Mushkpuri Top is one of the most scenic hiking destinations in northern Pakistan, known for its peaceful trails and sweeping mountain views. The journey to the summit begins near Nathia Gali and takes hikers through dense pine forests, fresh mountain air, and open meadows that burst into color after the monsoon season.

The hike is moderately challenging but rewarding, usually taking around three hours to reach the top. At an elevation of nearly 9,500 feet, the peak offers wide, uninterrupted views of the surrounding Himalayan foothills, making it a favorite escape for nature lovers and adventure seekers.

What makes Mushkpuri Top truly special is the combination of calm forest paths and dramatic landscapes that unfold as you climb higher. It feels like stepping away from everyday life into a quieter, greener world above the clouds.

This small plot of land, only a third of an acre in size, is the smallest park in Harris County — and home to some of its largest public art: Mount Rush Hour. Donated to the state in 2012 by local sculptor David Adickes, the collection combines two of his famous Presidential busts with two Texas politicians, Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston. The eighteen foot-high Statesmen rest on marble pedestals, lit at night by sconces. Every day, the Houston Chronicle estimates that they see about three million cars and trucks from their perch between Interstate 45 and The Katy Freeway.

This park is only one of many final resting places for one of Adickes’ lifelong passion projects. He was on a fateful road trip past Mount Rushmore when he wondered what it might be like to look the sculptures in the eye, soon embarking on a journey that would consume over a decade of his life and lead to more than one hundred and fifty president head statues. According to The Washington Post, he was known to frequent movie theaters just to stare at the backs of old men’s heads in attempts to get the statues right.

Adickes died in 2025 at the age of 98. The other 42 presidents from this set can be found at his old studio on Nance Street — and his sculptures of The Beatles (8th Wonder Brewery), Alexander Graham Bell (Hyde Park), and Virtuoso (Lyric Tower) can be spotted across the city. The other hundred president heads are split between an industrial recycling facility in Williamsburg, Virginia, and various RV parks and motels throughout North and South Dakota. 

 At the summit of Montpelier Hill in Rathfarnham Dublin are the stone ruins of a building constructed in 1725 for the then Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, William Connolly.  Intended and designed as a hunting lodge, the building was sold after Connolly’s death in 1729 and was later used as a meeting place for the Irish Hellfire Club. 

The summit of Montpelier Hill originally held a passage grave topped by a cairn of stones.  Connolly ordered the cairn dismantled and its stones used as building materials for the lodge.  One of the grave’s standing stones became the lintel for the fireplace.     

The Hellfire Club was founded in 1735 by Richard Parsons, a notorious aficionado of the dark arts and black magic.  The Club became known for lascivious and immoral behavior involving quantities of alcohol and sex.  The Club’s president was called “The King of Hell,” and he reportedly dressed like a winged Satan.  The Hellfire Club’s members were of such unsavory reputation that writer Jonathan Swift described them as “a brace of monsters, blasphemers and Bacchanalians.” 

It was rumored that the Club held black masses in the lodge during which black cats – and perhaps servants – were sacrificed.  William Connolly’s grandson, Thomas, claimed to have met the Devil during a card game in the Lodge, where he watched Satan burst into flames and fly out the gable window. 

In 1741, the roof of the Lodge caught fire and was completely destroyed.  Some claim the roof was intentionally set alight to give the building a more Hellish appearance.  The most sensational rumor was that the Club lured a victim to the Lodge, intoxicated him, and set him on fire.  The fire spread, killed several members, and destroyed the building.  Rather than repair it, the Hellfire Club's members moved their meetings, but Club membership declined thereafter.  Given the dark stories associated with the HellFire Club, it was no surprise that rumors spread that the ruins were haunted, and those rumors persist today.

Porto is a city that seems engineered for wonder. Its steep cobbled streets tumble toward the Douro River, where tiled façades glow amber at sunset and old trams rattle past wine cellars older than many nations. Travelers arrive for the port wine, the melancholic strains of fado, and the dramatic riverfront skyline, but Porto’s true magic lies in the way history and industry intertwine. Few places embody that union more powerfully than the Maria Pia Bridge, a masterpiece of iron suspended above the Douro like a line drawn in the sky.

The bridge was designed by the celebrated French engineer Gustave Eiffel several years before he became world famous for the Torre Eiffel. Completed in 1877, the Maria Pia Bridge represented a turning point in Eiffel’s career and in modern engineering itself. Working alongside engineer Théophile Seyrig, Eiffel devised an elegant wrought-iron arch capable of spanning the deep valley of the Douro with unprecedented lightness. The project demonstrated the daring structural ideas that would later define his Parisian monument.

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 Rabbit
Kennywood Amusement Park, West Mifflin

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.

Thunderhawk
Dorney Park & Wildwater Kingdom, Allentown

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 Coaster
Idlewild & SoakZone, Ligonier

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

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 Comet
Hersheypark, Hershey

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

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 Racer
Hersheypark, Hershey

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.

Open year-round (but closed on Tuesdays & Wednesdays), this alpine coaster offers fast turns and mountain views for all. The coaster combines modern engineering with the fresh Montana air to create a ride as timeless and unique as the state in which it resides. 

After ascending several hundred feet, riders will begin their descent down the coaster, their speed completely dependent on the rider's use of brakes as they zoom along the track, navigating the many twists & turns the coaster has to offer. The ride itself can take as long as the rider would like as everything with this coaster is completely up to the rider.

In addition to the alpine coaster, guests to the Flathead Lake Alpine Coaster can also check out gem mining or play a round of miniature golf. It's a fun afternoon for the whole family!

Under the English "New Poor Law" of 1834, civil parishes in England were required to join together  to form workhouse  unions with the aim of housing two classes of poor people, the poor and destitute of the areas served by the union, who were given long term, often permanent, but very frugal  accommodation with a requirement  to work 12 hours per day for 6 days a week, and vagrants , just passing through  the district, who were housed for 2 nights, giving a full day for them to provide 8 hours of hard labour in return for food.  Both classes were given a very restricted diet but the vagrants' diet was very frugal and hardly adequate. Essentially prison conditions were imposed for the crime of being poor.

Vagrants were searched for money on admittance and their own clothes were fumigated in an SO2 fumigation cabinet with the vagrants  wearing workhouse  uniform for their period of residence. Those seeking long term residence had to prove both their need and willingness to work and in addition a link to the locality. Without that the "Guardians" of the workhouse would send them on their way with instructions to seek relief in their own neighbourhood, both for economic reasons and as a throwback to the laws which were established to reduce mobility of labour after the Black Death, several centuries earlier.

