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Hey, everybody. It's Kelly McEvers, co-host of the show. So today is Saturday, and we don't usually

publish episodes on Saturdays, but for the next five weeks, to kick off the summer travel season,

we are doing a special series. We're calling it our weekend road trip series, where we bring you

stories of the strange, incredible, and wondrous places

right here in the United States that you can see from the road. We're going to start today on the

West Coast, and we will work our way all across the country to Washington, D.C. We've got some

pretty great stops along the way, everything from an iconic puppet theater

to a folk art museum in New Mexico, built by a very eccentric man, to an unusual telephone

in our nation's capital.

We'll start today in California in Sequoia and King's National Parks.

Here we go.

In the fall of 1891, some men went into the Sierra Nevada Mountains with a 20-foot blade.

And their goal was to slay a giant sequoia tree.

A tree that to most of the world was just a myth.

...