I'm Will Fulton, and this is thrilled us to exploit. Alright, alright, So, anytime you see the moon, if you draw a line from one tip of the crescent through the other tip of the crescent down to the horizon, no matter where you are in the northern hemisphere, no matter where the moon is in the sky, whether it's day or night, where that line intersects the horizon is too south. Joshua four is one of the founders of Atlas Obscura because so if you just follow that line straight out of the horizon, that's south over there. So we're bad to be kind of like hetted south. Yeah, you'll never look at the moon in the same way. Throw away my GPS, right, who needs it. Atlas Obscura is a travel company, part editorial endeavor, part user generated platform. They have I R L guided trips around the world, books, and yes, a podcast. They excel at making sure you never look at the world around you in the same way ever again, or in the case of the moon, even things orbiting the world. It was really like a folder of places in a desk drawer. We launched it as a website where anybody could share their knowledge of hidden wonders around them. Once we were very clear on what our mission was, which is to inspire a sense of wonder about this incredible world we all share, then it became clear there were so many different things that we could and should do to realize that mission. And we started doing, you know, real world experiences in different cities all over the country where where we had community members. We started doing, Oh ship, I gotta get off here. Yeah, oh god, oh god, it's okay, We're gonna test this car. Oh god, that was very skillful. Uh sorry, skillful, I'm serious. Uh yeah, m hm, okay. So where were we? So we just went through four lanes of traffic and just missing three cars. Yeah, my pulse is skilling. So why was I riding shotgun in the land Rover on the Jersey Turnpike on a surprisingly warm afternoon in mid November. Well, we were on route to a defunct fluorescent zinc mine in the middle of the Garden State. We got here by test driving Atlas Obscure, as new app which aims to make discovering cool stuff around you wherever you are much easier and on our side, Thrillist has long believed that you don't need to go halfway around the world to find experiences worth having, and that quote unquote travel can happen in your own proverbial backyard. This is a sentiment the team at Atlas definitely agrees with. To my mind, travel media has been like fairly broken for a really long time. I'm Dylan Thurrists and I am the co founder and creative director at Atlas Obscura. It has this tendency, like like media in general, to kind of fall into line telling the same stories over and over again, whether it's something as kind of classic as you know, romantic Paris, Eiffel Tower, or something a little newer like to Loom, you know, like that's the spot you got, that's where all the cool kids are hanging out. And the funny thing is is that when that happens, often the result is not a very good experience for the traveler or the place right the place gets kind of overloaded. Too many people show up, Everyone's chasing the same imagined experience, which then gets farther and farther away from the real experience. The whole kind of idea of Alice Obscura is if you can kind of spread out that impact and then also sort of point out that you don't actually even need to get on a plane to do it, if you're open to kind of creating new myths, new ideas about something that's an hour away from you but is still really interesting. That real experience is a really good travel experience, and that's like what we're always chasing and we're trying to give to people. The first stop we found on the Atlas app was a diner on the side of a highway in Jersey City, which was also an exhibition at the nineteen nine World's Fair. The Dinner of the Future was round, compact, and glistening. One employee was able to take order, skill drinks, and cook the customers orders without having to take more than a few steps. It was an early example of modern fast food. Right this pre dates McDonald's. Wow, Okay, I wonder what they were thinking, like, like, the Dinner of the Future is how they thought were gonna be eating. I guess, but we kind of are lot of ways, Like right, look at fast food restaurants, white Man, it does look like an aluminum UFO being partially swallowed by a brick building, and inside it smells like frying onions. And at this time of day, really strong coffee. Even now people are still milling around inside looking to grab a Burger's. Yeah. I used to work at Jersey Years. You go and you go on the path train, Yeah, to the shitty and beat around be like kill at morning? Do you come here? So when this guy, a local tow truck driver, learned about what we were doing, going around the state finding odd points of interest, he got really into it. We abandoned Turnpike in Pennsylvania. You know what I like to go because that stuff to test lit like where like all island And one employee was a town. Yeah, I don't know. Have you ever been out to Manto? I've never been a hero? Looked at him, Wait, what is that? They actually had battles of sixteen inch guns, that's the biggest, were on a battleship. Said, do you know about Atlas? Do you know about Atlas Obscura. It's a website. It's just like well stuff like that. You can check it out. You might like it. Okay, So what was amazing in there? The driver? Yeah, he had all of those places that he really loved that. He was just like firing off and they were all in the atlice Obscura database. So that was really cool, Like, is like he never heard of Atlas Obscure, right, And ultimately, what Atlas Oacure is trying to