At Ripon the workhouse for the  permanent  residents  was in a separate,  purpose built, block within the enclosed courtyard  and the vagrants were housed in separate accommodation  in the form of a row of "cells" in one of the wings of the gatehouse block. The main work carried out by vagrants at Ripon was breaking stones to small "pebbles" for road mending and cutting firewood, both illustrated here in the work-yard display.

The main workhouse block also contained  the accommodation  for the Master and his wife the Matron, jointly  responsible  for day to day running  of the workhouse, with the "inmates" housed in separate  single sex wings either side. Separation of the sexes, including  married couples and children, was enforced  rigorously. All these features are starkly illustrated by this fine museum.

Although formally abolished in 1929 many workhouses remained in use until the National Assistance Act of 1948 mainly because they were satisfying an unfilled need.

The last time Oslo suffered from a bout of the plague was in 1654. The plague claimed the lives of more than 1500 citizens. Estimates vary, but at the time this could have represented as much as 40% of the population. The city desperately needed space for mass graves, and so Christ graveyard was opened. 

To commemorate the sad occasion, Oslo erected peststøtten, or the plague-marker. Today this is Oslo’s oldest public monument, although at the time it would have been well outside the city limits.

The graveyard was in use from 1654 until after WW2. Famous generals, politicians and academics are buried there. Edvard Munch’s sister Sophie, subject of his Sick Child series of paintings, is also buried there. 

The marker reads: 

«JESU CHRISTO TIL ÆRE SOM OPUÆCKER DE DØDE ER DENE KIRCKEGAARD I DEN STORE PESTIS TID A° 1654. ANORDNET AF HANS JACOBSØN SCHØRT K.M. OBERSTE OC COMENDANT PAA AGERSHUS DA I STATHOLDERS W.H. GREGERS KRABBIS FRAVÆRELSE I SLOTESLOV FORORDNET  

EFTER BISPENS M HENNING STOCHFLEZ BEFALING AF SLOZPRÆSTEN H MICHEL PEDERSØN ESCHOLT DEN 18 OCTOBRIS INDVIET. VED TØYHUUSFORVALTEREN CAPT LAURITS PEDERSØN INSPECTION INDHEGNET

DEN FØRSTE HER VDI BEGRAFVEN VAR ARNE SIVARDSØN SOLDAT AV WANG SOGN» 

Rough translation:

“To the glory of Jesus Christ, who raised from the dead, this graveyard was in the year of the great plague, anno 1654, inaugurated by Hans Jacobsen Schist, appointed Royal Majesty’s colonel and commander of Akershus fortress due to the absence of prime minister W. H. Greger Krabbis. 

By order of Bishop Henning Stockflez, it was consecrated by the parish priest, Michel Pederson Escholt, on 18 October.

It was fenced under the supervision of the armoury administrator, Captain Laurits Pederson. 

The first person buried here was Arne Sivardson, a soldier from Wang parish.”

If you ever find yourself needing a break from shopping, Dubai Mall offers a casual alternative: a 10-million-liter ocean dropped right next to the Cheesecake Factory restaurant. The Dubai Aquarium's centerpiece is a massive suspended tank where hundreds of sharks and rays glide past shoppers.

The real magic happens inside the 48-meter transparent adventure, offering a 270-degree acrylic walkthrough from 11 metres below the surface. Walking through it feels like a slow-motion stroll across the sea floor, offering a fish-eye view of sand tiger sharks overhead. For those who wish to explore more than the rays and sharks, the upstairs zoo is home to King Croc, a massive saltwater giant who serves as a living reminder of prehistoric scale.

The massive aquarium is visible, without the need for ticketing, from inside the mall.  However, exploring the full scale of the Aquarium and Zoo, along with all experiences they offer requires prior booking. Tickets can be purchased online or at the door.

Most burger spots settle for a nice view. Twin Peaks Drive-In has two volcanos and an air show.This gloriously unassuming wood shack sits at the end of the Hood River Airport runway, close enough that diners on the outdoor patio regularly pause mid-bite to watch gliders, biplanes, and small aircraft clear the treeline just overhead. Mount Hood looms to the south. Mount Adams holds down the north. Somewhere in between, a fresh-pressed beef patty is sizzling on the grill.

Nobody seems to agree on exactly when Twin Peaks opened — sometime in the 1950s is about as precise as the history gets — but the hand-forming of never-frozen patties every single morning has apparently never stopped. In an era when most American drive-ins quietly switched to frozen pre-formed beef and nobody said anything, Twin Peaks just kept doing it the old way.

It sits along the Hood River Fruit Loop, surrounded by orchards, an easy and scenic drive from Portland. The parking lot is dirt. The shack is rustic. The planes are real. Stumbling onto this place feels less like finding a burger joint and more like finding a secret — the kind you immediately want to tell everyone about.

The Talking Bear is posed with an open mouth of bared teeth and a front paw raised to swipe, while his other paw rests on a grey rock.  His brown fur is heavily textured, and he sports the classic grizzly hump on his back.  When a button is pressed, the Bear vocalizes from a nearby speaker, letting out a growl followed by some California bear facts and history

Legend says that the Bear was originally created as an enticement to the International Olympic Site Selection Committee.  The inducement failed. However, in 1965, Hugh Schollenberger placed the fiberglass Bear at the intersection of Crane Valley Road and State Route 41 in the center of Oakhurst, and the Bear has presided there ever since.  He endures annual holiday decorations on his island of grass and has even been spotted wearing a festive scarf in cold weather.

Yarm Castle was built from grey stone in the 1880's by a local David Doughty who once lived in the adjoining house, many years later his son added to it by building Yarm town hall. It has turrets, ramparts and coloured glazed windows which were once illuminated by gas light.

Don't go expecting drawbridges and moats and you might have to search a bit to find what is probably best described as a folly.

Scattered throughout Hernando County, the Mermaid Tale Trail is a sprawling scavenger hunt made up of mermaid statues painted by local artists. The project was created to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, the famous Florida attraction where performers have staged underwater mermaid shows since 1947. The trail began with 26 statues unveiled in 2022 and has since expanded to more than 35 mermaids spread across Brooksville, Weeki Wachee, Hernando Beach, and beyond.

Each statue starts with the same fiberglass form: a six-foot-tall mermaid modeled from the face cast of a former Weeki Wachee performer named Kristy. From there, local artists transform them into wildly different characters. Some are painted with old Florida wildlife and mangroves, while others lean fully into fantasy, folklore, or psychedelic color palettes.

