Hey everybody. Welcome to today's episode of Atlas Obscura. And today we're going to do something that we once in a while do, which is instead of telling you about a specific place, we try to answer a question from you, the audience, or sometimes it's posed to me by a colleague. We're going to talk about a pretty deep question, about travel, about life, and this question, the thing that sparked this episode was asked by my colleague

Camille. Camille asked me if there was anything on my travel list that I was saving

for a particular moment in my life.

And Camille, if you thought you could ask me a simple travel question

without it turning into some kind of vast existential quandary about growing old, you underestimate me.

I'm Dylan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

And in this Q&A episode, I'm talking about travel, aging, and to some very special people

who have been through it all and who maybe can tell me about what awaits.

Hello.

Hello.

That's after this. Thanks. Act 1, travels of the young and reckless.

So this question about what kind of travel you might save for a particular time in your life

got me thinking about where I am in my own life and travel journey.

You know as a kid my travel was pretty modest.

It meant road tripping around the Midwest, long endless road trips, but they definitely made an impression. When I was 12, we stopped at this

place in Wisconsin, the House on the Rock. It's got the world's largest indoor carousel.

It's got a squid fighting a whale the size of the Statue of Liberty, you know, and as a 12-year-old,

I thought if this is what's in the woods of Wisconsin, what else is in the world?

You know, that sort of set me on this journey gave me that very initial spark the travel

spark and after I graduated high school I you know gathered my meager savings and went on this crazy two-month journey through Europe

...