do is give people the tools to we have a life of curiosity and one that is seeking out wonder and obviously that guy does a fair amount of that on his own, Alice, I know, I wish you would have been a little bit more exciting when he heard it that there's like, oh, wembid and dedicated to this pursuit. I'm just upset that I didn't try to pitch thrill us to him, like and hey, if you want somewhere to eat on the road, you know. So now we're onto the next stop in Montclair, New Jersey, to look at a house. That's a good look at house. It's very I like, wouldn't notice anything, excuse So it's it's in the middle of these like older looking Victorian houses, right, and it's a little boxy and a little pre fab um. I don't think to live in a hast to people try fin like, oh, that's not someways I thought it was gonna be. If you were just driving by this house, gray boxy, two stories and looking just slightly out of place. You might do a double take and then just forget about it. You wouldn't know it was. The house made totally out of concrete, with each level poured into a giant mold, including features like the stairs in the fireplace. It was a failed experiment in futuristic architecture by New Jersey's own Thomas Edison. Do you think people ever knocked on the doors? And I'm not suggesting we do that that would be weird, but I'm sure they must and I'm sure they hate it. Yeah, do you want to try? Okay, let's do it. What's the worst thing that happens? They say, now, right, Yeah, we knocked? A woman answered, and very graciously she agreed to talk to us. Of course, this has happened before. Yes, people do come here a lot, I have. It's mostly people who are interested in either Thomas Edison or a concrete And as an added bonus, she's an architect herself, so she was able to explain why this model of home building didn't exactly catch on the way they were planning on building it. Some of it failed, not all of their original ideas were they thought they're going to do it with the single pour from the talk to the bottom, but they ended up having to do it in different levels because they didn't have the technology to get the concrete vibrating and just stipping through the forms from top to bottom. So not all of it was successful and it ended up being much longer than they thought, but it was interesting to its time. The one thing that we really fascinated in is the bathom because we read that it was part of the mold. It was. It was not actually built, so it was planned. They thought about it. He also thought about doing a piano. They ended up just doing this fireplace and I mean you can come in and take a pick. It's also the stairs that are crazy idea. Wow, yeah those are totally concrete stairs. Yeah, that's a stupid thing to say. Where to concrete? Yeah, everything is concrete everything, and it does come with some major ban if it's what's the best part. Oh yeah, it's completely soundproof. We hear absolutely nothing. So it's solid. It feels like a bunker. Um, it's fireproof. It's just it's stable. It feels it feels. I like the feeling of it. Absolutely. That's cool. Good for sneaking around too, yes, good for when like you're a teenager and you're coming oh yeah, And part of what makes travel satisfying is having that context, those stories, that information, Like it's actually not very interesting to go to a place that you don't know anything about, Like you kind of come away from it a little bit empty because you're like, well, what was all that? Like what I don't I didn't know how to connect it to bigger stories. And so for for me, a lot of what als is about is like that storytelling, even if it's just like it's a concrete house in New Jersey, like it's not obviously amazing, but once you know about it, it becomes amazing. And that's that's kind of the whole premise. So after we profusely thank the owner of the concrete house and I apologize for my dumb jokes, we got back in our car and headed to our most remote destination, the fluorescent zinc mine in Ogdensburg. This is where it started to feel like a bona fide road trip. We like sort of made a itinerary for today, Like part of the pleasure of a road trip is there's an opportunity for serendipity. But the other thing I'd say about road tripping and about exploring by car. Is it gets people out of the core travel is really ruining a lot of a lot of places. I mean, you know, Venice obviously is the classic example. But to the extent that you can help facilitate people exploring other areas and can show them the value and like not going to the thing that is top on the you know, trip Advisor list or whatever. I think that's really good for everybody. And that kind of dispersal of tourism I think is actually going to be a very important trend in there is a supplying demand problem and you know, to the extent that you can show people that the supply is actually much more expansive than they might have realized, and there's a lot of amazing things worth their time and attention that will hopefully help to create a more sustainable kind of travel experience for the world. Um Dinnsburg historic mining town. I am excited about this. You know what else is well, we made some detours, but how far is this really from midtown? Man? Animal? Like an hour maybe and it is completely just in the woods, middle of nowhere mining town. Yeah. I would like jump on a subway and be on a subway for hour ago, like, you know, meet somebody for lunch or something. Oh, an underground mind door. I just missed our turn. Okay this is six Yeah, all right, We're gonna take a quick break and find the right turn. But when we get back, we're going inside of an old zinc mine with some surprises that really