Visitors follow maps and digital passports from downtown storefronts to coastal parks, discovering overlooked corners of Hernando County along the way. The experience feels somewhere between a folk-art road trip and treasure hunt.

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.

San Francisco’s Sutro Baths

Today, there are only remains of what were once these massive baths constructed by self made millionaire Adolph Sutro in San Francisco.

In Philadelphia, Ben Franklin’s Musical Invention

Host Dylan Thuras tries his hand at playing a “glass armonica,” a musical instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin. Its high-pitched, eerie sounds were rumored to cure all kinds of illnesses – or even, sometimes, cause them.

The Mapparium Globe in Boston

At the Mapparium® globe in Boston, visitors can step inside a giant, three-story stained glass globe…and get a glimpse of the bigger picture.

Vancouver’s Dude Chilling Park

A renegade art project in Vancouver galvanized a small community, pitted residents against city government, and ultimately resulted in a new name for a chill park.

Guadalajara’s Telmex Building

We visit an office building in Guadalajara, and learn how one man moved it–workers and all–exactly 40 feet.

LA’s Kuruvungna Springs

Eight thousand years ago, this land’s first inhabitants built a village around a sacred spring. Today, their descendants still work to protect it.

This Atlanta Monument Is a Tombstone for...Gravity?

A stone marker at Emory University commemorates one millionaire’s personal vendetta against gravity.

Mexico City’s Footwear Museum

This unassuming museum showcases everything from booties worn by a rescue dog to slippers owned by Queen Elizabeth I.

Kelly McEvers: Today we’re going to talk about a candy store in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. And about how candy stores have always played a big role in the town’s history.

Back in the 1840s, a German immigrant named Frederick Roeder set up a little sweet shop in Harpers Ferry. He sold cakes, candies, and pies and lived right upstairs for about 15 years.

But then came the morning of July 4, 1861 .By that time, the Civil War had arrived. Union troops were moving in. Roeder ventured outside his shop to check out the scene. Some say to get a look at the Union flag flying just across the river. He was a Union sympathizer himself. He was hit by a ricocheting bullet. And then he died. Which means the town’s first civilian casualty of the Civil War was the local candy shop owner.

And today, the connection between candy and history is still going strong in Harpers Ferry.

There’s a plaque marking the site of Roeder’s old store. And just a few steps away down a street called Hog’s Alley is a place called True Treats. It’s a candy shop, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.It’s also sort of an edible timeline of the history of candy.

Susan Benjamin: We are not a candy store. We’re a museum where you can eat the displays.

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 West Virginia Department of Tourism. And today we’re going to eat our history.

We will meet candy scholar Susan Benjamin, who founded what she calls the only research-based historic candy shop in the country.

She’ll introduce us to some surprising sweets that have shaped American history, from abolitionist sugars to World War I’s chocolate energy bars.

That’s coming up 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.

Kelly: Susan Benjamin is a candy scholar. So basically, she has the job that every kid dreams about. And it’s no fluke that she ended up in Harpers Ferry.

History buffs will recognize the name. It is where abolitionist John Brown led his famous raid back in 1859. Visitors can still see the armory he raided and lots of Civil War sites. Downtown Harpers Ferry even looks a lot like it did back in the 1800s—narrow streets and old brick buildings.

It’s the perfect place for true treats, which bills itself as the country’s only research-based historic candy store.

Susan: Our retail store is located in a building that opened in 1843 and was part of the Civil War itself. So you can imagine just how beautiful it is, not updated at all other than to keep the building straight.

Kelly: That’s Susan.

Susan: When you walk into our store, people think it’s really cute and really “old-time” and expect to see, “Wow, I’m so happy to see a real retro candy store!” Whoa, no, we’re not retro! We have retro, but we start before then.

Kelly: What Susan calls “retro candy” is stuff you might have found in the Five and Dime store: gummy sharks, lemon sours, tangerine drops, circus peanuts, stuff like that. But at True Treats, there are also older and less familiar sweets: beet sugar crystals, World War I ration bars, medicinal hard candies. In fact, the oldest products on the shelves come from thousands of years ago, like something called pastelli, which looks like peanut brittle, but with sesame seeds. Susan says Homer describes it in The Iliad as a honey and sesame pie.

This is a researcher’s approach to candy. In another life, Susan worked under the Clinton and Bush White Houses on communication initiatives. And before that, she was an academic in Massachusetts.

Susan: I’m from Boston. Who would know?

Kelly: But that was before she came down to West Virginia and fell in love with the history of candy. She’s even written a book on the subject called Sweet as Sin: The Unwrapped Story of How Candy Became America’s Favorite Pleasure. And she arranges the shop in a very specific way.

Susan: You can start first in history and walk chronologically all the way through the various time periods of candy. The history’s on the label, and what’s really important is that people get an experience of the history of candy because it’s never what they expect.

Kelly: Susan says the way to experience the shop is to walk through, pick out things that interest you, then go sit down in the front of the shop and eat your way through history.

Susan: Often whole families or groups of people sitting around little tables, sampling everything and reading the labels. And if I’m there, I’ll come over, or one of my employees who knows the stories will come over, and we’ll tell them a little bit more about it.

Kelly: There are hundreds of different candies and teas and other sweets in the shop and on their website. So a lot to choose from. But to give you a little sample, let’s just take a quick walk through the timeline of candy history in chronological order.

The oldest section comes first. You’ve got the sesame brittle candies from The Iliad, but also a lot of ingredients native to the Americas. There are candies made with maple sugar. Native Americans were processing maple sap into sugars and sweets long before the Europeans arrived. And…

Susan: … the cacao nib, which is really important because that comes from Mesoamerica and the Native Americans.

Kelly: Chocolate really took off in colonial America, specifically as a hot beverage. In other words, hot chocolate. People would mix it into milk or cream and grate spices on top. Martha Washington made hers out of steeped cacao shells. Susan says that as the Revolutionary War got underway, the drink became political.

Susan: Chocolate was actually a vehicle during the American Revolution in their boycotting of teas, of the British tea, and they needed alternatives. And one of the alternatives was chocolate, and they really pushed, “Everybody’s got to have chocolate. They’ve got to drink that.”

Kelly: In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson even declared that chocolate would one day become a more popular drink than coffee or tea in the U.S. It didn’t happen, but not a bad idea.

Moving on to the 1800s, the Civil War is coming. An intriguing story that pops out from this section also has to do with boycotts. As the country became more and more divided over slavery, people looked for ways to strike at the system economically.

Susan: What happened with the abolitionists is they looked for a number of ways to boycott the economy of slavery, by taking away the produce or finding alternatives to the produce that were funding slavery through its sales, and obviously cane sugar was a big one. So what they did instead was they found alternatives and they promoted those.

