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall. I'm Kelly McIvers. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The Podcast TeamJun 30, 2026

Atlas Obscura

This Illinois Tower Was Built Exclusively for Swiss Goats

The world’s tallest goat tower is a playground for Alpine ungulates. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Kelly McEvers: This episode is for the DIY nation. The people who see something they like and say, “I can make that.” People like Marcia and Dave Johnson. Their farm in Windsor, Illinois, is filled with DIY projects. The house… Marcia Johnson: The house is modeled after one in Williamsburg, Virginia. We found the house plan at the back of a magazine. Kelly: The gate… Marcia: The gate that you enter is a copy of King George VI’s gate in England. Kelly: The musical stones in the garden… Marcia: They are like an outdoor xylophone, but they’re made out of granite, and they actually can be played. You take a little marimba stick out there, and it makes a different sound depending on which one. Kelly: And this one feature that has actually become a tourist attraction. Marcia: When you come up the driveway, you don’t see it. And so then I bring people around this very large oak tree, and they see it for the first time, and they’re amazed because it’s much bigger than they expected, I think. Kelly: This big thing she’s talking about is a tower, almost like a fairy-tale tower, tall and spindly with a pointy roof. There’s this ramp thing that winds its way around the tower all the way up to the top. Marcia: And so the very first thing I do is have them sit on a little bench with the tower in the background under a sign that says Bienvenue, meaning “welcome.” Kelly: The sign is in French, not for the visitors, but for the goats. I’m Kelly McEvers and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today’s episode is brought to you in partnership with Enjoy Illinois. And today, Dave and Marcia Johnson are going to introduce us to their goat tower, the Tower of Baa-Goat, which is inhabited by a flock of goats who speak French—Swiss French to be exact. We’ll talk about 19th-century architectural follies and why goats like to climb and how sometimes household projects take on a life of their own. That’s after this. This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. The structure became the world’s tallest goat tower by accident. freneticferret / Atlas Obscura User Kelly: When Dave and Marcia Johnson were building their house, the one inspired by a building in Colonial Williamsburg, they happened to have some bricks left over. And for them, a pile of unused bricks is an opportunity, the start of a new potential project. One day, when Dave was reading a magazine… Marcia: Decanter magazine, which is a wine magazine out of the UK, did a feature article on Charles Back at the Fairview Winery in South Africa, and so that’s where my husband saw the picture of the goat tower. Kelly: This, of course, is Marcia Johnson. She’s a retired school teacher. Dave is a retired crop insurance salesman. The Fairview Winery goat tower in the magazine looked like a tower from a fairy tale. Or maybe if you live on a farm in central Illinois, a grain silo with a big ramp that spirals up around the outside of it. Charles Back had built this tower on his vineyard in South Africa because he also had a herd of goats for making cheese, and the tower was meant as a jungle gym for them. Marcia: These are Saanen goats that live in the tower, and Saanen goats originate from the Saanen region of Switzerland. I think that might be why they like to climb. They’re just automatic climbers. They see the tower, they go up it. Kelly: These Saanen goats from the Alps had been domesticated for milk production. Marcia: They’re actually called “Queen of the Milkers” because they give such prolific milk and such delicious milk. Kelly: The Fairview winery in South Africa was inspired by an even older goat tower from the 1800s at a winery in Portugal. That one was built as a kind of architectural folly. Or an interesting building with no real purpose other than just to be interesting. Or, as the family behind that vineyard put it, an artistic daydream with no functional explanation. In any case, Dave was smitten. Marcia: He was intrigued by it, and he, I think, he was just always thinking about different unique things that could be done. So, yeah, he was the idea guy, and then I’m the maintenance person. Kelly: I should point out that the Johnsons did not actually have any goats at this time—like at all. Still, Dave pushed ahead. This was back in the late ’90s. Marcia: And he saw the picture of the Fairview Winery, and he showed it to the bricklayer, and the bricklayer said, “Oh yeah, I could do that.” He was a master bricklayer who had come out of retirement just to do this, because I guess he was intrigued by it. In fact, he said to Dave, “You’re the craziest guy I’ve ever known.” So anyway, it was in the works before I knew anything about it. I was off, working. And they got this all planned out and got it started. The only thing I got to say was where to put it, which was outside my kitchen window. So I measured 50 feet outside my kitchen window, and that’s where they built the tower. Kelly: But unlike the design of their house, which had plans they got from a magazine, there were no plans for the goat tower. So Dave improvised. He and the bricklayer used the photograph from the magazine and worked backwards. They designed a tower that essentially had floors with little compartments on each floor that the goats could hang out in. But the actual measurements required a lot of guesswork, because, again, they were working off a photograph. Marcia: Well, they got the scale wrong. The diameter is about a foot bigger, and by the time they got to the four compartments that the Fairview winery has, it was out of proportion. It was too squat looking, so they had to do one more complete wrap, making it the world’s largest goat tower by mistake. Kelly: We’re talking now about a tower that’s 31 feet tall with a diameter of 7.5 feet. So this is like the height of a two- or three-story building. Marcia: And then they had to order another load of brick ’cause they ran out of brick, and the whole point was to use up the brick that was left over. So, they ordered another load of brick, and that was no small thing because those are handmade brick in North Carolina. So they got another shipment, finished the tower, they got the whole thing done in three months. Kelly: Now that Marcia and Dave had a goat tower. The next thing they needed was goats. They chose Saanen goats from Switzerland, naturally, just like the Fairview winery. And when the goats got there, they went straight for the tower. Marcia: They were in it just about instantly, and we had quite a few babies born on the place. We’ve had over 100 goats over the years, and one of the little boys, two days old, climbed all the way to the top of the tower, and then he got up there and he cried because it was easy to go up, but it’s hard to come down. So Dave went out and he went up the tower. It was funny because the mother was standing below the tower, kind of like, Well, what are you gonna do now that you’re up there? So Dave went and he carried him down, and then the next day the little guy did the same thing, went way up, and then cried because, again, he didn’t want to come down. So Dave went up and made him walk in front of him, and then he got it, and then he couldn’t keep the little guy down. So sometimes the goats will be up in their compartments, or sometimes they’ll just plunk themselves down on the stairs that go over the end of the spiral stairs that go around it. So yeah, they like to be out looking from above, I think. Kelly: Word got around about this goat tower on the Johnson’s farm. It started with some local newspaper articles, then it was picked up in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Their farm in central Illinois is about a two-hour drive from St. Louis. And from there, it just kept spreading. Marcia: We even ended up on the local phone book, which was ironic because it was a phone book for Findlay, and we’re actually in Windsor, but they put our goat tower on the Findlay phone book. So yeah, it got around and it’s been since the ’90s. Kelly: Soon, the goat tower became a full-on attraction. Marcia: It’s just a way or something that people can spend about 40 minutes out of their day to come and see something different, very un–central Illinois, as I would say. Kelly: And according to Dave and Marcia, the goats seem to enjoy the attention. Marcia: They love visitors. Sometimes it takes them a little bit to decide that they’re going to come out of the tower, but once they come down, then they love to be petted and made over, and yes, they’re, they’re friendly goats. They are friendly goats. Kelly: If you would like to visit the Tower of Baa-Goat, head over to their website, goattowerfarm.com, and drop Marcia a line to get a full tour. We will post a link in the episode description. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM podcasts. This episode was produced by Amanda McGowan. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.

The Podcast TeamJun 27, 2026

Atlas Obscura

7 Essential Experiences in Southwest Louisiana

A journey through crawfish boils, Carnival costumes, and incredible wildlife. In Southwest Louisiana, culture isn’t something tucked away in museums; it spills out of dance halls, crawfish pots, and marshes. In this region, accordion music echoes through restaurants, migratory birds fill coastal skies, and recipes passed down for generations still define local identity. As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, Southwest Louisiana offers a chance to experience a place where important parts of American culture took shape. From Cajun and Creole cuisine to zydeco music, many of the traditions that feel quintessentially American today were made in Southwest Louisiana. Whether you’re chasing chickens on a Mardi Gras courir or cruising a wildlife-rich coastal byway, here are seven ways to enjoy the unique character of the region. 1. Run the Courir de Mardi Gras The chicken chase is the main event during the Courir de Mardi Gras. Courtesy of Visit Lake Charles Long before beads and Bourbon Street became synonymous with Fat Tuesday, Cajun communities across Southwest Louisiana celebrated with the Courir de Mardi Gras, or the “Mardi Gras Run.” Like many great American traditions, the courir is the result of immigrant communities preserving their heritage while also creating something entirely new. Rooted in rural French traditions brought to Louisiana by Acadian settlers, every courir begins with masked riders and revelers traveling from house to house gathering ingredients for a communal gumbo. In between stops, they often sing, dance, and imbibe more than a drink or two. At the end of the day, the collected ingredients become a gumbo shared by everyone. While the entire procession is delightful, the most famous part of the ritual is the chicken chase. Participants dressed in colorful costumes scramble and dive in pursuit of live chickens as the birds run around a field. The result is chaotic, exciting, and distinctly Southwest Louisiana. Visitors looking to experience the tradition firsthand can check out the annual Iowa Chicken Run near Lake Charles. 2. Listen to Live Zydeco Music Rusty Metoyer and his band, the Zydeco Krush, make a fine introduction to the genre. Photo: Lindsey Janies Photography If Southwest Louisiana has a soundtrack, it’s zydeco. Developed within the region’s Creole communities, zydeco blends French Creole music with blues, gospel, and Afro-Caribbean influences. Anchored by accordion and the washboard-like frottoir, zydeco stands as one of America’s great homegrown musical traditions, its sound shaped by the same cultural exchanges that have long defined the nation. Lake Charles sits in the heart of zydeco country. Whether at festivals, casinos, or restaurants, local options for hearing the style abound. Among the region’s most beloved contemporary performers is Rusty Metoyer and his band, the Zydeco Krush, whose energetic performances carry forward a uniquely American art form that continues to inspire new generations. 3. Go Birdwatching A chestnut-sided warbler, seen on the Creole Nature Trail. Photo: James Smithers Southwest Louisiana’s vast marshes, prairies, and coastlines form one of North America’s most important migratory bird corridors. Located along the Mississippi Flyway, the region serves as a critical stopover for millions of birds traveling between North, Central, and South America. For centuries, these waterways and wetlands have connected people as well as wildlife, supporting Indigenous communities, fishermen, farmers, and travelers. Today, they remain an essential part of the natural heritage that helps define America’s Gulf Coast. With hundreds of species constantly passing through, the area feels like an endless outdoor aviary. Between seasonal visitors and lifelong residents, you can spot roseate spoonbills, white and brown pelicans, black-necked stilts, reddish egrets, blue-headed vireos, hooded warblers, and more. Grab your binoculars and checklist, and head to top-notch birdwatching spots—like the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge, Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge, and the wetlands surrounding Lacassine—to see color and majesty take flight. 4. Eat a Crawfish Boil A crawfish boil is equal parts dinner and communal rite. Photo: Kathryn Shea Duncan Few meals capture the spirit of Southwest Louisiana better than a crawfish boil. At its simplest, the boil consists of fresh crawfish cooked in heavily seasoned water with potatoes, corn, sausage, mushrooms, and other accompaniments. It’s as much a social event as a meal, a time when family and friends gather around newspaper-covered tables and spend hours peeling, eating, and telling stories. The region’s incredible seafood owes a lot to its unique geography. Southwest Louisiana’s network of marshes, estuaries, rice fields, and Gulf waters creates ideal conditions for crawfish, shrimp, crabs, and fish. The same fertile wetlands that support the abundant bird populations also help produce some of the state’s best seafood. But it’s not just about the food. More than a meal, the crawfish boil embodies the hospitality and resourcefulness that have long defined Southwest Louisiana. What began as a practical way to feed large gatherings evolved into one of America’s great communal dining traditions. During crawfish season, which typically runs from January through the end of June, you can find boils everywhere from backyard gatherings to restaurants and festivals. For especially fresh varieties, look for seafood markets and seasonal crawfish specialists that sell by the pound. 5. Attend the Mardi Gras Royal Gala The Gala’s ornate, feathery costumes are works of art. Photo: Kathryn Shea Duncan While Southwest Louisiana’s Mardi Gras season is famous for its parades and courirs, its most beautiful and spectacular tradition is the Royal Gala. Held on a single evening during Carnival season, the Gala is the grand coronation and presentation of a Mardi Gras “court.” The event consists of a procession of kings, queens, dukes, maids, and pages dressed in colorful costumes adorned with intricate beadwork, embroidery, sequins, and feathers. Many of the outfits take months to create and are inspired by annual themes that range from history to fantasy. The Gala also reflects how American communities preserve old traditions while continually reinventing them. Rooted in European Carnival customs but shaped by generations of Southwest Louisianans, the elaborate pageantry, costumes, and rituals of Mardi Gras have evolved into something distinctly American. Visitors can trace that evolution at the Mardi Gras Museum of Imperial Calcasieu, home to one of the world’s largest collections of Mardi Gras costumes. 6. Follow the Boudin Trail Each style and variety of boudin is a window into a local identity. Photo: Kathryn Shea Duncan Along with seafood, few foods capture the heart of Southwest Louisiana like boudin. The beloved sausage packs pork, rice, onions, and seasonings into a casing, resulting in a dish that reflects the region’s Cajun and Creole roots. Every butcher, smokehouse, and restaurant seems to have its own recipe, sparking intense debates about which version reigns supreme. If you want to sample as many varieties as possible, why not take a culinary road trip through the area’s best producers? The Southwest Louisiana Boudin Trail guides travelers around the region through a staggering array of boudins that are coarse and peppery, smoky and rich, studded with cracklins, and more. Along the way, you’ll discover how a humble sausage became one of Southwest Louisiana’s most enduring culinary icons. 7. Drive the Creole Nature Trail Gators are common sights along the nature trail. Photo: Chad Moreno, Killer Photography Known as “Louisiana’s Outback,” the Creole Nature Trail is one of the most remarkable scenic drives in the Gulf South. Stretching through marshes, prairies, beaches, and wildlife refuges, the route showcases an astonishing range of ecosystems within a relatively short distance. Equal parts road trip and safari, the trail supports an extraordinary variety of wildlife. Alligators bask in roadside canals, river otters swim through marsh waterways, and bottlenose dolphins can even be spotted swimming offshore. And, of course, migration season makes for a grandiose show for birdwatchers. The scenery is equally awe-inspiring. As you drive, a changing lavish landscape unfurls before you, changing from marsh grasses to wildflower-lined coasts to oak-covered cheniers. It all makes for the perfect introduction to the natural side of Southwest Louisiana, which has earned fans across the country. From the nature trail to the Royal Gala, all of these experiences reveal why Southwest Louisiana plays such an important role in the American story. Whether you’re dancing to zydeco, peeling crawfish, or exploring coastal marshes, you’ll encounter traditions that were made in Southwest Louisiana and built into America’s cultural identity. To plan a trip, read more at Visit Lake Charles.

