837 America Obscura; This Land Is Your Land

Travel with Rick Steves - Rick Steves

This episode of Travel with Rick Steves explores America's most unusual and fascinating attractions through the lens of Atlas Obscura, highlighting quirky roadside stops, natural

Key takeaways

• America is full of hidden wonders that inspire 'wonderlust' as much as wanderlust.
• Many unusual attractions—like giant balls of twine or roadside dinosaurs—are rooted in creativity, not just tourism.

Main topics

• Quirky roadside attractions in the U.S.
• Land art and large-scale earthworks

Notable quotes

"It is, to my mind, one of the most bizarre, amazing, wild creations in the entire United States." – Dylan Thuras on House on the Rock

"History is about curiosity. Come along as we look for America the Fascinating." – Beverly Gage

Conclusion

This episode invites listeners to see America beyond the usual tourist trail, embracing its

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) America certainly has some unusual attractions. You can explore the eccentricities of the House on the Rock in Wisconsin. Speaker 6 (0:07) It is, to my mind, one of the most bizarre, amazing, wild creations in the entire United States. Speaker 7 (0:15) Or listen to organ music played on stalactites at a cave in Virginia. Speaker 4 (0:20) You look at it and think, how did he think to do that? But I'm so glad that he did. Coming Speaker 7 (0:24) up, the folks from Atlas Obscura take us to a few of America's quirkiest sights. And historian Beverly Gage reminds us that what you hear about some famous places might be salted with a few tall tales. It Speaker 3 (0:37) is one of the most myth-saturated sites in the whole United States. She Speaker 7 (0:42) invites us to explore what's behind the curtain at the nation's important monuments. Speaker 3 (0:47) History is about curiosity. Come Speaker 7 (0:50) along as we look for America the Fascinating in the hour ahead on Travel with Rick Steves. Speaker 7 (1:00) With the big United States anniversary on the horizon, Yale history professor Beverly Gage set out on a cross-country road trip in 2023. She ventured well beyond the original 13 colonies to visit 13 key sites in the nation's history and to hear what people were saying about each of those sites. Beverly is our Pulitzer Prize-winning guide to America's history, and in just a bit, she'll tell us what she found from Williamsburg to Disneyland. The whole world is a bigger, weirder, and more wonderful place than you might have imagined. That idea led Dylan Thuris to start the Atlas Obscura website to pique our curiosity about thousands of hidden wonders on every continent guided by reader recommendations. Ella Morton selected 700 of their most remarkable entries to feature in their best-selling book, Atlas Obscura. They join us now from the Travel with Rick Steves archives for a look at some of their favorite curiosities across the USA. Dylan, Ella, welcome. Thank you. Thank Speaker 6 (1:59) you for having us. Speaker 7 (2:00) So you launched Atlas Obscura in 2009 to create a catalog of people, places, and things that inspire a sense of wonder. You wrote, it's to inspire wonderlust as much as wanderlust. What do you mean by this? I Speaker 6 (2:15) think what we're trying to do here is not just create sort of like a... bucket list. You know, some people say, oh, this is a bucket list of the weirdest places in the world. And you could use it like that. But hopefully, the idea is that these places really are everywhere. They're both far flung and in your own backyard. And as you look through this and get a sense how common these kind of incredible hidden stories are, the hope is you start to kind of explore the world in that way. You even look at your own hometown and think, what's here that I've sort of just been neglecting to go and examine and experience? Speaker 7 (2:45) So you, with your website, atlasobscura.com, you collect all of these crazy and fascinating insights and then edit them together into the book. Ella, tell us just briefly how that process works. Speaker 4 (2:58) Well, we began with looking at all the places that we've collected on the website, which at this point now is up to 10,000. So we had to look at whittling that down to 700 places and people and things to include in the book. And we started with our sort of greatest hits, which is the giant flaming hole in the Turkmenistan desert and the house on the rock in Wisconsin that has this magical lit up carousel that some of us have been to in our childhoods and remembered since then. And so it was about having