Kelly: Groups called “free produce societies” formed and promoted alternatives to cane sugar like honey, corn syrup, and syrup made from a grain called sorghum. The most interesting-looking alternative can be found at True Treats. It comes in a small glass jar and looks almost like golden raisins: these little orange pink crystals.

Susan: Beet sugar! So today, a huge amount of the sugar that we have is actually beet sugar, and that goes in the candy.

Kelly: Moving on to the early 1900s, things start to look a little more recognizable. We start to see candies wrapped up with brand names as industrialization comes to the candy world.

Susan: But at that point you would have things called cough drops, the Pine Brothers cough drops, the Smith Brothers cough drops. Is it a medicine or is it a candy? Well, yes, both, right? And today when we take these Halls or these various medicines that have been around for a really long time, what you’re getting is essentially a candy. So why worry about it, you know, but there was that crossover.

Kelly: There are also some interesting chocolate bars, including some brands that are new to me, like one called Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. It looks a little like a Payday, but it’s made of peanuts and molasses. This one actually has a military connection.

Susan: During World War I, people were making candy bars, and they were called “stuffed chocolate,” but they were basically candy bars that didn’t just have chocolate but had nuts and caramel. And they wound up being in one of the first rations during the First World War.

So they sent Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews and a couple others. They sent it off to the World War I soldiers.They came back saying, “I love these candy bars. These are so great.”

Kelly: Including these chocolate bars in rations wasn’t just for a morale boost. It was meant to be a quick source of energy: high fat, high calorie, easy to eat. And chocolate bars continued to be known for that after the war was over.

Susan: During the Depression, they were marketed as an inexpensive meal in a bar. That’s how they marketed them.

Kelly: Fun fact: The Mr. Goodbar was one of these. It was created by the Hershey Company in 1925 and advertised as a tasty lunch.

By this time, we’re coming back around to the modern age or close to it. This is when we get into the retro candy, the kind of stuff you see at the Five and Dime or in your parents’ or grandparents’ candy dishes: Malted milk balls, rock candy, bubble gum cigarettes (you really don’t see those anymore).

This section, Susan says, is a crowd favorite.

Susan: What they really, really love is when they read the story of the retro candy. And what they do with that, and what they do with eating that is they talk about their grandparents, and they talk about where they lived, and they talk about the candy store on the corner.

Kelly: For Susan, this is what the store is all about: Learning about the past in a new and unusual way.

Susan: It’s a visceral experience of history. When you eat the candies, you know where they’re from, when they’re from, a little bit about the role they played, and then you get to be able to smell, taste, and enjoy it, and get more if you want, you know, it’s that kind of experience.

Kelly: And maybe the next time you have a candy bar, you’ll think about World War I.

True Treats is open daily. They also have an extensive website if you are craving Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews or some of the other interesting sweets we talked about on today’s show.

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 Johanna Mayer. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.

The first time it happened, my father had been dead for one week.

My mother and I were in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, in April, trying to do something with ourselves. We were walking an overlook with long views across the ridgelines when something appeared in the air in front of us. Not in a photograph. Not on a screen. In the air. A shaft of colored light — blues and greens — moving as we moved, present in a way that had no business being there on a clear afternoon with no rain, no prism, no explanation.

My mother raised her camera toward it. I have that photograph. She is standing at the stone wall, back to me, pointing her camera at something that should not be there. She saw it too. We both did, with our own eyes. And then after a few minutes it was gone. We hadn’t changed anything. It just left.

I know what some people will say. Lens smudge. Camera artifact. But you can’t smudge a lens you’re not holding. You can’t artifact something two people are watching with their naked eyes in open air. And you can’t explain why it disappeared without anyone touching anything. And if it was only a smudge on my lens — why is my mother up there separately photographing it?

I’m a journalist. I spent decades at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. I don’t report things I can’t stand behind.

This is what I can stand behind: Every April since my father died, around the anniversary, it comes back. Different states. Different phones. Different landscapes. Always April. Always a few minutes. Always gone the same way it came — without explanation, without asking permission, without saying goodbye.

I’ve stopped trying to explain it. I’ve started just showing up.

My parents prided themselves on taking us everywhere. Every great trip, every wonder — their children came too. Some parents, my father said, used vacations to take a break from their kids. They never wanted to go anywhere without us.

When I was eight years old, they took me to Stonehenge.

My father stood at those ancient stones and said something I have carried my whole life: I have read about this place in books all my life. I have imagined it. I have dreamt of coming here. Now I’m 37 and I’m here. Then he looked at me. You are learning of this place for the first time in person. When you read about it at school, you’ll say: I’ve been there.

Then he said: I wonder who is the richer?

He meant it as a real question. He had spent a lifetime reading about this place, imagining it, longing toward it. He arrived at 37 carrying all of that. I arrived at eight carrying nothing — no context, no anticipation, no idea what I was standing in. But when I sat in a classroom years later and opened a book to Stonehenge, I would not be meeting it for the first time. I would be recognizing it. Every fact would attach itself to something I had already felt with my own body. He had the knowledge first, then the place. I would have the place first, then the knowledge.

I have thought about that question my entire adult life. I am still thinking about it.

This morning I got up before dawn to drive to a field in Nebraska.

Carhenge sits outside Alliance, in the sandhills, and it is exactly what it sounds like: a full-scale recreation of Stonehenge built from 38 vintage American cars, painted grey, hoods buried in the earth, chassis pointing skyward, some with other cars welded across them as lintels. It is absurd. It is also, at sunrise, genuinely and inexplicably beautiful.

There was no one else there. Just me and 38 cars and the Nebraska sky beginning to change.

I want to slow down here, because this is the part that requires slowing down.

The cars are grey. At the moment I arrived, in the blue-dark just before dawn, they were silhouettes — massive, strange, prehistoric-feeling against the pale Nebraska sky. Then the sun began to rise.

What happened over the next 90 minutes is the reason I stayed 90 minutes.

The light did not simply illuminate Carhenge. It transformed it, repeatedly, in real time. The grey turned amber. The shadows stretched long and then longer across the frost-pale grass. The sun cracked the horizon and poured through the gaps between the sculptures in long flat rays. Then it climbed and the quality changed again — softer, more golden, the rust beneath the grey paint catching fire. Every twenty minutes I thought: I have now seen Carhenge. Every twenty minutes the light shifted and I was seeing something new.