Atlas ObscuraJun 26, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Visiting All 50 U.S. States

Learn about the community of travelers on a quest to experience every state, and find inspiration for your own journey.

The EditorsJun 24, 2026

Atlas Obscura

The Wooden Way: A Cross-Pennsylvania Pilgrimage to the Golden Age of Thrills

A fast-paced journey up, down, and around the state’s historic coasters. Long before massive steel coasters launched riders into physics-defying drops and corkscrews, Pennsylvania helped define the art of the wooden roller coaster. When they debuted in the early 20th century, many of the state’s classic amusement parks drew city dwellers to lakesides, river valleys, and wooded hillsides for fresh air and excitement. By the 1920s, innovative coaster engineers at local firms like the Philadelphia Toboggan Company were transforming timber into gravity-powered marvels that hugged ravines, climbed hills, and delivered stomach-dropping airtime. A true testament to their design and appeal, some of these iconic rides continue to thrill riders today. For those wanting to trace the evolution of the wooden coaster—from some of the oldest operating rides on Earth to modern creations inspired by their predecessors—Pennsylvania is one of the best places to experience every incredible curve, climb, and drop. Jack RabbitKennywood Amusement Park, West Mifflin The Jack Rabbit is one of three historic coasters at Kennywood. Courtesy of Kennywood Amusement Park One of the oldest operating roller coasters in the world, the Jack Rabbit first began thrilling riders with its double-dip drop in 1920. One of three 1920s-era coasters at Kennywood, it ushered in a golden age of roller coaster innovation. Designed by engineer John A. Miller, it boasted new “underfriction” wheel technology that allowed trains to stay locked to the track on steeper drops. More than a century later, riders still flock to the Jack Rabbit to feel the weightlessness of its 70-foot drop. Afterward, historic-coaster fans can head over to the Thunderbolt to experience a steep plunge and lateral G-forces that have been wowing riders since 1924. If that’s not enough excitement, they can finish with the Racer, designed as a “Mobius loop” by Miller in 1927, with cars starting on opposite sides of the station and racing each other to the finish line. ThunderhawkDorney Park & Wildwater Kingdom, Allentown A classic out-and-back coaster, the Thunderhawk moves at 45 mph. Courtesy of Dorney Park & Wildwater Kingdom Originally known as the Coaster when it debuted in 1923, the Thunderhawk is among the last surviving works of celebrated coaster designer Herbert Paul Schmeck. The Reading-born Schmeck and his Philadelphia Toboggan Company left an indelible mark on Keystone State coaster history. The Thunderhawk is a classic example of an out-and-back coaster, carrying riders over, under, and through its wooden frame. Though the cars move at 45 miles per hour, the elegantly crafted layout is a testament to how a simple yet well-engineered design can still entice riders even today. Rollo CoasterIdlewild & SoakZone, Ligonier The Rollo Coaster swerves through the wooded hills of Idlewild. Courtesy of Idlewild & SoakZone When it was built into a wooded hillside in 1938, the Rollo Coaster was literally a product of its surroundings. Much of the wood used in its construction was sourced from Idlewild’s property and milled nearby. Rather than fighting the landscape, its designer—Schmeck again—embraced it, creating a family-friendly coaster that twists through the terrain and demonstrates how early coasters often incorporated hills and valleys into the rides themselves. Featuring updated cars added for safety in 2018, the Rollo Coaster carries riders up and down the hillside before sweeping through a gentle curve and returning to the station. With smooth dips, modest speeds, and plenty of nostalgia, it’s the perfect first wooden coaster experience for newbies. The Phoenix Knoebels Amusement Park, Elysburg The Phoenix is enjoying a second life at Knoebels. Shansby / CC BY 2.0 Like its namesake, the Phoenix rose from the ashes and was reborn anew. The coaster began its life as the Rocket in 1947 at a Texas amusement park. After nearly four decades of operation, however, it seemed doomed for demolition. That’s when the team at Knoebels stepped in to claim their coaster and shipped it across the country. After painstakingly dismantling the ride, they numbered each piece of lumber, sent it to central Pennsylvania, and rebuilt it. Now in its second life as the Phoenix, the coaster is flying high: It holds the record for the longest-running winner of the #1 wooden roller coaster award, issued by Amusement Today. Not only does Knoebels offer free admission, it also offers a second, spectacular wooden coaster. After riders scream and soar across the Phoenix, they can check out the Twister, filled with curves, a double-helix, and even a dark tunnel. The CometHersheypark, Hershey Born in 1946, the Comet has earned Landmark status. Courtesy of Hersheypark Another migrant coaster, Hersheypark’s Comet began its life in 1946 at a park in Ontario, Canada, before relocating to Pennsylvania in the 1970s. Since then, generations of riders have flocked to Hershey to enjoy its nearly 80-foot drop and several hills that provide some serious airtime. Today, its classic out-and-back design offers a ride experience that feels like an increasingly rare relic of the wooden coaster era. Its historic importance has even been recognized by American Coaster Enthusiasts, which granted it Landmark status. Ravine Flyer II Waldameer Park, Erie The Ravine Flyer II is full of twists and turns, and even thunders over a public street. Mary Bliss / CC BY 2.0 While many of Pennsylvania’s great wooden coasters are relics of the past, the Ravine Flyer II at Waldameer Park shows how the tradition is still very much alive. Built in 2008 on the site of a coaster that closed decades earlier, the Ravine is the tallest and fastest wooden coaster in the state. Dramatically crossing over a public road, it offers a blend of modern engineering and classic wooden-coaster aesthetics that have earned it international acclaim. Visitors to the free-admission park can enjoy the Ravine’s 120- and 105-foot drops, four tunnels, and 165-foot bridge over Peninsula Drive—all showing that old-fashioned thrills can still feel cutting-edge. Lightning RacerHersheypark, Hershey Which would you choose: Thunder or Lightning? Public Domain Yes, we already included a Hersheypark coaster on this list, but the Lightning Racer deserves its own spot. Built in 2000, it pairs two wooden coasters (Thunder and Lightning, naturally) that race each other across 3,400-feet of tangled track, creating the illusion of near misses and photo-finish victories. Designed by Great Coasters International, the ride’s deft combination of racing and interweaving tracks proves that wooden coasters still have room to evolve in the age of steel competitors. Since its debut, Lightning Racer has consistently been voted one of the world’s 25 best wooden roller coasters by Amusement Today.

Atlas ObscuraJun 15, 2026

Atlas Obscura

The world's tallest building has 1,000-year-old air conditioning

Burj Khalifa's beautiful secret is revealed in the new book, Hidden in Plain Sight. Sublime science hides in plain sight at the world’s tallest building. Tourists swarm Burj Khalifa’s observation decks to absorb startling views across Dubai’s skyline, and the sandy coast of the United Arab Emirates. Laid out beneath them is a space-age city which showcases the burgeoning wealth of the Middle East. Above their heads, meanwhile, is a testament to ancient Arab ingenuity. Covering the ceiling of the 125th floor deck are mesmerizing geometric patterns engaged in a millennia-old battle with Mother Nature. Called mashrabiya, this Arab latticework is so old that its origins are murky. What is undisputed, however, is that it was a brilliant architectural innovation which both blocked sunlight, and funneled breezes into homes here in the sun-scorched Middle East. In this way, mashrabiya was simultaneously high art, and one of the world’s earliest forms of air conditioning. It waned in popularity over the 1900s, as modern home cooling technology took over. Now, however, mashrabiya is resurgent, as revealed in the new book, Hidden in Plain Sight, in which journalist and photography Ronan O'Connell visited 23 countries to uncover the mysteries of our planet's top landmarks. Intricate latticework is being used to decorate many extraordinary new buildings across the Middle East as a celebration of Arab cultural heritage. Including in the region’s most-visited destination, Dubai. With a population of 3.7 million people, it is the largest city in the United Arab Emirates. This oil-rich Middle Eastern nation sits on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula, between Iran to its north, Saudi Arabia to it west and Oman to its east. Its strategic location, midway between Europe and East Asia, has made the UAE a global air travel hub and tourist hotspot. Although the UAE has deep, intriguing history, having been inhabited for more than 6,000 years, most tourists are drawn by attractions which didn’t exist three decades ago. Before vast oil reserves were tapped in the 1960s, Dubai was a petite port city. It wasn’t until the 2000s it embarked on a building boom which aimed, in part, to make it magnetic to tourists. Before then, sand filled many of the sites now occupied by gleaming structures, including Burj Khalifa. Now Dubai’s parched land is studded by avant-garde skyscrapers, goliath shopping malls, world-class museums, five-star hotels, and cutting-edge theme parks. Some of which sit on unique, man-made archipelagos flanking the city’s coast. All these recent additions have helped Dubai become one of the planet’s top 10 most visited cities. At some point during their stay here, most travelers at least glimpse Burj Khalifa, which looms above a metropolis spiked by more than 250 other skyscrapers. Even people who’ve never visited the UAE likely recognize this steel-and-glass wonder, images of which abound on social media. The greatest tourist landmarks encapsulate a destination. For example, the Colosseum underscores Rome’s deep history, the Eiffel Tower symbolizes Paris’ timeless elegance, and the Statue of Liberty signifies New York’s unrivalled multiculturalism. Burj Khalifa is equally effective in defining Dubai’s appeal to visitors. Ostentatious, innovative, hyper-modern and record-breaking. Dubai strives to build the biggest, the best, the boldest of everything. Given this fierce ambition, it was natural this city would aim to reach further into the sky than any civilization before it. Previously, the evolution of the world’s tallest building had long been slow and steady. New York’s Empire State Building (381m high) was eclipsed by the nearby World Trade Center (417m), Followed by Chicago’s Sears Tower (443m), Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers (452m) and Taiwan’s Taipei 101 (509m). Then Dubai entered the race. Rather than merely taking the crown, it made its competitors look like toys. Standing 830m, Burj Khalia Is so tall that, every so often, its crest just disappears, obscured by fog. It was designed not just as a monument to Dubai’s wealth, but as a source of pride for the Arab World, which hadn’t boasted the world’s tallest structure since Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza was overtaken 700 years ago. As with any massive manmade construction, which isn’t a hospital or school, there was debate about Burj Khalifa’s necessity, utility, and sustainability. Those arguments persist. But what’s clear is that this goliath has been a boon for tourism. Some 17 million people visited Burj Khalifa in 2023. It is part of a cluster of tourist-friendly sites, adjoined by grassy Burj Park, turquoise Burj Khalifa Lake, glass-laden Dubai Opera House, and gargantuan Dubai Mall. The latter brims with more than 1,200 shops. As well as dozens of cafes and restaurants, and family-friendly attractions like Dubai Aquarium, Sega Republic theme park, an ice rink, virtual reality zone and kids play centers. Dubai Mall is also the gateway to Burj Khalifa. Perhaps the defining tourist experience of this city, Burj Khalifa’s At the Top sends visitors into the clouds. These tours offer access to three observation decks, on floors 148, 125 and 124. First is a ride in one of the world’s fastest elevators. Reaching the initial deck takes about 60 seconds, during which tourists learn remarkable facts about Burj Khalifa via a digital display. Some 22 million man hours were required to build this skyscraper. It consists of 330,000 cubic meters of concrete, 39,000 tons of steel reinforcement, 103,000 sqm of glass, and 15,500 sqm of embossed stainless steel. Of its 200 floors, 160 are inhabitable. Once guests exit the elevator, they walk a loop of each enclosed deck. This provides a 360-degree perspective of Dubai through soaring windows. Should they wish to spike their pulse further, they can tread onto the 125th level’s eerie glass floor attraction, which simulates cracking beneath their feet, as if set to collapse. Those who’d prefer to calm down may descend to level 122. Amid a luxurious setting rich with dark leather and red velvet they can savor a 13-course tasting menu at fine dining establishment At.mosphere. Or absorb the dizzying views with a cocktail in hand at the adjoining Champagne and Oyster Bar. In doing so, they’ll have had a modern experience of the Middle East. For an appreciation of its proud past, tourists to Burj Khalifa should research those mesmeric patterns on its 125th level. They will learn mashrabiya was created to fulfil many purposes at once. It beautified a building’s façade, offered privacy, softened natural light, dullened outside noise, and allowed for airflow which reduced both heat and humidity. Less certain than the value of mashrabiya are its origins. Some historical accounts trace it as far back as the 12th century, to Egypt. Others suggest it may have originated in Iraq and its capital Baghdad, then one of the world’s largest, most sophisticated cities. Dozens of homes in the ancient Iraqi city of Basra still feature mashrabiya. By night, these abodes are spectacular, due to the mashrabiya latticework which frames their stained glass windows. So once darkness falls, and house lights take effect, a kaleidoscope of patterns is beamed onto the Basra streetside. Historic examples of mashrabiya also still grace homes or mosques in Muslim nations like Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Palestine, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Some utilize the Iraqi style of wooden mashrabiya screens, which enclose windows or balconies. Others are latticework carved into stone. That form of mashrabiya, which has different names from country to country, is particularly common in mosques and mausoleums. Including India’s Taj Mahal, built using Mughal architecture, a style which blends Islamic and Indian designs. Modern versions of mashrabiya also proliferate. Architects in the Middle East and beyond are increasingly blending it into new constructions. Tourists walking east from Paris’ famed Notre Dame Cathedral may pass hundreds of interlocking mashrabiya motifs on the towering glass façade of the Arab World Institute. In the UAE, meanwhile, travelers encounter such patterns in both of its key cities, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The latter has perhaps the world’s most stunning use of mashrabiya. Covering the 180m-wide dome of the Louvre Abu Dhabi museum, it beams shards of light through hundreds of perforations. A spectacle which is almost matched by the gigantic mashrabiya windows of nearby Imam Al-Tayeb Mosque. Such geometric flourishes also punctuate downtown Dubai. Dubai Mall employs mashrabiya both on wall features, to cloak a pedestrian footbridge and embellish its Apple Store. Chances are, then, that many tourists glimpse this Islamic design feature before they ascend Burj Khalifa. Once they do, and reach its 125th floor, most will fixate on the futuristic view before them. All the while, in their periphery, mashrabiya sits as a marker of Arab innovation which flourished long before the Middle East began to build toward the clouds. An ancient decoration camouflaged on a modern icon, as revealed by the new book, Hidden in Plain Sight.

