Hey, everybody. We are doing something a little bit different on the podcast today. We are

going to be answering one of your questions. And so we ask you submit questions for us.

And some of these questions are general travel questions. Some of them are personal questions.

Some of them are moral questions. So we are going to we're going to pull one out of the

bag and I am going to do my best to give you an answer. So let's see what we got. What was your

first exploration as a kid or as an adult? My first exploration is in quotes. Well, I think

there is a place there is a place actually sort of between when I was a kid and an adult. That

is one of the first places I ever really fell in love with. Gold metal flower. I'm Dylan

Therese and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange incredible and wondrous places.

More after this. I grew up in Minneapolis. It's such a cool city. It is just fun, vibrant place.

And there's this building in Minneapolis called Gold Metal Flower. And mills like this

defined Minneapolis in St. Paul for a while. They used to actually call they used to call the

city Mill City. And Gold Metal Flower at one time was the largest flower mill in the world. It

made enough bread or no flower to bake 12 million loaves of bread every day. But over time the

flower milling dwindled in the city. It was replaced with new economic sources like advertising and

the arts and and the mill started to shut down. I think it got shut down sometime in the 60s.

In the early 90s it suffered this huge fire. And though they kind of they propped it up to make

sure it wasn't going to fall over on anyone. It became this kind of gigantic ruin and it sat right

on the edge of the Mississippi River. And was this just massive kind of piece of a version of

Minneapolis that didn't really exist anymore? So cut to me in the late 90s. I am what you would have

called an alternative back then. I'm walking around. I got buster rhymes. Like give me some more is

is on my walkman. I am still listening to Nirvana even though it's like a little bit old at this

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