Most people stop for ten minutes, take a photo, and drive on. I understand this. I have done this. But Carhenge is not a ten-minute place. Carhenge is a place that keeps becoming something else, and if you leave before it's done with you, you have not actually been there.

I stayed. And because I stayed, I was there when the light came.

In the photographs — twenty of them, taken as I moved around the site — there is a soft green circle sitting low in the frame, in the frost-covered grass. Not the sun. Not a reflection. A round, quiet, luminous presence at the bottom of the image, consistent across every shot no matter where I moved. After about ten minutes it was gone. I hadn’t changed anything. It just left.

The same way it left in Tennessee. The same way it always leaves.

Standing in that field, I did what anyone does. I pulled out my phone and looked up what I was actually standing in.

Carhenge was built in 1987 by a man named Jim Reinders. He gathered his family on the Nebraska homestead where he had grown up. Together they painted 38 cars grey and arranged them in precise correspondence to the original Stonehenge — same dimensions, same orientation, same proportions. They unveiled it at the summer solstice.

He built it as a memorial to his father.

I read this sentence standing in the frost in Nebraska with the sunrise still happening around me, five years after my father died, on the anniversary of his death, at a stone circle made of American cars, with a green circle of light in my last twenty photographs that was now quietly gone.

There are moments where you stop trying to make meaning and simply stand inside it.

This was one of those moments.

My father would have had a lot to say about Carhenge. He would have appreciated the audacity of it — one man’s decision to take one of the most ancient monuments in the Western world and rebuild it in the Nebraska sandhills out of 1962 Plymouths. He would have appreciated that Jim Reinders didn’t ask anyone’s permission, didn’t wait for funding, just gathered his family and built the thing. He would have stood here a long time.

He would have wondered who was the richer — the people who made the pilgrimage to the original, surrounded by thousands of other seekers, or the people who made a different kind of pilgrimage, driving through the Nebraska sandhills before dawn and arriving to find the whole place entirely to themselves. No crowd. No noise. Just the light, and the cars, and the frost, and the silence of something ancient — or something built to feel that way — with no one else there to witness it.

I think about that question differently now than I did at eight years old. I think maybe the answer is: the people who stay long enough to let the light change.

I don’t think he would have come this morning without it.

But the light was there. And so was I.

And for about ten minutes, in the frost-covered grass of a Nebraska field, at a circle of cars built for a father by his son, so was he.

Where are you?

Two friends texted, separately, within an hour of each other.

Western Nebraska, I said.

So you're in the middle of nowhere, both of them wrote back.

I really paused.

I had flown into Denver and taken a nine-seater plane to Alliance: a tiny plane, a tiny airport, a tiny place. And just before the texts came in, I had been looking at the Atlas Obscura map and counted eight other places within a ninety-minute drive that I wanted to go to. I was bummed that I didn't have time to stay.

So I texted my friends back: No, I'm in the middle of somewhere.

One week later I was in the northwest corner of Alabama, where the Tennessee River bends, and I told that story to my Atlas Obscura colleagues on the first morning of our company offsite in Florence. Most of them had never been to Alabama before.

We had built the trip around a corner of the state most travelers don't have on their default map. Helen Keller's birthplace at Ivy Green in Tuscumbia. FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, where Aretha Franklin recorded "I Never Loved a Man" in a single day in 1967. Lunch under a literal rock overhang at the Rattlesnake Saloon. And after dark, in the rain, Dismals Canyon — one of the few places on earth where you can see Dismalites, the bioluminescent larvae that turn cave walls into a green-starred sky. Almost every place on the itinerary was already on the AO map.

What happened is hard to put into a recap, so I'll skip the recap. What I want to tell you is what kept happening around the places.

At Ivy Green, our guide Keller Johnson-Thompson — Helen Keller's great-grand-niece — talked about Helen for thirty straight minutes, and Alecia Dalessio told me afterward she could have listened for another thirty. Dan Sobo bought bookmarks for his daughters with a Helen Keller quote printed on them — the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart — and quoted the line back to all of us the next morning.

At Dismals Canyon, our guide Kevin Cheek — Dismals Canyon's chief operating officer — led us through the woods in total darkness, to a slot in the rock so narrow we squeezed through one at a time, holding hands. Above us, the glowworms hung like a green galaxy. Before we entered, Kevin asked the fairies for permission. I'm not sure if he was joking. I don't think it matters.

Jacquelyn Blackwell is from Florence. She has been there a hundred times. She saw her own town through fourteen pairs of new eyes and discovered things she'd never done before. Holyn Thigpen called her parents from the airport on the way home and told them everything. Her parents are now planning the same itinerary. Sam O'Brien started thinking out loud about her own quest. Daniel McDermon left, in his words, "almost giddy." Sara Ewell pointed out that the conversations we had on the buses and over slow lunches couldn't have happened on Zoom — and probably wouldn't have happened at all.

Rachel Carson, in her 1965 book, The Sense of Wonder, argued that children meet the world with a freshness adults train themselves out of, and that the way to recover it is to find a companion. Not a teacher. A companion — someone who hasn't lost the habit of asking what's that? The companion, she said, only needs to keep asking.

That's what we do at Atlas Obscura. That's what Kevin did with us at Dismals Canyon. That's what Keller did. That's what Jacquelyn did for all of us in her own hometown. And that is what kept happening on the bus rides, where someone who had stood next to you ten minutes ago at a glowworm cave was now telling you a story about their own family. An infectious passion for wonder.

Two friends told me, separately, that I was in the middle of nowhere. They were operating on the ordinary map. We reject the ordinary map. There is no middle of nowhere — there is only the middle of somewhere. If you think otherwise, you just need to put on your wonder lens. The 50-state quest is, at its heart, an argument for using that lens. So is the Atlas Obscura map. So was Florence, Alabama, last week, with fourteen people who had never been there.

Forty-six states down. Four to go. Idaho, Iowa, Washington, Alaska.

- Louise

The full Carhenge dispatch from Nebraska is coming in my next post. Sign up for our daily newsletter here to be sure you don't miss it.

Since the early 1920s, when word first spread of a highway that would run from Chicago to Los Angeles, Route 66 has defined the American dream—symbolizing the country's sense of freedom, ingenuity, and continuous transformation. Join us as we drive the "Mother Road" from start to finish, exploring everything from outsider art to indigenous history.

Episode 1: The Mother Road

We start our journey in Chicago, Illinois and unravel how the Mother Road came to be, hitting up a number of classic Route 66 roadside attractions along the way: Lou Mitchell’s, The Route 66 Hall of Fame, The Route 66 Experience, and Springfield, Illinois’ International Route 66 Mother Road Festival.