Ronan O'ConnellJun 9, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Xagħra, Malta

The second largest community of Malta's island of Gozo features a surprising number of unusual places to visit. Xagħra is the second largest locality on Gozo, the second largest island within the nation of Malta. Like many other towns on the island, Xagħra is located on a hilltop overlooking agricultural fields below it, although Xagħra seems to sprawl more. While Xagħra’s outwards appearance may make it look as quiet as most other residential communities on Gozo, the location actually has quite a few sites that are worth going out of the way to visit. The Xagħra Parish Church and the central plaza in front of the church stand at the center of the community. The current limestone church was built in the nineteenth century, and while it is similar to many of the other parish churches across the Maltese Islands, it is still an impressive building both inside and outside. The rest of the plaza features most of the community’s local shops and restaurants, and many of these restaurants have outdoor seating on the plaza. Also note the cross at the west end of the plaza; these crosses are a common feature of communities across the Maltese Islands. Xagħra’s most notable attraction is Ġgantija, a neolithic temple complex that sits on the community’s southern slopes. Built between 3800 and 2000 BC, Ġgantija is one of the largest neolithic structures in the islands, and the complex is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In spite of being so famous, Ġgantija is actually relatively uncrowded, making it a peaceful place to visit. Visitors will first be able to see neolithic artifacts from Ġgantija in the visitor center, including a few of Malta’s famous fertility figurines, before being able to walk inside the complex itself. Just north of the entrance to Ġgantija is the Ta’ Kola Windmill. In the 1700s when the islands were ruled by the Knights of St. John, the government constructed many windmills like Ta’ Kola to mill grain for the local population. Each windmill had a broad square base and a cylindrical tower at the center, giving the windmills a very distinct appearance. Most of Malta’s windmills have either been dismantled or demolished, but Ta’ Kola provides visitors with a chance to go inside one of the very few windmills left in the islands and to learn about their history. People who enjoy small, quirky tourist attraction will want to visit Ninu’s Cave and Xerri’s Grotto, both of which are located near the central plaza. Both locations are small limestone caves filled with stalactites and stalagmites that were found serendipitously by people drilling wells behind their homes; Ninu’s Cave was found first in 1888, while Xerri’s grotto was found in 1924. Both were turned into tourist attractions, and both are now run by the descendants of the men who found the caves. Note that Xerri’s Grotto is open during regular business hours but that Ninu’s Cave is only open late in the afternoons, and visiting both caves requires descending down narrow staircases. Located just north of Xerri’s Grotto is Sansuna’s Rock. While this looks like just a large limestone rock in a weedy plot of land, the rock may actually be the remains of an ancient burial chamber. It has also been associated with the mythical Sansuna, who is credited with constructing Ġgantija, and it is recognized as an important cultural site. The far northeastern end of Xagħra features a closed lookout standing over Calypso Cave, one of a couple of caves in the Maltese Islands that has been associated with the nymph from the Odyssey since the 18th and 19th centuries. While it is not possible to stand on the lookout or see the cave from above, this spot does offer spectacular views of Ramla Bay, which has one of Malta’s very few sandy beaches. The trail down to the beach passes through Ulysses Lodge, the most notable abandoned building on the island of Gozo. While this hotel was a popular wedding and events venue in the 1980s, it’s now aatracts graffiti artists and urban explorers (but note that walking around inside the structure may be unsafe because the structure is unstable). Most visitors spending just a few hours on Gozo will want to at least stop by Ġgantija for a couple of hours, but people spending at least one night on Gozo may want to spend the better part of a day exploring all of the different sites within this small community. Xagħra is easy to reach either by car or by public transport, but walking to the location is not recommending. For people driving on Gozo, the center of Xagħra is less than 10 minutes from the city of Victoria and less than 15 minutes from the island’s sole ferry terminal at Mgarr. Some of the roads may be narrow, but street parking is easy to find. Buses regularly travel to Xagħra from both the central bus station in Victoria as well as from the harbor. Although Xagħra does not have any large resort hotels, it does have a series of small guesthouses, bed and breakfasts, and smaller hotels that may appeal to tourists who are interested in having a quiet place to stay in a small town setting while visiting Gozo.

Dark Nebula DeluxeJun 8, 2026

Atlas Obscura

A fascinating visit to the temples of Old Pune

These temples are set in beautiful old courtyards with a world of their own. The old areas of Pune are called Peths. A Peth is a neighbourhood or a ward. The old city has been divided into a number of such wards. These areas have been in existence since several centuries. Narrow lanes, houses with timber overhangs, stone mansions, mysterious alleys, curiously shaped streetlamps, random crumbling walls… In the midst of all this, the temples of old Pune have historically served as community gathering centres for people of all ages to come together and socialise. Many of these temples are Shivkalin (built during the time of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj) or Peshwekalin (built during the time of the Peshwas). In this post, I will be discussing some of the most commonly seen traditional features of Pune’s heritage temples I have come across during my explorations of the city. Most of these temples have a vintage old fashioned stone gateway or a gatehouse to enter the premises. The gatehouse has a room above it and one can see traditional arched windows built in it. The door is always ancient and wooden, with shiny metal bolts and latches. Often, there are statues of Dwarapalakas (guardian deities of temple entrances in Hindu culture) on either side of the door. Once you step through these doors, you enter a time machine. The hustle and bustle of the street falls behind and you enter a different world. A slower world. A calmer world. There is generally a tiled courtyard open to the sky. The old temples are always set in a nice, peaceful courtyard. There is also a Tulsi Vrindavan near the temple entrance. A Tulsi Vrindavan is a stone or marble pedestal housing the Tulsi plant (Holy Basil, Ocimum tenuiflorum) which is considered to be sacred in Hindu culture. The temples are generally constructed out of both stone and wood. Particularly in the old temples in these old areas, since there is a lot of history involved, one can find a lot of paintings and historical information on the walls. Many temples also have intricately designed glass lamps hanging from the ceiling. Back into the courtyard, you will always find birds chirping around, squirrels nibbling at nuts or a cat snoozing in a corner. It is their home. The courtyard also generally has other smaller shrines dedicated to other deities, apart from the main deity of the temple. There can be a huge tree in the courtyard as well, one big enough to provide shade to the entire place. Such courtyards also have mysterious locked doors and closed windows. These generally lead to other houses in the area. A couple of times, I have seen beautiful stone statues lined along the corridor. Upon asking the locals, I found out their history. The locals are really kind and when you ask questions with a curious smile on your face, they are only too happy to share their knowledge. They have probably lived in that area all their lives and are privy to information not available elsewhere. People rarely stop to ask questions and when they do, the locals are delighted to share what they know. The kind of interesting facts and anecdotes they tell you will fill you up with a sense of wonder about the history of these places. There is so much that has happened in the past. We only know a small portion of it so it a delight to explore these places. There are many such temples in Old Pune, out of which I have visited a few. There is Tulshibaug Ram Temple in the Tulshibaug area whose spire was once upon a time the tallest structure in the city. There is Nageshwar Shiva Temple which is said to be around 700 years old. There is Belbaug Vishnu Temple which has a Portuguese bell and an interesting story behind it. There is Trishund Ganpati Temple which has an idol of Lord Ganesh with three trunks. There is Lakshmi Narasinha Temple in Sadashiv Peth with a nice courtyard. There are many more temples I am yet to explore. Most of them have some fascinating historical fact or anecdote associated with them.

Vivek GadreJun 8, 2026

Atlas Obscura

The Atlas Obscura Guide to the World’s Biggest Sporting Event

Explore the cities where this year’s players will leave it all out on the field, from Vancouver to Miami. As the biggest tournament in the world brings fans across North America, Atlas Obscura and Hilton invite listeners to go beyond the matches and into the stories, flavors, neighborhoods, and hidden wonders that make each host city so unforgettable. Our series explores the culture surrounding the world’s biggest sporting event — from unexpected local traditions to offbeat road trips between cities — helping visitors turn the tournament into the trip of a lifetime. Latest Episode: Mexico City’s Footwear Museum This unassuming museum showcases everything from booties worn by a rescue dog to slippers owned by Queen Elizabeth I.

The Podcast TeamMay 21, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Your Emails Are Fueling My Quest to See All 50 States

As Atlas Obscura's CEO continues her voyage to her remaining 11 states, your emails are pouring in. Keep them coming! I have to be honest with you: I thought I was the one going on an adventure. But then your emails started arriving, and I realized the adventure had already been happening — in living rooms and minivans and camper vans and cruise ships and, apparently, at least one sinking expedition vessel in the Drake Passage — long before I packed a single bag. Since I shared my quest to visit all 50 states before America's 250th birthday, which will be on July 4th this year, I've heard from hundreds of you, and I am genuinely moved. You are state-counters and road-trippers, expats writing from Sweden, Jesuit priests from Omaha, proud Fairbanksans, 87-year-olds still dreaming about five northwest states, and three-generation families who've made the full 50 a kind of inheritance. You are, in other words, exactly who I always believed our Atlas Obscura community to be: people who think that showing up somewhere — really showing up, eyes open, taking the back roads — matters. Some of you have systems. Anthony Castora and his wife draw a state quarter from a hat every New Year's Eve, right before the Times Square ball drops. They've been doing it for 16 years, and every January, his students and coworkers wait breathlessly to find out where the Castoras are headed next. I love this so much I want to steal it. And then there's David Raum, who told me he wasn't even that excited about visiting Hawaii — until the expedition ship he'd booked to Antarctica hit an iceberg and sank. Everyone survived, the airline vouchers needed using, and Hawaii became his 50th state entirely by accident. He's 81 now, just back from two months in Mexico, and still going. I want to be David Raum when I grow up. My trip continues, and after walking parts of The Trail of Tears, I wrote a guide about that, in case you, too, want to walk it. After an incredible time in Arkansas, next up, I will be sharing experiences from Oklahoma, Kansas, and then Wisconsin. The travels are so much better with your tips. You've sent me covered bridges and crater fields, a gravity-wave observatory on a nuclear site in Washington, a funicular railway in Dubuque, a barn shaped like a teapot, and — more than once, from more than one of you — the sandhill cranes along the Platte River in Nebraska in March, which I'm now convinced I cannot miss. (Will the cranes still be there in early April?) Keep the tips coming. I'm taking notes on every single one. And if you are on a quest to finish your 50 states -- or have already finished them -- tell me about that! And fill in your map! We are opening our platform and our podcast to feature stories of 50 state quests, and would love to hear yours. I'm at ceo@atlasobscura.com

Louise StoryMar 12, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Wonder All Around Us

A stop at the gravesite of a Kentucky Derby champion reveals how Atlas Obscura turns ordinary drives into unexpected discoveries. Somewhere in Kansas, a well-traveled man asked me if I was driving long distances to hit the state's biggest attractions. I paused. That wasn't really how I was thinking about this trip at all. As I settled into driving south to north through the plains states, I discovered something. Wonder doesn't actually require huge detours when you travel with the Atlas Obscura app. Wherever I was headed, there was something unexpected and interesting practically underfoot. So I showed him. I pulled up the app right there. “Look. Fifty feet from where we're standing, there's an all-electric house.” And just a few minutes away, a horse graveyard. I had already failed to stop at Mister Ed's grave in Oklahoma, sorry Mister Ed, so I wasn't going to miss this one. The Lawrin gravesite sits at the end of a quiet residential cul-de-sac in Prairie Village, a tidy suburb of Kansas City. It's tucked behind a black wrought-iron fence on a small, well-tended rectangle of green. You would never know to turn into this neighborhood, wind down its meandering streets, and pull up to this spot without Atlas Obscura. But here's what's interesting about Lawrin. He was the only Kansas-bred horse ever to win the Kentucky Derby. In 1938, Lawrin crossed the finish line with jockey Eddie Arcaro in the saddle and a four-leaf clover tucked under it for luck. The entire 200-acre Woolford Farms where he was born and trained is now Prairie Village. All that's left of it is this small, immaculate patch of grass at the end of a cul-de-sac. While I was there, I met a man in his 90s who lives in the house across the street from the grave. He told me his favorite story about that 1938 Derby finish. In the final stretch, he said, Lawrin and his jockey glanced back. The second-place rider was closing fast. They nearly lost. But then they refocused and surged ahead. “Never look back,” he told me. “When you turn around like that, the horse thinks it's coming to the end. He starts to slow down. Just keep going.” Then he shared a bit of horse burial trivia. Racehorses are usually buried with only their head and heart because their bodies are simply too large. Head and heart. I turned that over as I walked back to my car. It turns out the full tradition actually includes the hooves too. Intelligence, spirit, and speed, all interred together. And if there was one thing Lawrin had in abundance, it was speed. Two minutes and four and four-fifths seconds worth of it, to be exact. That's what wandering with Atlas Obscura does for you. You stumble onto wonder in places you never would have found on your own. If you have suggestions for places I should see in the states I still have left, email me at CEO@atlasobscura.com. My map so far:

Louise StoryMar 16, 2026

Atlas Obscura

The Graveyard That Made Me Kiss a Frog

A surreal field in rural Wisconsin holds hundreds of giant fiberglass molds—an accidental archive of roadside Americana where art, industry, and imagination collide. I kissed a frog in Sparta, Wisconsin. Voluntarily. Enthusiastically. The frog in question is one of hundreds of giant fiberglass molds scattered across a football-field-sized lot behind a nondescript sheet-metal building off County Highway Q. This is the home of FAST — Fiberglass Animals, Shapes, and Trademarks — a company that has been building giant roadside statues, mascots, and water park attractions since the early 1970s. It was incorporated under its current name in 1983 by a man named Jerome Vettrus. FAST has worn the mantle of American titan-builder for over 50 years. Among their greatest hits: a 200-foot-long sea monster at House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and a 145-foot-long muskie in Hayward. After each job, they keep the mold. All of them. For decades. And that's how a quiet field in rural Wisconsin became one of the most unexpectedly wonderful places I've ever wandered. There are giant skulls and colossal dogs, oversized Santa Clauses and titanic mice. The fiberglass has weathered over time, giving the molds an almost ancient, stone-like quality, as though the yard is the remnant of some surreal lost civilization. Walking through it is eerie and beautiful at the same time. Some molds are rotted out, covered in weeds or standing water. Others are in relatively pristine condition and could practically be reused tomorrow. That's actually the point. The molds are kept for future reuse, since they'd be expensive to recreate. So this isn't just a graveyard. It's also a library. A catalog. An archive of American roadside whimsy sitting in the tall Wisconsin grass. I found the frog slide mold and, yes, I kissed it (still looking for my prince). FAST has been making frog slides for over 35 years. You've almost certainly seen one at a water park somewhere without knowing it. I slid down a few of the slides too, because how could you not. Then I stood there imagining all the places these forms have traveled, whether they were painted bright yellow or fire-engine red, whether they were installed at some mini golf course in Arizona or a splash pad in Ohio. I imagined the faces of the delighted kids who have no idea their beloved frog came from a field in Wisconsin. The current owner took over around 2020, and if you visit during business hours, he might just show you around. The whole thing is free. Open 24 hours. No facilities. Pure wonder. It got me thinking about waste and beauty. There's something philosophically satisfying about a place where industrial byproduct becomes accidental art installation. FAST's mold graveyard isn't the only example. Ghanaian artist El Anatsui famously creates vast, shimmering tapestries from discarded bottle caps. Artists on Mount Everest have turned abandoned oxygen cylinders and helicopter wreckage into sculpture. The stuff we discard has a strange afterlife when someone thinks to look at it differently. That's the gift of Atlas Obscura exploring: we keep pointing you toward the places where someone already did the looking for you.

Louise StoryMar 18, 2026

Atlas Obscura

I Asked. You Answered. Now I Have Some Questions for You.

Here is what you told me about the 11 states I am racing to visit before July 4th. And here is what I am still wondering. A few weeks ago, I announced my quest: Visit all 50 states before America’s 250th birthday on July 4th. I had 11 remaining—Arkansas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, Idaho, Washington, and Alaska—and I asked if you had suggestions. What arrived was not a trickle. It was a flood. Hundreds of emails, from readers in Fairbanks and Visby, Sweden; from retired wildlife biologists and Jesuit priests and 87-year-olds and environmental science teachers in Phoenix. You have collectively produced what might be the most detailed, lovingly opinionated, off-the-beaten-path guide to these 11 states I have ever encountered. I want to share what you said. And then I want to ask you something. What You Told Me The single most-recommended destination in my entire inbox was Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. A world-class art museum in the Ozarks, built by the Walton family—and apparently, it is exactly as extraordinary as its reputation. Consider that recommendation well and truly made. It also has a special exhibit showing for the 250th. South Dakota produced the most passionate emails. The Badlands—“badass, take water”—came up from many readers. Mt. Rushmore came up almost as much, though almost always with a counterpoint: Crazy Horse, which multiple readers called more meaningful; or Custer State Park, where one reader used to pay her kids for animal sightings to keep their eyes off their screens. One reader admitted he was dead set against visiting Rushmore—saying “a bunch of stone heads defacing a beautiful mountain, who cares?”—and then was completely won over after hiking the trail up close. Hall of Mosses in the Hoh Rain Forest - Forks, Washington Washington produced more recommendations than any other state. The ferry system. The Olympic Peninsula. The Hoh Rain Forest. Mt. Rainier. Mt. St. Helens. The Underground Seattle tour. The LIGO gravitational wave observatory on the Hanford nuclear site, which has monthly public tours and which I am not missing. Eastern Washington’s Yakima Valley, where one reader described apple orchards on volcanic soil and hop fields carrying “the foreshadowing fragrance of future IPAs.” And the Moccasin Bar in Hayward, Wisconsin—cash only, taxidermy animals staged in dioramas playing poker and boxing, a world-record musky on the wall. No website. For Nebraska: Several of you mentioned Carhenge. Several more mentioned the sandhill crane migration along the Platte River in March—which, as I write this, is happening right now. A Jesuit priest from Omaha described driving up through the Sandhills toward the Badlands as “a different kind of stunning beauty you won’t see anywhere else.” I believe him. Iowa kept surprising me. Mason City came up from numerous readers independently: It has the last surviving Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel, the hometown of Meredith Willson (who wrote The Music Man), and puppets from The Sound of Music on display at the local art museum. I did not know any of this. The future birthplace of Captain Kirk is also in Iowa, in the town of Riverside, which I find deeply wonderful. Craters of the Moon - Arco, Idaho Idaho, I am told, contains incredible nature. A retired wildlife biologist sent me a list of fifteen places that don’t appear in any guidebook, including rivers that vanish underground and a fault scarp still visible from the 1983 earthquake. Craters of the Moon came up four times. The town of Arco—the first city in the world powered by atomic energy—sits right next door. For Alaska, the advice was nearly unanimous: Go. Just go. One reader who has lived there 45 years wrote: “We love Atlas Obscura, but you don’t need smoke and mirrors in Alaska.” I believe him, too. What I Notice Across All of It Reading through hundreds of recommendations, a few themes emerge that say something about how this community thinks about travel. Almost everyone pushes past the obvious. The marquee attraction gets mentioned, and then immediately qualified or redirected. Go to Rushmore, but Crazy Horse. Visit Seattle, but cross the Cascades. The instinct to find the less-trodden version runs deep in this inbox. It is, I think, the Atlas Obscura instinct made explicit. Indigenous history comes up again and again, and always with moral weight. The flooding of Ojibwe land to create the Chippewa Flowage in Wisconsin. The Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma. The First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City. Multiple readers specifically suggested skipping the Mt. Rushmore tourist shops and buying from Native artisans instead. This isn’t incidental. It feels like something this community carries collectively. Food is always specific, never generic. Nobody says “eat at a good restaurant.” They say: Get a Maid-Rite in Iowa, a loose-meat sandwich served since 1926. Eat cheese curds in Wisconsin—“the squeakier, the fresher.” Get pie at Norske Nook. Have a coney dog at Coney Island on 104 E 3rd St in Grand Island, Nebraska, run by the original owner’s son, interior unchanged. These aren’t Yelp recommendations. They’re heirlooms. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Allen House - Wichita, Kansas And this surprised me: Frank Lloyd Wright is a secret connective thread through the whole trip. His last surviving hotel is in Mason City, Iowa. His Allen House is in Wichita, Kansas. His Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, has hotel rooms and a bar. His Taliesin is in Spring Green, Wisconsin. I could build an entire itinerary around one architect across four states. I might. Where I’m Still Looking for More I want to be honest: Kansas and Indiana got thinner treatment in the inbox than the other nine states. Kansas carries a reputation—“it’s flat,” multiple readers noted, often before and sometimes after their recommendations—that seems to suppress enthusiasm even among people who clearly love it. I know Monument Rocks exists. I know Lawrence has some of the richest Civil War history in America. But I want more. What are you not telling me about Kansas? Here is a video of one interesting little place I visited there so far. West Baden Springs Hotel - West Baden Springs, Indiana Indiana also feels like it has secrets I haven’t unlocked. The dunes, the caves, the West Baden Springs Hotel with its extraordinary domed atrium—those came up. But I suspect there’s an Indiana that doesn’t get written about, and I want to know what it is. So here is my ask: What did I miss? What did your fellow readers get wrong, or underrate, or skip entirely on the above states? Are there places on this list you’d push back on? And what would you add? Why I Trust You Studies consistently find that friends and community members—people who share your values, your curiosity, your sense of what a good trip means—are the most reliable predictors of whether you’ll love a place. One analysis of millions of travel check-ins found that the people in your community shape your destination choices more powerfully than any algorithm. The intangibility of travel makes us especially dependent on the testimony of someone who has actually been there—not descriptions, but the lived experience of a person saying: Go, it surprised me, do not miss it. The Atlas Obscura community self-selects for a particular kind of curiosity. You are not here for the obvious. You are not here for the sanitized version. The recommendations you sent are, almost without exception, from people who went somewhere, were surprised by it, and wanted to hand that surprise to someone else. That is an act of generosity. That is also, I think, why it feels so trustworthy—because it comes from the same place that wonder does. I am going to all 11 states. I have four months. And I am taking your list with me. Tell me what I missed. I’m at ceo@atlasobscura.com. — Louise

Holyn ThigpenMar 21, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Two Places, One Story: Mickey Mantle’s House and the Toxic Town

An Atlas Obscura map led to a joyful stop at Mickey Mantle’s childhood home, and a haunting visit to the abandoned mining town just up the road. The Atlas Obscura map led me to two places in the same corner of northeast Oklahoma on the same afternoon. I didn't plan it as a journey from joy to grief. But that's what it became. The first stop was Commerce, Oklahoma, population around 2,400, a town so modest you could drive through it in under two minutes and think nothing of it. I pulled up to 319 South Quincy Street with my eleven-year-old son, and we got out of the car into the bright afternoon and stood there in front of a small white house, taking it all in. This is where Mickey Mantle grew up. The Commerce Comet. One of the greatest baseball players who ever lived. I told my son the story the way it deserves to be told: like a fairy tale. Mickey's father, Mutt, was so certain of his son's destiny that he named him after a Hall of Fame catcher before he was even born. When Mickey was a boy, Mutt would come home from work every afternoon at four o'clock, and the baseball lessons would begin. Mutt pitched right-handed. Mickey's grandfather pitched left-handed. They engineered a switch-hitter on purpose, right there in that yard. Below the windows was a single. Above them, a double. The roof, a triple. Clear the house entirely and you had a home run. Mickey once said he was "the only kid in town that didn't get in trouble for breaking a window." My son and I walked around the yard. We peered into the old tin shed that served as Mickey's backstop. We stood where Mickey stood, and I tried to explain what it meant, that from this unremarkable house on this unremarkable street, in a small town most people have never heard of, something extraordinary grew. That greatness doesn't wait for the right zip code or the right circumstances. That you can come from anywhere, from very little, and still become something magnificent. A Yankees center fielder even. He nodded. We skipped around the yard a little, goofing off in the way that eleven-year-olds do when something connects with them but they don't quite have the words for it yet. We got back in the car. I told him our next stop was just up the road. I knew it wouldn't be a happy place. Atlas Obscura’s entry about the town of Picher had made that clear. We drove north on the small Highway 69, past flat green fields and bare trees, and then the landscape began to change. Gray mountains appeared, massive, looming, wrong. These were the chat piles: seventy million tons of toxic mining waste, the crushed and poisoned remnants of a century of lead and zinc extraction. As we rolled slowly into Picher, I was livestreaming on Instagram. Almost immediately, a viewer from Oklahoma appeared in the comments, urgent, almost scolding: Why are you going there? There are so many nicer places to visit. I kept driving deeper into the toxic town. Courtesy of Bethan Herron The houses came into view. Deserted. Every one of them. "KEEP OUT" spray-painted across doors and windows, faded but legible. Yards still faintly shaped by the people who had tended them, a walkway here, a porch railing there, the ghost of a garden. This didn't feel like some picturesque old mining ghost town from the 1880s, the kind you visit out west with a gift shop nearby. Picher had been a living community until very recently. In 1983, the EPA designated it part of the Tar Creek Superfund Site, one of the most toxic places in America, it turned out, surpassing even the Love Canal. By the mid-1990s, studies found that 34% of the children in Picher had dangerous levels of lead in their blood, a contamination that could cause lifelong neurological damage. An Army Corps of Engineers study in 2006 found that 86% of the town's buildings were badly undermined by mine shafts and at risk of sudden collapse. Then, in May 2008, an EF4 tornado tore through what remained, killing six people and destroying 150 homes. The government stopped offering to help people rebuild and started offering to pay them to leave. By June 2009, the last residents had accepted buyouts. On September 1, 2009, Picher was officially dissolved as a municipality. Sixteen years ago. That's what I kept thinking. Sixteen years ago, people lived here. Children played in these yards. A high school class graduated — eleven seniors, the last class in Picher-Cardin High School's history — and then the doors closed forever. "Can we go faster?" my son asked. "Can we leave?" We stayed in the car. I didn't roll down the windows, having read on Atlas Obscura that the wind could carry harzardous material. I told my son what I tell myself about travel: that it's not just about the beautiful places and the perfect photos. It's about seeing many angles on the world, including what's hard and strange and broken. And that we owed it to the people who lived here not to look away. Courtesy of TonboMedia He nodded again. Less convinced this time. Picher stayed with us for days afterward. We kept talking about "that toxic town." And, honestly, I couldn't decide what to share about it with Atlas Obscura's community. Should I even write about it? Then, I sat down to write about Mickey's house in Commerce. I was writing the story about the balls thrown over the house with his father, and I looked up more about Mutt. Wow. Mutt died in 1952, at forty years old, when Mickey was twenty. The cause was Hodgkin's disease. Mutt's father Charlie, the same man who had pitched left-handed to Mickey in that yard every afternoon, had also worked in the mines of northeast Oklahoma and also died of Hodgkin's disease before he was fifty. Mickey spent his whole life assuming it was family fate — that the Mantle men simply didn't make it past forty. He didn't know, until much later, that inhaling lead and zinc dust in the mines can lead to Hodgkin's disease. Mutt had worked specifically at the Eagle-Picher Company, the mining operation whose waste became the toxic mountains I had driven through that same afternoon, a few miles up the same road. And here is what stopped me cold when I worked out the timeline. The Eagle-Picher mines didn't close until 1967, fifteen years after Mutt was already dead. The EPA didn't declare the area a Superfund site until 1983, thirty-one years after Mutt died. And the last residents weren't cleared out until 2009, fifty-seven years after Mutt's death. The mine that in all likelihood killed him, just kept going. More workers. More families. More dust. And the town built on top of all that poison wasn't fully evacuated until more than half a century after Mutt Mantle was buried. When all that happened, people weren’t talking about Mutt Mantle or the connection the mine had to the famous Yankee’s baseball star. Today, most people who make the pilgrimage to Mickey Mantle's boyhood home in Commerce never drive the few minutes north to Picher. Why would they? Mickey's house draws baseball fans and history lovers who want to stand where a legend stood. They skip around the yard, peer into the old tin shed, feel the warmth of the American dream — and then they get back in the car and drive away, the story intact, the fairy tale complete. But the full story isn't in Commerce. It's also in the journey to Picher. Until you've sat in that toxic town and felt the eerie silence of those deserted streets, you haven't really understood what it meant for Mutt Mantle to come home from work every afternoon at four o'clock. "That's so sad," my son said, when I told him that Mickey’s father worked there. "Are you okay that I took you to Picher?" I asked him. He thought about it for a moment. Then he nodded, slowly, solemnly, a little wiser. Wonder, I've come to believe, isn't only the beautiful and the marvelous. Sometimes it's the terrible thing you finally understand. Sometimes it's the two places on the map that turn out to be, quietly, the same story.