honestly blew my mind. Stick around. This is a geological hotspot. There's over four hundred different minerals here, which is a crazy, crazy number. This is Andy, former science teacher and our personal tour guide of the Sterling Hill Mine Museum. So this was the locker room. Yeah, the changing room. We left a couple of shower over here. One bart to the museum is in a giant warehouse where the miners used to change and shower. There are literally hundreds of rocks and minerals on the splay. There's an interactive periodic table. There are geodes bigger than my head, a rock from the moon, an asteroid that hit an old Chevy, and the lung nut that came off said Chevy. But none of that could top what happened when Andy led Josh and I into a seemingly normal looking room filled with seemingly nondescript rocks and turned off the lights. So the lights, oh, really shit. So when the lights turned off, a few specially placed black lights switched on, and all around us these giant rocks were glowing with brilliant shades of violet and neon pink and incandescent blue. It was like a glow in the dark fever dream this this is our signature color here, yes, red and green and red and green. Okay, And why do these particular rocks fluoress that a little bit of manganese makes fluorescence happen here. It can be with other metals in other areas, but with ours, it's it's the manganese. Andy told us. If you want to learn about fish, for example, you can't just spend all day in the aquarium. You gotta get out to the ocean. So we left the confines of the museum and headed underground to see these rocks at their sources the world, probably eight hundreds. So here already, wine, there's a lad, there's the lake there whoa. So the mine was actually active until the nineteen eighties, and now it's open for tours with attractions like this one ft deep underground lake. And while there's a lot to learn here, they definitely have one too. Well. We do have a diver that comes in once a year to go into that leak for our haunted Halloween tours. And he goes in and he's a scary, right. But here they have somebody that kind of joins the tour, right it's his wife. Yeah, so he comes out, grabs her and pulls her under and they just disappear in the show. Yea, it is part of the show. It is. But you know, oh my god, the largest that is wild. It is totally. We have had a bunch of movies filmed here and music videos. Do you know Joey Banass? I didn't know him either, Is it like with two dollar signs? I think so? Okay, I think he filmed the video here. That's usually so for anyone interested. The video is actually for the song Long on My Ship by Phony People featuring Joey Badass. It uses the glowing rocks built into the Minds as the setting for an underground club and also for a handful of kind of idiosyncratic uncut gems references throughout the video. I still really want to show it all day. I'm so excited about this. Well, c yeah, you're just go jogging down here five day and no way a time. And if you've ever seen the Ben Stiller movies Zoolander, you've seen this mind for like three years. So I think I'm getting the black long Bob. It's not very well ventilated down there. Christ like Derek be down it one day. So along with being the mind from Zoolander, Sterling Hill still has some of those phosphorescent rocks inside the mine. You can see these glowing giant slabs actually built into the rock walls, even if they occasionally loan them out to places like the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for example. But what they found out, the architects they're sitting now that rock is too heavy, so they had to slice like a piece of bread, and they sent the slices back to us. So here's the thing about Sterling Hill minds. I would recommend anyone living within a couple hours to take a day trip here. But I also understand why if not prompted by a friend who's been there, or maybe stumbling upon it on a resource like Atlas Obscura, you'd miss it. As travelers, we too often prioritize the big name attractions, the famous destinations whose core virtues are rooted in that fame, and not the quality of the experience itself. People get stuck in this bucket list mindset. Travel is not about like ticking every box, but allowing yourself a little bit of the mental freedom to like have serendipitous experiences and then oftentimes interesting things sort of happened along the way. You know, a lot of these places they're not super popular, so you get there and you might be able to talk to like the person running the museum or the art project. That's all part of it for me, just seeing things that you already have seen. It's like it feels important and it can feel good, but I think you want to balance it with giving yourself to do permission to do things that you don't know what is going to happen. You do you maybe you'll have a bad experience, maybe a wonder for an hour and a half and be like we couldn't find a place to eat and like I didn't know where I was. That's like also okay, you know what I mean. I don't know. It's just like everyone's trying to optimize all the time, and I'm trying to like anti optimize. If you think about out like the idea behind National Geographic, Like the message one gets from National Geographic is like that wonder is a thing that you experience over there, like you know you have to like climb a tall mountain or or go to a different continent. And part of what motivates us is this idea that actually, wonder is an extremely accessible uh what do you want to call it? An emotion, an aesthetic experience. It's all around us if you just know how to look for it. Here we are in New Jersey, which doesn't exactly have like the