Episode 2: The Giants of Route 66

Among the many roadside attractions you’ll find on your Route 66 journey, the “Muffler Men” or “Giants” of the Route are among the most beloved. With “3D Advertising,” Route 66’s iconic sentinels sold everything from tires to hot dogs. We explore a number of famous Giants in Illinois, including those at the American Giants Museum.

Episode 3: Quirk & Kitsch on 66

Quirky roadside attractions add a whimsical twist to any road trip, and Route 66 has a treasure trove of them. In Illinois, we explore an old prison built by its prisoners, a classic road side drive-in serving up corn dogs (that aren’t really corn dogs), and load up on souvenirs at an antiques mall.

Episode 4: It's Electric

We cross from Illinois into Missouri, where we discover the charm of the Show-Me State. For the next 300 miles, we cross Missouri from east to west, learning just how this state gave Route 66 the nickname “the Electric Highway.”

Episode 5: Arts & Craftsmen of the Route

Route 66 has inspired countless songs, provided an audience for artworks large and small, and spun a number of tales over the years. We spend some time appreciating these—in some cases, very unusual—creative endeavors as we drive through Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Episode 6: New Mexico’s Retribution Road

Crossing into New Mexico, we drive the original alignment of Route 66 up to Sante Fe and then down to Albuquerque. The original alignment was changed in 1937 and became known as The Retribution Road. Why? Join us to find out!

Episode 7: Cultural Crossroads in New Mexico

New Mexico is home to 23 indigenous tribes, and relics of the Old West dot the landscape. We dig into the state's rich cultural heritage as we make our way west from Albuquerque.

Episode 8: Arizona & The Whimsical West

In Arizona, we uncover the truth behind the mysterious black and yellow jackrabbit signs, drive through the Jurassic past, and even get inspired by a big green tiki head. If your motto is “for the plot!” you're sure to love the Copper State.

Episode 9: Stay to Play

Accommodations are an important part of any road trip, and Route 66 has some of the most iconic stays in America. From retro campers to palatial hotels, if you’re looking for memorable getaways on your epic American adventure, we've got you covered.

Episode 10: Relics of the Wild West

Bandits, cowboys, and lawlessness were romanticized in post-Civil War America, enticing many to venture to the Wild West. At the center of this expanse was Arizona Territory, known for its ruthlessness but also its sense of freedom, opportunity, and discovery.

Episode 11: The Nature of Route 66

Mother Nature, while not the central hero of the Mother Road's story, has always been a supporting character. Admittedly, we’re going to be somewhat liberal in how we define “influenced by nature” but, hey, it’s Route 66, baby. And we’re truckin’ along through California on our last few hundred miles.

Episode 12: Old West Meets Old Hollywood

Throughout our journey on Historic Route 66, you may have noticed another mode of transportation running parallel to us—yep, that’s right, the railroad. The symbolism is hard to miss: two modes of transportation running side-by-side, one representing the past and one representing the future. Driving through California, we see where the Old West meets Old Hollywood; the intersection of the former Western Frontier and a Glamorous Free Future.

Episode 13: The End of the Route

This is it gang. The end of the road. The final stretch. We're nearing the end of our adventures on Historic Route 66, but there’s still more to explore as we roll into our final destination. Come along as we make a pit stop in Rancho Cucamonga and get our game on in Pasadena before exploring our final destination: Los Angeles!

Kelly McEvers: Gina Geffrard has a very specific memory about the first time she encountered the place we’re talking about today.

Gina Geffrard: In 2019, I filmed an episode of House Hunters. And one of the houses on the show is across the street from the gardens. I remember talking to the producers of the show, asking what is across the street. And they didn’t really know, so we did research and we found out it was Kenilworth Park.

Amanda McGowan: You were on House Hunters?

Kelly: That’s our producer, Amanda, following up on the most important detail here.

Gina: I love that that’s the follow up. But yeah, it’s been a while now. I filmed in 2019 and it aired in 2020, but it was a really fun experience.

Kelly: Gina was on House Hunters looking to buy in Washington, D.C.—specifically in the Kenilworth neighborhood, which is northeast of downtown along the Anacostia River. The neighborhood had this park that got Gina’s attention. It had lots of trails. It was near the river. So pretty soon after moving in, Gina would go running and biking there.

It seemed like a normal park, until she started exploring.

Gina: I didn’t realize what I was looking at when I first saw or entered the gardens. And even many more times after, I still didn’t realize where I was.

Kelly: One day, Gina saw this gravel path ...

Gina: … and to the left and to your right are more trees. Maybe there’s some flowers growing on the ground, a lot of green grass, and then eventually you pass a second set of gates. And then when you walk through that second gate, in front of you is just a huge, vast number of ponds.

If you come in in the summer, especially June and July, and even in August, you’ll see these ponds filled with water lilies and lotuses, and it’s a sight to behold.

Kelly: This is Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens: a sort of secret oasis in Washington, D.C. right next to a much larger urban park; so people often miss it.

Today, by the way, Gina is not just a fan of the place. She’s actually the interim executive director for the Friends of Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. That’s an organization that cares for the park alongside the National Park Service.

Gina: One of the reasons why we’re a hidden gem is because we are hidden. Parks are pretty common in the city. The D.C. area actually has a large number of parks for the number of people that reside here, but you rarely see a garden, and you rarely see an aquatic garden; in fact, we’re the only aquatic garden that’s a national park in the country.

Kelly: I’m Kelly McEvers and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Washington.org. And today we’re going to a very unusual national park: a floating park, an oasis of ponds filled with lilies and lotuses. And we’re also going to dive into its backstory, which goes all the way back to a Civil War veteran and his daughter, who fought the federal government to protect her father’s legacy.

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.

Gina: We had some students come in last week for a field trip, and some chaperones—their parents—came and they didn’t know about the gardens. And when they walked through, the first thing they said was: “There’s a lake back here.” When the plants are not in bloom, it looks like a bunch of lakes.

Kelly: Here’s Gina Geffrard again.

Gina: When you want to see all these flowers and plants blooming, and birds and butterflies, the summer is the time to come. The lotuses are the star because they grow so tall. That’s really what you see when you come to the gardens, because it’s not just small little plants. There are these huge, beautiful flowers that bloom in a variety of colors.

Kelly: So how did the only aquatic garden national park come to be? It goes back to the Civil War and a veteran named Walter B. Shaw.

Walter was originally from a little island off the coast of Maine, but in 1863, he joined the Union Army and the following year, he saw some very intense fighting in Virginia. During the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, Walter got shot. Doctors were able to save his life, but they did have to partially amputate his right arm.