Louise StoryMar 23, 2026

Atlas Obscura

This Chef Is Redefining Cuban Comfort Food From a Kissimmee Food Truck

Amanda Melendez and her partner Claudia Mena built their following with a showstopper seven-hour pork dish. “All that we have learned has been, as we Cubans say, ‘a golpe.’” Amanda Melendez is explaining the success of her food truck in Kissimmee, Florida, and it’s quickly becoming clear that her popularity did not come by accident: It was forged out of fire. “A golpe” literally means “by blows,” and when Melendez says she learned that way, she means that she did so through struggle or sheer force of will. It would be easy to forget this while salivating over a plate of her cerdo asado, or roast pork, the meat falling apart under a gleaming sheet of crispy skin. Served over Cuban rice and beans with pickled onions, fried sweet plantains, and yuca, the knock-out dish makes customers feel at home. So too does warm, graceful service from Melendez and Claudia Mena, her partner in life and in business. But behind Chef Amanda’s brilliant cooking and impeccable service are two women who have worked tirelessly to build their business from the ground up. Chef Amanda’s food truck is known for cerdo asado, a roast pork dish served with rice and beans, pickled onions, and plantains. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez Beginnings Melendez was born and raised in Matanzas, Cuba in a family that cherished mealtime. “Food, for us, was more than food,” she recalls. “It was the moment where we would sit together, where we would share our culture.” Melendez’s grandmother Mirta would prepare delicious meals for her entire extended family: comfort dishes like carne frita, or fried meat, and macaroni with pork fill Melendez’s memories of childhood. “We don’t have that much abundance in Cuba,” Melendez says, “and my grandmother would resolve to feed us with whatever she could get her hands on.” In this way, young Amanda was raised in a culture of culinary innovation. “In Cuba, if something doesn’t exist, Cubans will invent it to feed their families,” Melendez says. At age 18, Melendez left the island nation for Miami, where she joined her father, who was already living there at the time. At first, Amanda wasn’t particularly interested in cooking. As a child, she left the cooking to her grandmother. In Miami, fate brought her just outside of the kitchen, as a server and a manager. “I worked, like we all do in this country, in gastronomy,” Melendez says. Her first job was in a Salvadorean restaurant, and her second was at a Cuban one. The experiences exposed her to cuisines from across Latin America—even her own. “I ate foods that people here say are Cuban dishes—that you don’t actually eat in Cuba,” she said, because of a lack of access to ingredients. She points out that ropa vieja, a slow-cooked, shredded beef dish that is famous in the United States, is rare in Cuba, because the slaughter and sale of beef is heavily regulated on the island. With time in the United States, Melendez would not only taste, but also innovate on Cuban dishes that were difficult to obtain back home. At her food truck, she plates a mini-serving of ropa vieja on crispy tostones (fried green plantains) for a small, punchy bite of Cuba. The truck’s take on ropa vieja. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez A chef is born Though Amanda’s transition to life in Miami was marked by abundance, she became a cook during a time of desperation: the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. With nothing to do, she began to cook in her Miami home, her grandmother guiding her through Cuban classics. “Little by little,” she remembers, “my love for cooking emerged.” Claudia, who met Amanda while they were both waiting tables, could tell that she was tapping into a passion. “She pushed me to study it” seriously, Amanda says, and she did, enrolling in night classes at the María Moreno Culinary Institute in Miami. By night, she learned the fundamentals of French cooking, and by day she continued working at a Cuban restaurant in Miami. But that hustle was not paying off; the pandemic killed much of the business at her day job, so she needed to look for other opportunities. Again, her loved ones saw her talent, and encouraged her to nurture it. “My brother-in-law told me, ‘You cook well, why don’t you start a meal prep business?’” Amanda took to preparing lunches in her home kitchen that Claudia would deliver to clients around Miami. Over the course of several years, her business grew from 7 clients to 80, and she had to start cooking in a ghost kitchen to handle the volume. While at school she worked a punishing schedule: she would wake up at 3 A.M., cook until around 7, take a nap, then buy groceries for the next day before heading to classes from 7 P.M. to 11 P.M. at night. While Amanda was at school, the couple heard about an opportunity to buy a food truck, and they jumped on it. At first, they used the truck as a ghost kitchen. In 2024, Amanda graduated from Maria Moreno with a degree in culinary arts. She and Claudia continued with their catering business in Miami, but they dreamed of leaving the city so they could show Amanda’s cooking—Cuban food with global influences—to a non-Cuban public. Amanda’s father lives in Orlando, and on a trip to visit him, Amanda and Claudia were impressed by the area’s vibrant food truck scene. They wanted to become a part of it. They applied to join five or six food truck parks before getting a call from Food Trucks Heaven. The manager offered them a spot, but there was a catch: “You have to come before the end of the week because I only have one spot available,” Amanda recalls her telling Claudia over the phone. “We left for Orlando early the next morning.” From top: a Cuban-inflected take on arancini; cerdo asado; and arroz frito. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez A place in Food Trucks Heaven The first month in Kissimmee was “horrible,” Amanda remembers. One of the toughest parts of leaving was separating from her 90-year-old grandmother, whom she had lived with since arriving in the United States. On top of that, she left behind many other family members in the Miami area to move to a city where she knew no one besides her father. “Nobody knew who we were, and my food truck is named Chef Amanda,” says Melendez. “Who is Amanda? No one knows. It didn’t say ‘Cuban’ anywhere. It was horrible, horrible.” Amanda worked the kitchen of the pink food truck, and Claudia attended to customers. Melendez burnt herself cooking on her first day. There were days where Amanda and Claudia did not sell a single thing. “It was like when someone is just exhausting themselves, sacrificing so much, but with nothing to show for it,” Amanda remembers. “We realized the only way people would buy from us was if they learned about our food first.” Claudia and Amanda started to give away samples of cerdo asado, their show-stopper. Tourists started sharing images of the delicious, seven-hour slow-cooked pork on social media. Influencers stopped by. “We’ve grown little by little this way,” Amanda says. Seven months later, they sell so much that they’re having trouble keeping up with demand. Claudia says that Amanda’s biggest challenge is that she has trouble delegating her work to other people, but it’s time for her to hire a worker to help out. They’ve grown on the strength of Claudia’s hospitality and business acumen — Amanda calls her the “mastermind” of the operation — and Amanda’s innovative, soulful cooking. When the pair was still in Miami, Amanda’s professor, Yoher Vielma, helped them create a menu for their nascent food truck based in Cuban cooking, but with modern, global twists. “We make use of the original recipes with new techniques to create a fusion menu,” says Melendez. “Because society advances.” Take, for example, Amanda’s croquetas, a classic breaded fritter that on the island would be made with a doughy center. Amanda, taking notes from Spanish croquettes, makes hers with bechamel, so the crispy exterior gives way to a melt-in-your mouth interior. Or her arroz frito, a fried rice dish brought to Cuba by Chinese immigrants in the 1800s. She loaded hers with Cuban stir-fry ingredients—pork, pineapple, sweet plantains—but came up with her own sauce incorporating Japanese rather than Chinese ingredients. Her arroz con pollo arancini are particularly revelatory. The base of the dish is a yellow rice-and-chicken dish that Amanda says Cuban cooks use to transform a small amount of poultry into a large, filling meal. And in Melendez’s hands, the dish transforms once more. “It ends up with a texture like a risotto,” she says. She adds cheese while it’s hot, breads it, and fries it to make it crispy on the outside, and moist and flavorful on the inside. She cuts the richness of the fried rice balls with two salsas: one made of cream cheese and lemon; and another with Japanese mayonnaise, lemon, and aji amarillo, a Peruvian orange pepper. Customers have also been clamoring for her tarta vasca, a crustless Basque cheesecake, which she Cubanizes with a guava marmalade. The same marmalade is served with her queso frito, fried cubes of muenster cheese that are breaded and fried until tender on the inside but crunchy outside. “The cheese is spectacular,” she says. “People order a ton of it in the food truck.” Queso frito, fried muenster cheese, served with a guava marmalade. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez Many Cubans are “incredulous” when they see the menu. “They ask me, ‘This is Cuban?’” Amanda says. “We tell them, ‘Try it. If you don’t like it, I won’t charge you.’ “And what always happens? They’re surprised. They’re always surprised, because when they try it they realize that it is Cuban food.” The menu is filled with her delicious takes on Cuban classics, like pan con lechón, a roast pork sandwich, a Cuban sandwich, and the inimitable ropa vieja. Customers can wash it all down with pineapple, mango, guava, or mamey (a custardy, aromatic tropical fruit) juice. In fact, while certain visitors need convincing, some Cuban-American influencers have been sharing videos of themselves eating at her food truck, calling it the best Cuban food truck in Orlando and saying that it transports them right back to Cuba. And though Amanda loves winning over her compatriots, she is just as pleased when an American who isn’t as familiar with Latin American food tries her cooking. “They come to us and say, ‘This is the best Cuban sandwich I’ve ever eaten.’ That fills us up, really. It gives me more happiness, I promise you, than money could.” Chef Amanda Melendez with a dish of fried rice. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez From Kissimmee to the world Now that she’s developed a following in Kissimmee, Melendez says that she’s just getting started as a restaurateur. Next, she hopes to open another food truck in the Orlando metro area, and at some point, a brick-and-mortar. She and Claudia are also eying cities north of Florida where they can introduce her takes on Cuban cuisine to Americans who might be unfamiliar with it. Getting there won’t be easy, but she and Claudia are more than up to the challenge. “You’ll fall, you’ll hit a thousand obstacles, Amanda says. “But you can’t give up.” She encourages people who are hesitant to follow their dreams to take a leap. “Anything you want in this world you can achieve, but you have to believe in yourself unconditionally,” she said. Though Amanda’s dreams are grand, they are simple at their core: She likes feeding people. “It makes me happy when someone smiles when they eat something I made.” she says. “I want everyone to experience that.”