this mix of... Things that really made an impression that are strange and wondrous. That's a sort of sample platter of what Alps Obscura has to offer. Speaker 7 (3:35) Okay, so let's take a romp through America. I'm just going to bring up a few themes because I know the book is gathered in sort of themes. And I'd love to hear your favorite memories or your favorite experiences or things you want to be sure that people know about when they're dreaming about America Obscura. First of all... We're a car, you know, a road trip kind of society. Let's talk about a few roadside attractions. What are some of the most quirky roadside attractions we should know about? Speaker 6 (3:58) Well, I'll actually talk a little bit about the one that Ella just mentioned called House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin. And I went there when I was 12 with my parents on a kind of classic American road trip. We went to the Corn Palace in South Dakota and Wall Drug. And so on this trip, we went to a place called House on the Rock. It is, to my mind, one of the most bizarre, amazing, wild creations in the entire United States. And to give a sort of quick description of what's in there, inside of this house, and house is really the wrong word because it takes about six hours to walk through the entire sprawling set of buildings kind of hidden in the forest. Inside is... As Ella mentioned, the world's largest carousel with the world's most diverse set of carousel animals. There is a sculpture of a squid fighting a whale that is the size of the Statue of Liberty that's inside the house. There's a giant hallway that's made to look as if it goes on forever. The Infinity Room, as it's called. Anyway, it is a truly fantastical place. And where Speaker 7 (4:59) exactly is that again? Speaker 6 (5:00) Spring Green, Wisconsin. You Speaker 7 (5:02) mentioned goofy dinosaur parks in the book. There's a number of dinosaur parks, aren't there? Speaker 6 (5:07) There are. They're scattered across the United States. There's a few particularly good ones. What's Speaker 7 (5:12) your favorite? Speaker 4 (5:13) There are. One that stands out, they're the cabazon dinosaurs, which are featured in the film Pee-wee's Big Adventure. This giant apatosaurus, I believe it's now called. And that's another thing that's a sort of roadside attraction. People know it from having driven through California as kids. Speaker 7 (5:30) And there's no actual artifacts or archaeological digs. It's just plain old... goofy modern dinosaurs to entertain the kids on a road trip? Speaker 4 (5:37) Well, so this one is kind of interesting because in the mid-1990s, a bunch of creationists established a museum and gift shop in the belly of one of the dinosaurs. Speaker 7 (5:49) How about other roadside attractions? What comes to mind? I like that you've got a chapter about the largest ball of twine. Speaker 6 (5:55) Oh, sure. That's a very competitive category, actually. There's multiple large balls of twine, and it depends on whether you're— Speaker 7 (6:01) Yeah, because you qualified this one, rolled by one person. Right. So that Speaker 6 (6:05) is one, and then there's another that's been a group project. And obviously, America has this kind of obsession, shared, interestingly, with Australia, of giant things, of building enormous versions of things. And I think it may be just about having— kind of a lot of space. This Speaker 7 (6:19) is Travel with Rick Steves. We're joined by the co-founder of Atlas Obscura, Dylan Thuras, and the chief editor, Ella Morton. Their website is atlasobscura.com. Talk for a minute about natural wonders and land art. You know, there's the famous Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Speaker 6 (6:35) The 1970s produced a particular explosion of land art, these gigantic installations and other kinds of large-scale installations. There's one actually, this gigantic project called City out in Nevada. It's monumental. I mean, it is the size of a small town, basically, and will be there in 1,000, 2,000 years. I mean, these things are made, in a sense, to last the test of time because they're just huge. It's these giant earthen works. It's huge pyramids of packed earth, giant trenches. You know, there's other works like this, like Double Negative is this enormous trench, sort of canyon that's been dug into the ground. Speaker 7 (7:18) You know, you talked about the city. I was fascinated by California City. I didn't realize that there was a planned city 100 miles north of L.A. that was actually built to rival Los Angeles, but apparently it never got