I'm in London.

Let's see, it's 4.30 in the morning, you can hear the birds chirping.

I'm going to meet my Uber to go to Wimbledon.

Wimbledon is the famous tennis tournament held in London every year.

Two weeks of tennis played on grass courts.

In tennis circles, Wimbledon is basically hallowed ground,

a pilgrimage site, because it's the oldest tennis tournament in the world.

But it's not that easy to get tickets.

There's a public lottery, which about 1 in 10 people reportedly win.

Another option is you can pay thousands of dollars per ticket.

Or the last option, you can stand in line. A very, very long line. It's

actually kind of a famous line that thousands of people join every day of the

tournament. Today, I'm one of those people.

My name is Emma Morgenstern and this is Atlas Obscura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we go to the Wimbledon Q, a place that's become a true tradition of the tournament.

It's filled with the possibility of getting into the most exclusive tennis tournament in the world and the potential for big time disappointment.

More after this. Ladies, gentlemen, those of you, keying up and the line. I'm a pretty big tennis fan. I grew up watching Venus and Serena Williams pretty much every year since I've lived in New York

I've gone to the US Open and it's become a life goal of mine to go to all four major tennis

tournaments around the world. So this summer I crossed one off my list. My husband Sam and I flew

from New York to London to go to Wimbledon. But like so many thousands of other

people we didn't have tickets so we knew we'd end up in the queue.

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