Sam Lin-SommerMar 26, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Wyoming, and What Happens When You Pull Over

On her quest to visit all 50 states by July 4th, Atlas Obscura's CEO pulled over for a bicycle sculpture, a plane on a pole, and a mountain lion being skinned in a Wyoming backroom, and came away with something unexpected. I had not planned to stop in Pringle, South Dakota. We were driving west through the Black Hills to take a day trip to Wyoming when … I spotted it — a large sculpture made entirely of bicycles, welded together on the roadside outside of town, going nowhere and completely magnificent. We pulled over. My kids ran through its arches and tunnels. We took pictures. We left 10 minutes later having seen something none of us expected. That stop set the tone for the next two days. Just off I-90 near Sundance, Wyoming, I pulled off at a spot I'd found in the Atlas Obscura database: the Quaal Windsock — a 1950s Beechcraft Twin Bonanza airplane, 45-foot wingspan, mounted on a 70-foot pole above the highway. Mick and Jean Quaal loved the old plane but couldn't justify the $200,000 it would have cost to restore it to flying condition. So instead, they put it back in the sky another way. It pivots with the wind. The propellers still spin. We stood there and watched it turn for a while, and then we got back in the car. We had come to this corner of Wyoming for Devils Tower, the strange flat-topped rock column that erupts from the plains northeast of Hulett like something from another planet — which, if you grew up watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it essentially is. In Lakota tradition it's called Bear Lodge, and the grooves running down its sides are the claw marks of a great bear who chased children to the top while the rock rose to protect them. Prayer flags tied by Native visitors flutter at its base. Rock climbers (I'm one of them) move slowly up its columnar basalt faces far above. It is one of the more genuinely strange and beautiful places in America, and it deserves every word that has been written about it. But this essay is not about Devils Tower. Hulett is a small, old-timey Wyoming town about 20 minutes from the Tower. We were driving through it, windows down, when I saw the sign: Deer Creek Taxidermy. I said what I always say in these moments: Can we stop? We stopped. Atlas Obscura has hundreds of taxidermy places in its database. Our community has written about anthropomorphic Victorian taxidermy — dead kittens at tea parties, dead hamsters playing cricket — and about taxidermy loan libraries where you can check out a full-grown tom turkey the way you'd check out a book. We have taught bird taxidermy and mammal taxidermy online to thousands of students. One of our most dedicated community members — a woman named Caroline Mazel-Carlton who has visited more than 1,000 Atlas Obscura locations — told me she has loved taxidermy since she was 2 years old, and that her friends have, on multiple occasions, had to extract her from taxidermy backrooms while on trips. I had always found this odd. I had not yet understood it. Bobbi Butler was behind the counter at Deer Creek when we walked in, keeping an eye on her granddaughter at the same time. She gave us the tour without hesitation. The walls were covered: deer, elk, bears, steers, animals arranged in postures of frozen alertness. Some looked calm. Some looked intense, even furious. My 8-year-old, a vegetarian, moved quietly from mount to mount, studying each one. Then Bobbi said: "So the guys are out back, and they're actually, I don't know if you'd like to see, but they are skinning a mountain lion." Of course, I said yes. Outside, a mountain lion lay on its back, legs suspended in the air. Blood across the chest, deep red at the neck. Two men worked efficiently and without ceremony. My son looked at it and said, "That's disgusting." One of the men looked up. "Good, we needed more help. If everybody holds a leg we have enough people." Bobbi explained: the animal had been harvested by a hunter who'd brought it to Deer Creek to be mounted. "When it comes back from the tannery," she said, "then we do all the artistic stuff." One of the men popped out a claw — enormous, curved — and held it toward us. "You want to see the dangerous stuff? Look at this." My son, the vegetarian, looked at the claw. He did not look away. Back inside, Bobbi walked us through the full process. Animals come in wet and go straight into the freezer. When it's time to work, they thaw the skin and glue it over a high-density foam form sculpted by specialists to the exact shape of the animal. "We order the foam," she said, "then we take the skin out of the freezer and thaw it out, put glue all over the form, stretch the skin over it, sew it up down the back, put glass eyes in, and tuck the nostrils and eyelashes in." She showed us mounts mid-process, pins still holding the skin in place while it dried. I asked whether the eyelashes were preserved from the actual animal. Yes, she said. My son asked if they'd done a cow. They were working on one. A monkey? Yes. A whale? No. He thought about this. "I think it would be cool to do a rat." I had come to Wyoming for Devil's Tower. I left thinking about what Bobbi Butler's work actually is — not preservation of death, exactly, but an argument that something was worth remembering and looking at in new form. The foam form. The glass eyes. The real eyelashes tucked carefully into place. Someone decided this animal's specific likeness, its particular claw, deserved to last. The Quaals' windsock had been put in the sky because they loved a plane too much to let it rust on the ground. The bicycle sculpture in Pringle was welded to the roadside for no navigational reason whatsoever. Bobbi's mountain lion will hang on someone's wall for decades. Maybe the purpose is the same in all three cases. Someone saw something worth presenting in a new way. Someone said: Look at this, and look what I did with it. Caroline would have stayed for hours. I think I'm starting to understand why. — Louise Ps - I hope you are enjoying my quest to complete my 50 states. Email me anytime with your own questing stories or travel suggestions at ceo@atlasobscura.com.

Louise StoryMar 31, 2026

Atlas Obscura

A Flight Attendant’s Philosophy

A Q&A with flight attendant Deeb Haidar about a life spent in motion. Deeb Haidar may live in Brooklyn, but he spends half his time in different cities—sometimes even different countries. Since becoming a commercial flight attendant three years ago, Haidar has travelled all over the world for his job, working his way up from less-glamorous destinations to vibrant places that have each come to feel like a second home. Atlas Obscura Community Editor Holyn Thigpen spoke with Haidar about his favorite cities to travel to for work, the hole-in-the-wall spots he’s come to love, and the simple pleasures of a life spent in transit. Atlas Obscura: What made you want to become a flight attendant? Deeb Haidar: I used to travel a lot as a kid—mostly the Middle East. I was in Lebanon and Jordan and Kuwait to see family, and when I would go there, I’d be there for so long. Growing up in a Middle Eastern household in the U.S., I was never fully integrated, even though my parents wanted me to be. I was in such a bubble at home that even though I grew up in the U.S., a lot of things were super unfamiliar my whole life. AO: What kind of routes did they put you on in the beginning? And has that changed over time? Haidar: Domestic hell. In and out of Ohio—the worst stuff you can imagine. I’m still in my domestic era. I have to fight for everything internationally. AO: Is that because they’re more likely to give those flights to old-timers? Haidar: Yeah. I go to LA and San Francisco the most right now. If we’re talking about cities that I feel the most integrated in outside of New York, it’s definitely going to be San Francisco. It feels like such an old city. Even the businesses and the types of establishments they have there—old diners and eateries that are from, like, a hundred years ago—they’re all still there and all the architecture is still intact. AO: What else do you like about SF? Haidar: There is such an interesting kind of counterculture that exists in San Francisco once you get past all of these tech bro aesthetics and the tech bro lifestyle. I used to always go to Chinatown there, but there are all these Chinese spots that are not in Chinatown because of how it’s become [gentrified]; they’re in this neighborhood called Inner Richmond. That’s where the legit old school places are. A lot of the Chinese community in San Francisco moved to Inner Richmond from Chinatown. And the intention there is not to attract tourists, which I like. AO: How did you find out that this is the “real” Chinatown? Was it just through you exploring while you were there on work? Haidar: I just talked to people, mostly taxi drivers. Taxi drivers are like my lords. They really, really, really do help out. There are some weird ones for sure, so you have to know which ones are actually going to have good recommendations. I always wait to see if they have a family before I start talking to them. AO: Do you have a routine as far as what you do when you’re there, or do you like to switch it up every time? Haidar: I’ll get in from my flight, I’ll shower and I’ll change. I’ll put my earrings on. Go to the Mission or to Outer Richmond. I’ve been going to Outer Richmond a lot more often recently, just because I feel like it’s a bit more calm. But the Mission is beautiful because there’s such a vibrant and ever-present Latin diaspora there. Amazing restaurants and all these different cafeterias. You can go around just speaking Spanish. The Mission, captured on film. Photo by Haidar AO: I love this approach you have, where you’re just immersing yourself in different neighborhoods. Haidar: I think there’s this “cruise ship mentality” or “Disney park mentality” that’s baked so deep within us now that we just can’t find the magic in places. We’ll go somewhere, like Paris, and be like, “Ugh, I don't like Paris. The people are so mean” and this, that, and the other. And if you press people when they say stuff like that, they’ll just say “Oh, well, I wanted to order this and [the Parisians] just kind of scoffed at me.” But with those people, it’s always the same thing: They don’t speak French. It’s always that they're not speaking French. And I get it: Obviously not everybody speaks French, but it’s nice to at least try. When I’m in Paris, I don't even try to—like, English never even enters my head. It’s weird because, with Gen Z, we like to claim that we’re the most culturally literate generation and we’re the most forward thinking and all these things, but I’ve seen it a million times where a Gen Z person will go into a cafe and they’ll start speaking English. As a flight attendant, I see it too. Because when we go to Spain, when we go to Italy—I’ll speak Spanish first; I’ll speak Italian. I see how passengers react to me, and from that alone I can tell how they are when they’re in these countries they’re flying to. I’ll ask someone if they want something to drink in a language, and they’ll respond in super overly articulated English. It is a kind of aggressive thing to do, even though I’m sure they don’t realize it. AO: You told me before we started that Paris is one of your favorite cities. What are your favorite spots there? Haidar: My number one favorite is probably this dingy little tobacco shop that has all these slot machines and a coffee bar. I went in there because I needed to use the bathroom. I got a cup of coffee because I thought I had to buy something. (I didn’t. They literally wanted nothing to do with me.) But it was the best coffee I ever had in my entire life. It was run by this old Asian lady and her daughter. It’s funny, too, because I know people have this expectation of Paris—that there’s a certain type of person and a certain type of establishment. But there are all these different ethnic groups. These are people who immigrated from all over, but they’ve been in Paris longer than we’ve been alive. They’re more Parisian than anyone with a French degree will ever be. Through blood, sweat, and tears, they’ve become Parisian. AO: So best coffee you’ve ever had and you can use the bathroom for free if need be? Haidar: If need be. I don’t have the name of it because it’s a very generic place. It’s a random place on a corner. I got a shot of espresso that literally tasted like white chocolate, and it was milky and thick and rich. It was the most incredible coffee of my life. There’s also a boulangerie called La Griotte, and it’s in the 17th [arrondissement]. La Griotte Boulangerie Pâtisserie Michael Maher via Instagram. Used with permission. You go there and everything is plastic and gray and it’s lit horribly. And the pastries there? I’m sure they’re not the best in Paris by a long shot, but you go in there and you feel so welcome. You see commuters come in with their dogs, and you see how that one spot, based on geography alone, has become a fixture in these people’s lives, and it’s embedded so intimately in their lives. And they’re also so kind to you if you try and speak French, even if you sound like an idiot. AO: This is really warming me up to the Parisians. I think I’m going to have to give them another shot. Haidar: Oh, definitely. I think everyone needs to give them a shot. It’s become such a thing in America to hate on them. And I’m not saying everyone in Paris is an angel, but I think people who go there just like to believe they’ve had the same experience as others and they convince themselves of that. AO: What are your other go-to Paris spots? Haidar: There’s Chez l’copain, which is in the 18th, and it’s a little wine bar. It’s really trendy, cute, super dimly lit with red lights, and everyone’s young and outside smoking a cigarette. Les Vinaigriers is a restaurant that’s in the 10th. It’s a French restaurant. There’s only like four or five things on the menu, and they do it really well and everything is mixed. There are some experimental menu items that have shoyu and stuff in them, which is really cool. So there is a little bit of a mixed flavor there going on. And it’s a really, really cute street corner next to another cafe I haven’t been to yet called Le Flash, which is based off of arcade games. And there’s Le Garçon, which is a cafe, and I’d put that on my list just because of my experience with coming in and saying that I’m bad at French. Chez l’copain Courtesy of Chez l’copain AO: They were helpful? Haidar: It wasn’t that they were guiding you through it; they were just listening to you. They stopped and they listened to you. And everyone in there is French, and there are all these construction workers who are all commuting. Especially if you go in the morning, which I do. And they just sit there and listen to you struggle, but they’re not making fun of you. I really think French people love Americans. I know it sounds crazy—this is my hot take. They love American stuff. They love burgers. They love McDonald’s. McDonald’s is such a big thing! French people foam at the mouth for McDonald’s. If you go to France and you get a McDonald’s, honestly, you are kind of doing some form of cultural immersion in a way. McDonald’s and Burger King. Those are the two franchises that have been reclaimed by the French. AO: Are there special French McDonald’s items that you’ve tried? Haidar: They have the sauce chinoise, which is the Chinese sauce. AO: Are there any places that you think are overrated in Paris? Haidar: Oh, yeah. Champs-Élysées, for sure. The whole street. AO: What about it? It’s just a tourist trap? Haidar: It’s a tourist trap, and it’s all retail. A lot of European cities have this, and even American cities have it, where it’s the perceived center of a city, but now it has all been replaced by retail. It’s like a non-place. It’s a Zara. It’s a Salomon pop-up. It’s a Louis Vuitton. It’s a Hermes. It’s all these places. And then you’ll see a bistro here and there, and the prices are marked up by thousands. That’s an exaggeration, but still. Attractions have become the same everywhere you go. The same stores, the same things are there, and you don’t feel like you’ve gone anywhere. And I know some people look for familiarity, and they look for safety, and they look for something that they’re comfortable with. And it’s there for them. But obviously, you’re probably going to come back feeling like you haven’t done anything or you haven’t gotten anywhere. Also, it is kind of overstimulating and really depressing. AO: You mentioned the 10th arrondissement is an area where a lot of your favorite places are. Are there other areas in Paris where you just really like the vibe? Haidar: Yeah, the 9th. It’s a more chill part of the town. It’s very residential. There are families about, and what’s great is that it’s not for anybody, you know? That’s why I also like that really ugly gray place—because it’s not trying to be anything trendy. It’s not for you. It’s not for anybody. It’s not for people who visit Paris. And Paris shouldn’t—any city shouldn’t—no one should expect a show to be put on for them like they’re going to Epcot. No one should be expecting to enter a theme park. The 9th isn’t dolled up for anyone because it’s a city. It’s a real place. People live there. AO: I know you're very much an explore-by-the-seat-of-your-pants person, but is there any spot that you really want to hit next time you're there? Haidar: There are two places. There’s Le Flash. And then there’s this one cafe that I saw...I took a picture of the street next to it. It doesn’t have a name on the wall, but there are no lights. It’s all natural lighting. And it’s really small, and the seats are cushioned outside. It looks so old, but everyone there is so young. And they look like they know that they’re going to a simpler time. I don’t know...there’s so much I really can’t articulate about some places. Le Flash Max Drehsen via Instagram. Used with permission. AO: So between San Francisco and Paris, is San Francisco still your favorite city? Haidar: I mean, just because of how much I’ve travelled there, I’ve made friends. There are people that I go see now. AO: Just locals you’ve happened to meet? Haidar: Like, literally, I was in a tiny coffee shop called Grand Coffee and I met one guy named Angel, and he became one of my best friends. We get ice cream together and stuff. There’s a place actually called Garden Creamery and they do all their ice cream flavors from scratch and we get ice cream after he’s done at work. I haven’t paid for a coffee for as long as I can remember when I go in there. It’s the size of half of a bedroom—a tiny coffee shop with four little stools, and it’s a bar, basically. And [Angel] gives me the aux; I don’t pay for coffee, and I bring him ginger beers from the corner store down the street. AO: I always love those connections I make when I’m traveling that I’m actually able to maintain. That’s so special. Haidar: It is special because you do feel like you’re creating something. When you travel enough, you feel like you don’t really belong anywhere. And sometimes you have those moments where you’re like, “Wait, maybe I do. Maybe there are people that…” Because I feel like home as a concept is never a place. It’s always people.