reputation for being you know, the most out there place in the universe, but like it's filled with incredible things to go and find and discover. Like the Morris Museum in Morristown, the permanent exhibition musical Machines and Living Dolls is worth of islam. Well, that's what we're here for. The incredible collection is due to one passionate collector's lifetime of acquisition, which he donated over seven hundred antique mechanical figures and machines. It's one of the largest collections in the world on public display this. I'm like so psyched for this. All right, let's go to it. I love animatronic stuff. We're going to see some early animatronics. Oh, this is so cool. The museum was filled with player pianos, player violins, player hurdy gurdy's, people who have record players do whatever it is. Yeah, if you couldn't play a piano yourself, you there's no way to listen to music. It was stocked with wind up animals from the eighteen hundreds, statues that would actually play the flute, and little toys that would perform acrobatics. Honestly, it either looked like a steampunk wet dream or the potential setting for a horror movie. And speaking of horror movies, this wouldn't be a day with Atlas Obscura without stopping by an abandoned town. Luckily, there was one on the way back to the city, the deserted village of Feltville, which brought to mind another very pertinent travel question that I wanted to get Josh's take on. You know, one of the things that I feel like we kind of trapple with thrill us, But it's like this idea of you kind of tell people about hitting gems. Do you ever have fear that you are going to turn them to ruin them? Yes. When we started Atlas Obscura, that question consumed a lot of our brain space and like that was the thing that we worried about most having. I have been doing this for over a decade um. I feel very very confident in saying that was a misplaced fear. That in the ten years that we've been doing this, we've seen plenty of places just disappear, go out of business, and places disappear because as they're underloved, not because they're overloved. And again and again and again we hear from places that are featured in the atlas that, like how grateful they are. There are places in the world that really are being overrun with tourists. And one of the functions that Atlas Obscure serves is to disperse people right, like to say that the menu of places that are worth visiting is much larger. So. The deserted village of Feltville, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, is from Alice Obscure. Originally Settled in the early seventeen hundreds, the small village of Feltville has existed in a number of formations, including a milltown, a religious community, and a mountain resort. But with each makeover, the village keeps living back to its status as a deserted ghost out. Okay, so it's kind of interesting because it says that it was a mountain resort type of town and then a lot of its thunder was stolen by the emerging ray Shure, which is where I'm from. I didn't even know their mountains, No, I really don't. Maybe the definition of mountains is a little bit um. Everybody was shuter back man, you have flexibly exactly, Yeah, wild have no idea. The deserted village of Feltville was set alongside a pretty normal looking hiking path. The buildings were in various states of decay, with perilously sagging roofs, boarded up windows, and green paint chipping on the sides. Again, this is something you would never expect to be hiding in a relatively normal suburban park. Yeah, this is cool. So this is where the electricity ends. Yeah, the last Yeah, literally the end of the line. You could have probably staged a horror film almost everywhere we went to, maybe The White Man at least of wish, But you know, maybe Yeah, maybe that's creepy. Yeah, that's very creepy. These feel very abandoned. The idea of using an app to find an abandoned village, of using GPS to take a spontaneous road trip, it all seems a little counterintuitive. But for me, everything we've been talking about today, this travel ethos that sites like thrill List, an Atlas, Obscure Propagate is only aided by technology. I personally feel a lot better about getting lost knowing that I have a phone that can help me get back. I mean, we sometimes called ourselves way Back an Internet company built to get people off the Internet, like the you know, it's all tools and they have different upsides and downsides. By using you know, the advantages of a smartphone and app GPS, Yeah, it gives you the confidence to say, Okay, I'm gonna take that bus to that bus to go forty five minutes outside of town to see this cathedral this guy has been building. I actually think it's made everybody capable of a little more adventure, a little more risk taking, um, because you know, yeah, you can always figure out how to get home and to do that and then have an amazing experience. On the other side is like a true cathartic. It's truly cathartic to have that happen. It's real like it's one of the delights of travel and adventure. And on the topic of getting home after Felt film, that's exactly where we were headed alright, stuck in traffic entering the Holland Tunnel. But Josh, this is a great day. Thank you so much for showing me around my home states, some places I didn't even know about, and using the app and learning a little bit about Alice obscurity, which is one of my favorite nights. This is great. Thank you man, Thanks for giving me a chance to uh test drive the app and explore New Jersey. I want to ask you, what was your favorite part of the day. Okay, so there was the moment when they turned on the ultra violet lights at the Strong