off the ground. Speaker 6 (7:30) Technically, by geographical scale, I believe it is still the third largest city in California. But Speaker 7 (7:36) it's got a population just of a handful of people. Speaker 6 (7:39) Of a few thousand, it was designed as this car-centric megacity, except built largely in the 1960s. It was out in the Mojave Desert. And for reasons that I think now seem obvious, people were not incredibly thrilled to move their lives out to the edge of the Mojave Desert. So now it sits there. It's been, you know, roads and cul-de-sacs are all laid out, except there are basically no houses there. So it's like this giant. You know, it almost looks like a circuit board if you see it from Google Earth. Speaker 7 (8:09) These are kind of places you'd never know about if you didn't do a little studying ahead of time. You've got a chapter called Castles Without Kings. And, you know, we always go to Europe for castles, but there are some crazy castles in the United States of America. Speaker 6 (8:19) Yeah. One of the other places I think I would recommend as one of the great kind of roadside stops or a place worth making a special journey to is Bishop Castle in Rye, Colorado. It is a 16-story... medieval-ish castle built by one man over the last 40 years, hauling stones kind of by hand. You're basically free to explore this entire place. You can go up to the very top of it, and at the top are these wrought iron welded sphere and a little bridge you can cross. There's a guest book that basically you're supposed to sign before you go in that says, If I should fall to my death, I accept responsibility for that. And it's definitely a place where you feel like, you know, you kind of are responsible for your own safety. But in a way, that is part of what makes it an incredible, unusual place. And part of it's, for me, part of why I enjoyed exploring it. It really is like the pinnacle of American outsider art. Speaker 7 (9:16) It's funny because in your book you have the warning, Atlas Obscura was written in the spirit of adventure and readers are cautioned to travel at their own risk and obey all local laws. Some of the places described in this book are not open to the public and not meant to be visited without appropriate permissions. So there are a few places that are fun to know about but a little dangerous to actually visit. Speaker 6 (9:34) That is correct. Speaker 4 (9:35) Yeah, and that's sort of part of the philosophy of this book is that we realize that not everybody can get to all 700 places or even maybe 100 places, but even just knowing that these things are out there and these people are creating these castles and outsider art projects and... You know, being so creative and innovative and looking at the world in a different way, that inspires us in itself. Speaker 7 (9:59) Yeah, I'm inspired just by reading the book. We're considering some of the most unusual sites you can visit around America right now on Travel with Rick Steves. Documentary filmmaker Dylan Thuras co-founded Atlas Obscura as a crowdfunded website to the world's hidden wonders. Dylan co-authored their best-selling Atlas Obscura book with Ella Morton. plus their gastro-obscura food guides and explorer guides for young readers. There's more at atlasobscura.com. Take me to the most mind-blowing place that you can actually visit, that you would really highly recommend somebody visit. Speaker 4 (10:34) Well, there's a place called Luray Caverns in Virginia that actually contains the world's largest musical instrument. If you go there, you'll see what looks like a console for a church organ. And it looks kind of strange to have that inside a cave. But what you don't see is that in the 1950s, a guy named Leland Sprinkle wired... five miles worth of cable between that central console and a bunch of different stalactites that were different sizes so that when they were struck, they would make a certain tone. They would act as the pipes for this church organ. He called it the stalactite pipe organ. He used to play it himself, but now it plays automatically. But it's one of these things where you look at it and think, how did he think to do that? But I'm so glad that he did. And Speaker 7 (11:20) you can go there and actually see it being played? Yeah. Wow. And Dylan, what's your recommendation? Speaker 6 (11:25) I'm going to talk about a place that actually I kind of hope will get saved because right now it's sitting basically abandoned in Jackson, Mississippi. And it's a place called the Mississippi River Basin Model. And it is the greatest scale model perhaps ever