After the war, Walter stayed around Washington D.C. He actually completely relearned to write using his left hand, and he got a job working at the U.S. Treasury Department as a clerk. About a decade went by, and Walter and his wife saved up some money and bought a little plot of marshy land next to the Anacostia River. And something about this land inspired Walter because soon he started, as he called it, playing in the water.

Gina: He decided to dig a pond with one arm and planted these flowers, and they started blooming so lovingly. So much so, he dug more ponds with one arm. And the plants started to thrive some more. And he then created a business called W.B. Shaw Lily Company.

Kelly: At first, this was Walter’s side hustle, a hobby. He spent time perfecting his growing methods. One old newspaper article said he had trouble with turtles eating the roots of his plants, but over time, he built the business up. And in 1902, he started selling water lilies full time.

Walter shipped his lilies around D.C. and even further out to cities like New York and Philadelphia. The Waldorf Astoria Hotel was apparently a big customer.

You have to wonder how they would have mailed delicate plants like this in the days before refrigeration or two-day shipping. One article from the time revealed Walter’s method. He would cut the flowers first thing in the morning at 5 a.m., tightly wrap each one in thin sheets of lead, and then in wax paper, and supposedly this way they could stand up to a week of travel. When they arrived at their destinations and were put in water, they would come back to life.

While Walter was out digging his ponds and caring for his lilies, he had a frequent companion: his daughter, Helen. She was about 5 years old when they moved to the marsh, and throughout her childhood, she went out and helped her father dig his lily ponds, learning all about the plants and the business.

As a young woman, Helen got married and had a child, but tragically, both her daughter and her husband died within a few years of each other. After that, Helen started running the family business.

Gina: When Helen Shaw took it over, it really boomed. Helen started building structures on the property, so the greenhouses you’ve seen are from the time when she owned the business, including the visitor center, which is original, and two of the hothouses, which are original.

Kelly: And Helen expanded the gardens from nine ponds to 42. She sourced new lilies from all over the world, eventually selling 3,000 to 5,000 lilies every day. She was even the first woman in D.C. to hold a commercial driver’s license, which she used to deliver flowers.

Gina: And then she also opened up the gardens to the public. So this is when we have not just the selling of the plants and the flowers, but people from the public coming to see this beautiful place that they created.

This was the 1930s, right? So if you can imagine at that time, there were still many challenges for women in America. And so for her to not only run a business, but to have the business thrive and also fight the government for it. She fought the government for her garden. I mean, she was pretty fierce.

Kelly: So let’s talk about Helen versus the federal government. In the late 1930s, the government decided they wanted to own more land along the Anacostia River because they wanted to expand public riverfront green space and also do this massive dredging project of the river’s mud flats as a way to combat mosquitoes and malaria. All of this would have destroyed the aquatic gardens.

Helen spent nearly 20 years in a legal battle over the garden’s future.

Gina: We do have writings from Helen Shaw Fowler and her attorney at the time, kind of going back and forth. He advised her to sell. She did not want to. Ultimately she did. The government purchased the land from Helen—begrudgingly on her part—and so Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens has been owned by the National Park Service since.

Kelly: In the end, though, the government did not end up tearing up the gardens like they’d originally planned. Instead, they turned it into a national park.

Gina: And we probably could thank Helen for saving the gardens by opening them up to visitors, because people then knew what was there. It could be fair to say that had it remained a private business, and people didn’t know about it, it could probably be something completely entirely different today.

Kelly: So then what happens when a neighborhood garden becomes a national park? As the Shaw Lily Company, the park was part of daily life in the area, a place of recreation, a place of work. But after it became a national park in 1938, the neighborhood around it started changing.

Gina: Eventually the Kenilworth neighborhood over the decades becomes a predominantly Black community. And because it’s a national park site, I believe this is when they start building the fences that are currently around the gardens for a variety of reasons. And the fences, they kind of bring some tension in the community.

Kelly: And there was more going on next door. In the early 1940s, the federally appointed D.C. government made a piece of land right next to the aquatic gardens into a giant landfill where trash was openly burned. The landfill stayed open until 1970, and environmental cleanup only began in the late 1990s. But throughout all these changes, the gardens were still meaningful to people in the community.

Gina: We’ve heard from many residents of the Kenilworth neighborhood, of the Eastland Gardens neighborhood, of the Parkside neighborhood. Really fun stories from the 60s and the 70s, when they used to sneak into the gardens in the wintertime because the ponds would freeze and they would ice skate around over the ponds.

Hearing those stories is really fun. And the gardens do mean a lot to the people in the neighborhood, but sometimes the relationship is not what it should be.

Kelly: Locals worked hard to connect the gardens with the community, like Walter McDowney, also known as “Ranger Mack”: a park ranger who grew up across the street. He created a junior ranger program to bring neighborhood kids into the gardens. Still, Gina says that by the early 2000s, most visitors to the gardens were from out of town. This was around the time the Friends of the Aquatic Gardens formed.

Gina: So a bunch of volunteers who loved gardening, who loved plants, who loved the park, got together and informally started Friends of Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. And as the nonprofit grew, it not only helped build volunteerism, but it helped to bridge the relationship between the National Park Service and the community—and until this day, we’ve been doing the same thing.

Kelly: Today, there are many ways to enjoy the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Photographers and birders love it. There are fitness classes, so you can do yoga and Pilates among the lilies. And just last year, the Friends piloted a program to keep the park open late in the summer.

Gina: So for a very long time, the park hours were 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. So you can imagine if you were working, you really never got to go to the gardens. Last year, the Friends group helped to pay to staff the gardens so we could be open until 8 p.m.

Kelly: The biggest event of the year is in July, the Lotus and Water Lily Festival, which draws thousands of people every year.

It’s been nearly 150 years since Walter B. Shaw dug his first lily pond. And today, the gardens he left behind are as beautiful as any national park, but also part of people’s regular daily lives. Gina says she’s actually had a chance to meet one of Shaw’s descendants and get his take on what the park is like today.

Gina: He loves the gardens. He loves the gardens, and I have asked him like, what would your great, great grandfather think about this? And he’s just like, “Well he would be overjoyed,” you know? A lot of people, when they start a business, even if they have the wildest dreams, you never really know what could happen. I’m pretty sure that Walter B. Shaw, when he started a hobby, did not think there would be a 20,000-person festival occurring, just celebrating this garden, celebrating his creation. I hope we’re doing a good job in making them and their ancestors proud.