Holyn ThigpenApr 2, 2026

Atlas Obscura

The Breathing Hole of the Earth, Found in South Dakota

South Dakota just as winter was ending, and the most alive things were underground. Atlas Obscura community member Catherine Laton warned me. "You're going to be so surprised at how much you'll love South Dakota." She is one of hundreds of readers who flooded my inbox after I announced my quest to visit all 50 states before July 4th. And, she was right, and also not quite right. I was surprised, but not in the way she meant. Fueled by your e-mails and recommendations, I arrived in the Black Hills at the tail end of winter — roads clear, season not yet turned. The hotel had almost no other guests. A handful of sites were shuttered until Memorial Day, waiting for crowds that hadn't arrived yet. Off-season travel: a little lonely, occasionally frustrating, and then suddenly, quietly, revelatory. Because the caves were open. Jewel Cave sits in the southern Black Hills, not far from where Mount Rushmore keeps its vigil and Crazy Horse slowly emerges from the mountain to the southwest. Below is one of the longest caves in the world. Calcite crystals coat the walls in formations that catch your headlamp and scatter it like broken chandeliers — spectacular, alien, cold. (There's also an advanced caving tour for ages 16 and up that requires squeezing through a narrow slot. I fit, so we're coming back when my kids are old enough.) Wind Cave is different. Wind Cave is a story. The cave is named for the wind that blows through its entrance — air pressure changes above ground push air in and out, as if the earth has lungs. When we left, my kids and I could barely pull the door closed behind us; the cave wanted to keep breathing. The Lakota called it Washun Niye, "the breathing hole of the earth," and held it sacred as the place from which the buffalo and their own people first emerged into the world. White settlers "discovered" the entrance in 1881. By 1903 it was a National Park. It was this cave that consumed the young life of Alvin McDonald, a teenager who began exploring its passages in the late 1880s and kept a diary of everything he found. He mapped corridors. He named rooms. He went back again and again, and started bringing tourists with him, charging admission, occasionally leaving them overnight in the dark when he had somewhere else to be and retrieving them the next morning. He died of typhoid fever around 20, having explored more of Wind Cave than anyone before him. The rangers tell his story with real tenderness: here was a kid with a candle and a notebook and an overwhelming need to know what was around the next corner, and apparently no particular anxiety about other people's comfort. I recognized something in that. Our guide mentioned that visitors always ask whether Wind Cave and Jewel Cave connect somewhere underground. Both are only partially explored — vast unmapped passages still ahead — so no one knows for certain. Probably not, she said; Jewel has no wind phenomenon, which suggests they're separate systems. But who knows. I found myself thinking about that uncertainty for the rest of the trip. South Dakota turns out to be a place of magnificent incompleteness: caves that may or may not connect, a monument still being carved after seven decades, a history still being reckoned with. There is so much still ahead. Above Wind Cave, the bison were grazing in the cold. American bison were hunted nearly to extinction by the late 1800s, from an estimated 30 million animals down to perhaps 1,000. Wind Cave Park became one of the reintroduction sites in 1913, and the recovery worked. The park now maintains a free-roaming herd of 400 to 600. They are enormous and indifferent and they do not move for your car. I sat and waited while a young bull stood broadside in the lane, regarding me with what I can only describe as philosophical calm. The buffalo emerged here, the Lakota say. They nearly vanished. They came back. The cave is still breathing. Reader Jerry Turley had told me Crazy Horse impressed him more than Rushmore. He was onto something. Rushmore is extraordinary — the sheer audacity of carving four faces at that scale isn't something photographs prepare you for. But Crazy Horse, still being carved seven decades after sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began in 1948, carries a different weight. Ziolkowski died in 1982 without seeing it finished. His family has continued. He built something he knew would outlast him, and somehow that makes it more moving than the four finished faces just up the road. Reader Arthur Hillson had told me: Skip the tourist shops at Rushmore and buy a blanket directly from a Native artisan instead. Good advice I'm keeping in mind for the road ahead. I drove back through Deadwood in the fading afternoon, a town that has leaned fully into its own mythology, saloons and history museums stacked on top of each other. Catherine Laton told me to take water in the Badlands. I did. She was right about that too. Atlas Obscura has 64 places listed in South Dakota — many that I didn't get to. Yet. — Louise PS - This is part of my quest to see all 50 states before the 250th birthday of our country on July 4th. I hope you will email me your thoughts about traveling across the United States at ceo@atlasobscura.com

Louise StoryApr 6, 2026

Atlas Obscura

These Historic D.C. Spots Tell America’s Story

Celebrate 250 years of red, white, and blue at these hidden and unusual places. This year, the United States celebrates a major milestone: 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed and America became an independent nation. The country’s Semiquincentennial is an important time to reflect on the people, ideals, and events that have shaped it, as well as what the future holds. And what better place to celebrate the U.S. than its capital city? D.C. is home to America’s federal government, national monuments, and prominent political figures, but it’s also the site of some truly incredible, lesser-known U.S. history. Since July 4, 1776, the story of America has been written largely by its unsung heroes and enlivened by the unique places and moments often left out of history books. At these six sites, America’s past, present, and future converge in vivid color against D.C.’s lively cultural backdrop. A vibrant world packed with fragrant foliage and centuries-old botanical traditions. DC Gardens, CC BY 2.0 National Herb Garden Inside the U.S. National Arboretum lies the National Herb Garden, one of the most extensive collections of its kind in the country. Established in 1980 by the Herb Society of America, the garden is divided into thematic “rooms” and specialty sections that trace the roles that herbs have played in culture and history. Informational plaques throughout the garden showcase each plant’s practical, medicinal, or cultural significance, from those brewed into beverages to the dyes drawn from blossoms. The garden also contains collections of specific genera such as lavender, rosemary, and chili peppers, allowing visitors to experience the taxonomic diversity within plant families. A private creative bunker for one of America’s most prominent thinkers. Ted Eytan, CC BY SA 2.0 Frederick Douglass’s Growlery This small stone cabin on the grounds of Douglass’s Cedar Hill home became the reformer’s favorite place to read, write, and think in peace throughout his career. Douglass kept the single-room structure simply furnished with a couch, stool, and desk filled with his books and papers. It is likely that many of Douglass’s most famous works were first drafted in this space, which has been jokingly called a “19th-century man cave.” Today, visitors can step inside the reconstruction of this cozy abode, which uses materials from the original Growlery and sits in its original location. A salvaged mast honors sailors lost in a tragic explosion. Arlington National Cemetery, Public Domain USS Maine Memorial (Mast of the Maine) The mast of the USS Maine, an armored cruiser that exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898, stands proud in Arlington National Cemetery, commemorating the over 260 people who died in the tragedy. It was first raised from the sea in 1911 and brought to Arlington in 1912. Now, the mast sits atop a large granite base, designed to resemble a battleship gun turret. It contains inscriptions of the names and ranks of those lost in the wreck, as well as a welded depiction of the Maine’s bell. Above the door, another inscription reads, “Erected in memory of the officers and men who lost their lives in the destruction of the USS Maine at Havana Cuba, February Fifteenth MDCCCXCVIII.” This 4-foot stone marker once symbolized a national dream. Charles Smith, CC BY SA 2.0 Zero Milestone This small granite structure symbolized lofty goals for America’s future when it was erected in 1923. Championed by Dr. S. M. Johnson, an advocate of the burgeoning Good Roads Movement, the marker was intended to show the central point from which one could measure highway distances throughout the country—a timely aim in the early days of America’s booming automobile age. Johnson took inspiration from ancient Rome’s Golden Milestone, located in the Forum, which marked the origin point of the Roman Empire’s extensive road system. While the Milestone’s great vision never quite caught on, it’s still technically a geodetic benchmark for some local measurements. Rochambeau helped lead Americans to victory at Yorktown in 1781. This statue shows him directing his troops. Daderot, CC Zero Statue of General Comte de Rochambeau This statue of the famous French Revolutionary War hero was erected in Lafayette Park to affirm positive Franco-American relations. Following tensions between the two countries during the 1898 Spanish-American War, France sought to show that it held no grudges and was ready to restore friendly diplomacy. President Theodore Roosevelt and members of Congress, along with French military and civil delegations, dedicated the Rochambeau statue in 1902 in the southwest corner of the park. Intelligence officers worked long, grueling shifts inside a former pigeon coop. Elliot Carter, Atlas Obscura User Peirce Mill Spy Station During the Cold War, D.C. was full of covert spaces for top-secret operations, such as this unadorned attic space in Rock Creek Park. The small nook atop a former carriage house became a site for intelligence officers to monitor bugging equipment directed at the diplomatic consulates (and snap the occasional sneaky photos). Meanwhile, the ground floor of the space became home to an alternative art collective called the Art Barn. The building’s use as a spy station was not revealed until 1992, when the Washington Post interviewed the Art Barn’s executive director about her unusual upstairs neighbors. In the same article, the Post reported that all spy equipment had been removed from the mill the previous year when the Cold War came to an end.

Holyn ThigpenApr 10, 2026

Atlas Obscura

Stuck in the Long Valley Caldera

Driving through snowy mountains, Kelly’s hot spring adventure suddenly went wrong—or did it go right? Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. A few weeks ago, I was up in the Sierra Nevada mountains by myself for the weekend. I like doing that sometimes. The ski mountain I like is about five hours north of L.A. I usually leave town on a Friday night. On the way up, I sleep in my van at a rest stop or a campground on public land. And I wake up the next morning and the mountains are right there. On this trip, I decided that after a day of skiing, I was going to go explore the Long Valley Caldera. A caldera is basically a big depression caused by a volcano that has collapsed on itself. And the Long Valley Caldera did that about 700,000 years ago. It’s actually one of the largest calderas in the world, 20 miles by 11 miles, right near Mammoth Mountain, where I go skiing. It looks like just a big, flat, open field covered in sagebrush. But underground, there’s still an active magma chamber that heats the groundwater and forms some of my favorite things in the world: hot springs, these little blue pools that pop up all across the field where hot water has bubbled up, and you can just get in and sit there on a really cold day. So on this day, I was searching for hot springs in the Long Valley Caldera by myself in my van. Oh, and it was after a really big snowstorm. What could go wrong? I’m Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And here at the show, we ask people a lot of questions about the places they go. Sometimes we like to ask ourselves those questions too. Today’s question for me was this: What is a time when you felt like you were in over your head? This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Hot Creek, a hot spring in Long Valley Caldera CC BY 2.0 / James St. John There are really good maps of the Long Valley Caldera. I did not have one. Instead, I decided to type “hot springs” into Google Maps and wing it. I drove down the highway, took a left at the old green church I remembered, and went another few miles on a paved road. Then I got to a turnoff that Google Maps said would take me to some hot springs. They have names like Crab Cooker and Wild Willy’s and Hilltop. But the problem was: that road had not been plowed. It was covered in snow and ice. And my van is not four-wheel drive. I should have hesitated … I didn’t. At this point, I should probably come clean about the fact that in my life, I have turned down a lot of roads I shouldn’t have turned down. Because for many years I was an international correspondent for NPR and others. I’ve covered wars. I’ve worked in a lot of intense places. And so when I first got the question for this episode, I thought: Do people really want to hear about the time I was detained by the KGB? I mean, that was because I went down the wrong road near the border with Chechnya. Do they really want to hear about the time I ended up on the road with the ISIS checkpoint? The road in Yemen where the U.S. was dropping bombs from drones? That time in Syria when my fixer said, don’t worry, we’re just going to the back of the front line. The problem with these stories is not just that they are super intense and scary, but—and bear with me here—the problem is that I actually came out of those situations okay. And this has given me a very false sense of confidence that I will always make it out okay. Call it privilege. Call it stupid luck. I call it positive reinforcement for bad behavior. So, at the caldera, I’m on the bad road. It’s bumpy, but it’s not too bad. And I make it to the first hot spring, which was so cool. It’s just this little depression of warm water lined by smooth rocks right in the middle of the snow-covered field with the Sierras on the horizon. Big blue sky. I have the pool all to myself. I started sending selfies to my girlfriends, like, look what I found. And a few people had been in the pool just before me. They were putting on their boots and getting ready to leave, and they said they were heading to the next pool just a couple miles away. They didn’t have four-wheel drive either, but they said they were going to try. Getting to that next hot spring meant turning down another bad road, one that looked like it might be even worse than the first bad road. So, I waved and told the people I wasn’t going to risk it. Yeah, yeah, bye. Have a good time. But then, I got back in the van and I was in such a good mood. And I thought, that first pool wasn’t quite warm enough. And I knew they got warmer the further you drove into the caldera. And the sun was shining and the sky was so blue. So I figured, I’ll try to go a little bit further. When I did get stuck, I didn’t think it was a big deal. Even though it seemed like I was out in the middle of nowhere, I still had a phone signal. I’ll just call AAA. Everything will work out, I thought, like it always does. Seven hours later, I was seriously questioning the way I live my entire life. I don’t believe in luck running out, but it felt like mine had. Pro tip: if you’re out on a caldera on a small dirt road, AAA will not come for you. They consider it off-roading. The road was super narrow, and my tires were super stuck in this very deep rut of snow and ice on kind of a little hill and a turn. The crazy thing was, though, there were other people out there, so I started waving them down. And after a little while, some guys drove up and said they had a tow rope. So they tied my van to their four-wheel drive truck, and they towed me out of my spot. But then I got stuck again. And we kept trying and trying and trying, and then they got worried that they would get stuck. And then it started to get dark. And then they said they had to leave. They had a couple kids in the truck, and they just couldn’t help me anymore. At this point, I have to be honest. I started to think, maybe this isn’t going to work out. I might actually have to spend the night out here. And to be clear, I have been in worse situations. I once spent the night in a school in Syria, in an area that was under heavy bombardment. But this was nature. What if it dumped snow again and I got really buried and no one could find me? I could make it for a while in the van. It has a bed. It has blankets. It has a little kitchen. There’s a fridge with some food in it. And there’s a heater that works even if the van isn’t running. There’s also a bunch of other crap in the van that I wouldn’t need, like maps and spices and mosquito repellent and tents and about six different ways to make coffee. So, I would survive. But how was I going to get out? Before the guys with the tow rope left, they actually gave me the number of a professional who might come and tow me out. For a fee. I called her. She said her truck was in the shop. But she gave me the number of another guy. I called him and he said it was going to cost a lot of money. Like hundreds of dollars. So I tried to get myself out. I let the air out of my tires. I put my floor mats under my tires and tried to use those as traction. I tried to put the chains on, but that only works when you can actually move the vehicle forward to get the chains into place. I tried digging out with a dustpan. Why do I have a dustpan? Eventually, I called the expensive guy back. His name was Tim. He sounded like he knew I was going to call him back. It took him a couple hours to get there, but he finally came roaring up in this jacked up Jeep with a crazy hefty tow rope and these big treads that you put down under the tires to get traction. I was so close to the part of the road that was okay to drive, but it still took like an hour for Tim to get me out. And by this point, it was fully dark. Tim was super cool. He had worked on search and rescue teams. He does marathon training at elevation. He had been in Iraq, too. We traded cool stories. I later even went to his house so he could fix a sensor that had broken on one of my tires. And Tim told me not to be embarrassed. Getting stuck happens to the best of us. But yeah, I was embarrassed and also just kind of sad. I know one of the reasons that I always do the thing is that I don’t worry about the worst case scenario. I joke with people that I don’t have a worry gene. I just do not have the ability to imagine what could go wrong. And that is how I’ve lived my life, how I’ve been able to do all the things I have done over the years. And yes, I acknowledge that I might not have been able to wriggle out of situations near Chechnya and in Yemen if I wasn’t a white middle-class American lady. But now, since this mistake, I can imagine what could go wrong. And maybe the next time, I won’t turn down that road. But what kind of life is that? I mean, who is this person? Other worriers I know say worrying is actually a good thing, a healthy thing. That if you worry all the time, you will be pleasantly surprised when things go right. I don’t buy it. I would much rather assume the best than assume the worst. People will talk to you. People will be helpful. How bad can that road be? I sulked for days about getting the van stuck. I tried to tell the story to my friends, but I thought, it’s not a good story. But then I realized, I did get Tim out of the deal. I made a cool new friend. He put a pic of the rescue on his Instagram page, and I didn’t have to spend the night out on the caldera. I guess in the end, things did go right. Right? Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM Podcasts. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.