Kelly: Entry to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens is free and does not require an entrance pass. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, Washington, D.C. is of course right at the center. Where else can you walk to brunch through America’s oldest urban national park or enjoy a nightcap with a few of our nation’s monuments? Check out Washington.org to plan your D.C. getaway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Leigh Myers’ signature cookies are crispy on the edges, tender in the center, and jazzed up with spicy nuts.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cup (200 grams) all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

16 tablespoons (228 grams) unsalted butter, softened

1 cup (188 grams) packed brown sugar

1/2 cup (118 grams) granulated sugar

2 large eggs, at room temperature

4 tablespoons heavy cream

4 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

3 cups (216 grams) old-fashioned rolled oats

2 cups (278 grams) semi-sweet chocolate chips

1 cup (126 grams) cayenne-pepper-toasted, chopped pecans**

**toast pecans:
 1 cup chopped pecans,
 1 teaspoon ground cayenne, 1 tablespoon melted butter

Directions

Step 1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Toss the
pecans, cayenne, and butter together. Spread out on the baking sheet and bake for 10
minutes. Let the nuts cool before using.

Step 2. Keep oven at 350 and line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Step 3. Whisk the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon in a small bowl. Whisk it good.
Mix the butter and both sugars in a large bowl with a wooden spoon until it’s creamy
and screaming for mercy. Beat in the egg until incorporated, then stir in the cream and
vanilla.

Step 4. Add the flour mixture and gently stir until no traces of flour remain. Add the
oats, chocolate chips and nuts, folding them in until evenly distributed. Loosely scoop a
rounded ball of dough - I use a 2 tbsp ice cream scoop - and drop onto prepared sheet,
spacing your balls 2 inches apart.

Step 5. Bake, 1 sheet at a time, until golden brown, 12 to 14 minutes. Cool on the sheet
for 1 minute, then transfer cookies to wire rack to cool completely.

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

Joan Weed found this shortcake recipe on the back of a magazine and decided to make it her own. While the original recipe was for a traditional layer cake, Weed decided to take a more biscuit-based approach (with delicious results).

Ingredients:

3 cups sifted flour

4-1/2 tsp baking powder 

1tsp salt 

1/3 cup sugar

3/4 cup shortening (butter)

2 eggs

2/3 cup milk (about)

2 tbsp melted butter

2 qts strawberries 

1 cup heavy cream

Directions: 

Sift dry ingredients, then cut in shortening.

Add eggs and enough milk to moisten dry ingredients.

Drop 1/4 cups of dough on greased baking sheet 2” apart till dough is used up. 

Bake at 425 for 20 mins or until nicely browned on top.

Clean, slice and sweeten berries while biscuits bake.

After cooling some, split or crumble biscuits.

Spoon berries over top. Top with whipped cream.

The biscuits freeze well and also make for a great treat on their own!

Though Cincinnati is best known for breweries, another effervescent beverage has a long history in the Queen City: the nectar soda.

Home to the oldest pharmacy college in the U.S. west of the Alleghenies, the Eclectic Medical Institute (1845-1952), and Lloyd Brothers Pharmacists, Cincinnati was long on the forefront of the pharmaceutical industry. The city had a number of apothecaries with soda fountains, as well as confectioners serving countless carbonated concoctions—some claiming to cure a variety of ailments, and others simply providing customers with something sweet and refreshing to drink.

Enter the nectar soda. The flavor is a combination of vanilla and bitter almond, and the drink is pastel pink in color—a nod to the hue of almond flowers, according to Dann Woellert, a Cincinnati food historian, etymologist, and the author of Cincinnati Candy: A Sweet History. Nicknamed the “drink of the gods,” the bitter almond flavor of nectar soda balances out what would otherwise be overly sweet vanilla, creating an addictive taste that grows on you with each sip. 

Nectar sodas have been served in Cincinnati since at least the late 1870s, though, like many iconic foods and beverages, its precise origins are murky. The only other U.S. city to embrace nectar sodas was New Orleans, but unlike Cincinnati, the tradition fizzled out in the Big Easy in the mid-20th century. Plus, Woellert says that the Queen City popularized them first. “They were served in Cincinnati nearly a decade before New Orleans,” he says.

While the Cincinnati nectar soda has multiple origin stories, each crediting a different pharmacist or confectioner, Woellert has concluded that John Mullane created the flavor after traveling to Quebec City to learn the art of confectionery from a prominent Canadian candymaker. He began serving nectar sodas in his confectionery shop in downtown Cincinnati in the late 1870s.

So, why did the nectar soda end up in Cincinnati and New Orleans, of all places? Wollert suspects that the bitter almond and vanilla flavor was used by the French Acadians who settled in both Quebec City and New Orleans.

Though nectar sodas aren’t as common as they were in the early 20th century, when they could be found at countless confectioneries and pharmacy soda fountains across Cincinnati, they’re still served at establishments throughout the city and the surrounding area. Nectar sodas have been on the menu at ice cream and chocolate shop Aglamesis Brothers since it opened in Cincinnati in 1908, if not shortly thereafter. That’s according to company president and CEO Randy Young, who is also a third-generation family member. 

It’s unclear when nectar sodas were added to the menu at Graeter’s, a Cincinnati ice cream and chocolate shop that opened in 1870 and now has locations throughout the city and the Midwest, but Chip Graeter, chief of retail operations and a fourth-generation family member, says that they were especially popular throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

In a January 28, 1947 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Tom Moore, the head of the soda department at Dow Drug Store—which operated 32 soda fountains throughout the metropolitan area at that time—said that “nectar is one of the most popular flavors in all of their stores, and has been for many years.” Five years prior, Dow ran an ad in the same newspaper which read: “Be glad you live in Cincinnati, the only place in the country where you can enjoy a Dow double-dip nectar soda.”

Originally, nectar syrup was made by combining half-and-half or milk with water, bitter almond extract, vanilla extract and red food coloring. While Aglamesis eventually switched to a dairy-free shelf-stable syrup, Graeter's recipe has never changed—it still contains milk and needs to be refrigerated. 

Both Aglamesis and Graeter’s make nectar soda by mixing nectar syrup with a dollop of whipped cream, adding a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream, then topping it off with some soda water and more whipped cream.

Though Young says that nectar sodas are most popular with older adults, they’re also a hit with members of younger generations who try them. “People who grew up with them still love them today,” Graeter says. “We still make them in all of our stores, but they're not nearly as popular today as they once were, simply because milkshakes and smoothies have taken over.”  

According to Young, there is a commercially available descendant of the nectar soda. “Commercial soda companies like Barqs and others came out with their version of cream soda—a bright pink soda—which got its flavoring from nectar soda,” he explains.