Kelly McEversApr 13, 2026

Atlas Obscura

The House With No Story

Atlas Obscura CEO Louise Story didn't have a plan in Bloomington. She just had the app, her kids, and an open afternoon — and ended up somewhere she never expected. We picked Bloomington because of friends. A couple we'd been close with in New York moved there four years ago when she got a professorship at IU. We wanted to see them. They didn't have an agenda for the day, so I pulled up the Atlas Obscura app and suggested two places: the Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection and the Captain Janeway statue. They'd never heard of either. Four years in Bloomington, and they didn't know their town held more than 30,000 antique puzzles or a bronze monument to a starship captain who won't be born for another three centuries. At Slocum, my kids worked through nearly every puzzle on display in the room—wooden geometries, trick boxes, ancient sliding-tile puzzles. My husband, the family brainiac, got stuck on one called Chinese Rings: six interlocking metal rings threaded onto a U-shaped wire loop. The goal is to remove all the rings, then replace them. It looks simple—just slide them off. But the wires block your way. You can't take them off one at a time. You have to skip rings, double back, work through a precise 31-step sequence. He sat there turning it over in his hands, trying every angle, while the kids moved on to the next table. He never solved it. The kids were merciless. Now they want a puzzle cabinet at home. Then we walked to the Janeway statue, and I became the narrator. I'm not a Star Trek person. I wouldn't have stopped for this on my own. But my kids were with me, and they wanted to know: Why would a town build a statue to someone who isn't real? Someone who won't even be born for 300 years? So I read the plaque. I looked it up in the app. And I told them. Captain Kathryn Janeway was the first female captain to lead a Star Trek series. She commanded a starship stranded 70,000 light-years from home and spent seven seasons making impossible decisions—the kind where every choice has a cost and you make the call anyway because someone has to. She was created by Jeri Taylor, a woman who grew up right here in Bloomington, graduated from IU with an English degree in 1959, and became one of the only female writers and producers in the Star Trek franchise. Taylor fought for representation in a room full of men who told her no. She gave Janeway her own hometown. And when she retired, she donated her life's work to the Lilly Library—the same building where my kids had just been solving puzzles. The statue was crowdfunded entirely by fans. Women who needed Janeway to exist. Who saw themselves in a captain who didn't apologize, didn't explain, just led. I stood there looking at her—this bronze woman on a pedestal in a small Indiana town—and I thought about all the times I've sat in rooms where men doubted me. The boss who once told me he couldn't believe he was listening to a pregnant woman lecture him about cloud computing costs. (I was right. He admitted it later.) The moments when being blonde, being a mother, being from Florida somehow meant I couldn't possibly know what I was talking about. I didn't know, standing at that statue, that I was looking at myself. I was just trying to explain to my kids why a town would honor someone fictional. But that's what sharing does. It makes you see things you wouldn't have seen alone. Our friends kept saying, "We had no idea this was here." There's something wonderful about showing people hidden corners of their own town. After we said goodbye, I had one more stop. Before the trip, I'd texted my mom to tell her we were visiting Bloomington. I knew she'd done two years of college at IU. What I didn't know—what I learned only when she texted back—was that she'd also lived there as a child, ages 2 to 7, while my grandfather did his doctorate. I'm 45 years old. I didn't know this. She sent me a list: 423 Jordan Street, her first house. University Elementary, K-2. The swim team pool with underwater windows where she swam alongside Mark Spitz. Teter Quad. The Hub. The gorgeous limestone campus with the river running through. I was rushing out the door. I barely read it. I saved the address and moved on. We found the house after saying goodbye to our friends—though the street isn't called Jordan anymore. It was renamed Eagleson a few years ago after David Starr Jordan's legacy as a eugenicist came to light. My mom didn't know. The address she'd carried in her memory for sixty years no longer exists the way she remembers it. The house sat up on a hill behind a concrete staircase. A two-story Colonial, painted pale gray, with white columns framing the front door. Evergreens crowded the entrance—junipers and arborvitae that had been growing for decades. A sunroom on one side. A brick chimney. It looked like a professor's house, not a postdoc's. More substantial than I'd imagined for a young academic family in the late 1950s. I pulled up in the car. I looked at it. I took a photo. I drove off. I checked the box. A few weeks earlier, I'd taken my kids through my own Floridian childhood— in the towns of Maitland and Winter Park. I showed them my elementary school and the historic Black town of Eatonville next door, how growing up beside it shaped who I became, why I'd written a book about the Black-white wealth gap, why equality causes have run through my life. They asked endless questions. They wanted to understand. The place unlocked because I was there to narrate it. But at my mom's childhood home, I had nothing to say. My grandparents are both dead. They divorced bitterly, and after the split, neither would speak about the life they'd shared. My grandmother—who I adored, who was gorgeous and put-together and thoughtful in everything she did, coordinated down to her jewelry, nothing unconsidered—she never mentioned Bloomington. It was "before." It didn't exist. And now, writing this, I realize: I never asked. I never pushed her to talk about the years before the divorce. I never asked what it was like to be a mother in her late 20s with a toddler and a husband building his career. I never asked what that house felt like, what the kitchen smelled like, whether she was happy. She died in 2021. I can't ask her now. I wonder—if I had pushed, would she have told me? Or would she have deflected, the way she always did when the past came up? I'll never know. That's part of the grief: not just that she's gone, but that the questions I should have asked went unasked. And now I'm standing in front of her house at 45—the age she was when she lived there, with kids the same ages my mom was then—and there's no one left to answer. Except my mom. Who's still here. Who texted me a whole list of memories. Who I didn't invite. Why didn't I invite her? I could have asked her to meet me in Bloomington. We could have walked up those concrete steps together. She could have told me which window was her bedroom, whether she remembers the backyard, what her father was like before everything fell apart. Instead, I checked the box. I took a photo from the car. I think about all the travelers out there with bucket lists. Checking boxes. Taking photos for Instagram. Driving past houses to say they did it. How many of them are actually feeling a place? Spending time there in a meaningful way? With the right people? So much of my 50-state quest has been meaningful—but I realize now it's because I've been sharing it. The puzzle room came alive because my kids were there. The Janeway statue mattered because I could explain it to them—and because explaining it made me see something about myself. I even showed my friends hidden corners of their own town. In other places, like a horse cemetery in Kansas, I met locals. But the one stop that was actually about family history, I did without a person who could explain it. I rushed. I checked the box. Some places you can discover on your own. But some places—your mother's childhood home, your grandmother's first kitchen—those need a narrator. And if you don't bring one, you're just photographing a house. Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo wrote: "Humans, not places, make memories." I'd go further. Humans don't just make memories—they make places exist. Without someone to tell you what happened there, a house is just architecture. A statue is just bronze. If I hadn't sat down to write this essay, I probably never would have thought about that house again. It would have stayed a photo on my phone, a drive-by on the way to the airport. But writing made me see what I missed. Writing made me text my mom. Writing made me wish I'd asked my grandmother the questions I'll never get to ask. When you get home from a trip, sit with it. Write something down—even if just for yourself. You might discover that the place you rushed past was the one that mattered most. And the people who can narrate your history? They're still here. But not forever. Ask them now. Bring them with you. I took a photo of my mom's house anyway. I'll send it to her. Maybe she'll see something I couldn't. -Louise PS — Have you visited the places where your parents or grandparents grew up? Did you bring them with you? Write me at ceo@atlasobscura.com with your thoughts on what old family places mean in your travels—and whether you've ever regretted not asking the questions while you still could.

Louise StoryApr 14, 2026

Atlas Obscura

We Took Three Kids to Napa. One Joined the Wine Club.

Wine country has a secret life — and it involves a torture chamber, a geyser, and an 11-year-old wine club member Everyone warned me about bringing three kids to wine country. They weren't wrong, exactly. Pull up to Stag's Leap or Mumm and you'll find gorgeous scenery, serious sommeliers, and approximately zero reason for a child to be there. I love wine. My kids do not. We needed a plan. The plan turned out to be a medieval castle. Castello di Amorosa sits at the end of a long drive through vineyards in Calistoga, and when it comes into view you genuinely stop breathing for a second. The stones are too old to be in America. The walls are too thick. The whole thing looks like someone lifted a 13th-century Italian fortress out of Tuscany and set it down, inexplicably, in Northern California wine country, surrounded by crimson and burnished bronze grapevines. Which is, more or less, exactly what happened. The man behind it is Dario Sattui (he was born Daryl, which tells you something). Fourth-generation vintner, ardent Italophile, and a person with a vision so large it took twelve years and over a million antique bricks – salvaged from dismantled Habsburg palaces–to realize. The hinges, the locks, every chain link carefully assembled. And he did it with his wine profits. No tech billionaire money here. Sattui had already built one of the most profitable wineries in Napa at V. Sattui, reviving his great-grandfather's tradition. He could have stopped there. Instead he built a castle, shipped a million bricks across an ocean, and created something so specific, so committed, so genuinely joyful that on a Friday afternoon a family from New York stood in his courtyard while their 11-year-old joined the wine club. That part requires explanation. We did a seated tasting in one of the outdoor courtyards, golden light coming through the arches. What I didn’t know: Castello has a kids' flight. Three glasses, yes, a flight of grape juice, each one poured and presented by a sommelier with complete, genuine seriousness. My kids tried a Muscat Canelli, a Gewürztraminer, and a red blend. The sommelier explained each one as thoroughly as she explained ours. Terroir, tasting notes, the whole thing. My children, who last week argued about whose turn it was to feed the dog, suddenly had opinions about stone-fruit-forward profiles. The atmosphere was nothing like the hushed reverence of some tasting rooms. It was joyous. Everyone around us — families, couples, the staff — seemed delighted just to be there as if the place gave everyone permission to find it magical, and everyone accepted. My 11-year-old was the leader. After finishing his third grape juice flight, he turned to the sommelier and asked to join the wine club. They said yes. He'd receive grape juice only. He is now, they informed him, the youngest member in the history of Castello di Amorosa. I don't know what we've started … After the tasting, my kids insisted on the torture chamber — genuinely, historically detailed — and I recommend letting them lead you through it, because their enthusiasm is infectious. But here's the thing about this corner of California that nobody briefed me on: it's not just a castle. Within about 20 miles of Calistoga, Atlas Obscura will take you on a tour that defies all expectations of what "wine country" is supposed to mean. There is a geyser in Calistoga, California's own Old Faithful, powered by an actual subterranean volcano, that erupts regularly while people are a mile away getting mineral mud baths, apparently unbothered. There is the Monticello Dam, home to the largest drain hole in the world, sitting serenely in a Napa reservoir, looking perfectly pleasant until you look directly into it. There is a hill in Sonoma that you have stared at for years: it's the photograph called "Bliss.” The default Windows XP wallpaper, shipped on over a billion computers. The hill is real. You've seen it every day. You just didn't know where it was. And then there’s Safari West, a wildlife preserve just outside Santa Rosa where giraffes walk past your open-air vehicle and rhinos graze in the distance and you think: I was in a medieval castle four hours ago. Napa does not care about your expectations. This is what using Atlas Obscura as your travel companion does to you: you start out looking for something to do with your kids while the adults drink wine, and you end up somewhere you never could have planned. There's a sister property too — not a castle, but equally kid-friendly. We're already planning the return trip. My youngest would like it noted that she found the torture chamber first. -Louise PS — Have you found somewhere that completely defied your expectations — somewhere you almost didn't go? Have you brought your kids somewhere that turned out to be magic, or taken a chance on a detour that changed the whole trip? Write me at ceo@atlasobscura.com. I want to hear about the places that surprised you.

Louise StoryApr 20, 2026