Hill Mining Museum and all of a sudden, all these like totally plain looking rocks suddenly became this electrified, you know, palette of Neon colors basically, and that was kind of like, I mean, forgiving if I'm stretching this, but like a little bit of a metaphor for Atlas Obscura, Right, it's like the idea is like, there's all this stuff all around us and if you just flick the light switch in the right way, you can find wonder, you know, all around you. And that was like a little moment where that happened today and um, you know that's that's what we're trying to do. That was pretty good. Have you been thinking about that? No, I swear to guy that just came to it so big. Thanks to Joshua Fear and Dylan Thuriss and the whole team at Alice Obscura and make sure to download the Atlice Obscure app on the Apple app Store. Ye. This show was produced by myself and me a Fast, edited and mixed by the other worldly Dean White and Abbey Austria. Special thanks to all of my boss is Jim Demiko, Megan Kirsch, Brett Kushner, and Emily Feld. And thanks to you for listening. We'll be back next week. Bye.

I'm Will Fulton, and this is thrilled us to exploit. Alright, alright, So, anytime you see the moon, if you draw a line from one tip of the crescent through the other tip of the crescent down to the horizon, no matter where you are in the northern hemisphere, no matter where the moon is in the sky, whether it's day or night, where that line intersects the horizon is too south. Joshua four is one of the founders of Atlas Obscura because so if you just follow that line straight out of the horizon, that's south over there. So we're bad to be kind of like hetted south. Yeah, you'll never look at the moon in the same way. Throw away my GPS, right, who needs it. Atlas Obscura is a travel company, part editorial endeavor, part user generated platform. They have I R L guided trips around the world, books, and yes, a podcast. They excel at making sure you never look at the world around you in the same way ever again, or in the case of the moon, even things orbiting the world. It was really like a folder of places in a desk drawer. We launched it as a website where anybody could share their knowledge of hidden wonders around them. Once we were very clear on what our mission was, which is to inspire a sense of wonder about this incredible world we all share, then it became clear there were so many different things that we could and should do to realize that mission. And we started doing, you know, real world experiences in different cities all over the country where where we had community members. We started doing, Oh ship, I gotta get off here. Yeah, oh god, oh god, it's okay, We're gonna test this car. Oh god, that was very skillful. Uh sorry, skillful, I'm serious. Uh yeah, m hm, okay. So where were we? So we just went through four lanes of traffic and just missing three cars. Yeah, my pulse is skilling. So why was I riding shotgun in the land Rover on the Jersey Turnpike on a surprisingly warm afternoon in mid November. Well, we were on route to a defunct fluorescent zinc mine in the middle of the Garden State. We got here by test driving Atlas Obscure, as new app which aims to make discovering cool stuff around you wherever you are much easier and on our side, Thrillist has long believed that you don't need to go halfway around the world to find experiences worth having, and that quote unquote travel can happen in your own proverbial backyard. This is a sentiment the team at Atlas definitely agrees with. To my mind, travel media has been like fairly broken for a really long time. I'm Dylan Thurrists and I am the co founder and creative director at Atlas Obscura. It has this tendency, like like media in general, to kind of fall into line telling the same stories over and over again, whether it's something as kind of classic as you know, romantic Paris, Eiffel Tower, or something a little newer like to Loom, you know, like that's the spot you got, that's where all the cool kids are hanging out. And the funny thing is is that when that happens, often the result is not a very good experience for the traveler or the place right the place gets kind of overloaded. Too many people show up, Everyone's chasing the same imagined experience, which then gets farther and farther away from the real experience. The whole kind of idea of Alice Obscura is if you can kind of spread out that impact and then also sort of point out that you don't actually even need to get on a plane to do it, if you're open to kind of creating new myths, new ideas about something that's an hour away from you but is still really interesting. That real experience is a really good travel experience, and that's like what we're always chasing and we're trying to give to people. The first stop we found on the Atlas app was a diner on the side of a highway in Jersey City, which was also an exhibition at the nineteen nine World's Fair. The Dinner of the Future was round, compact, and glistening. One employee was able to take order, skill drinks, and cook the customers orders without having to take more than a few steps. It was an early example of modern fast food. Right this pre dates McDonald's. Wow, Okay, I wonder what they were thinking, like, like, the Dinner of the Future is how they thought were gonna be eating. I guess, but we kind of are lot of ways, Like right, look at fast food restaurants, white Man, it does look like an aluminum UFO being partially swallowed by a brick building, and inside it smells like frying onions. And at this time of day, really strong coffee. Even now people are still milling around inside looking to grab a Burger's. Yeah. I used to work at Jersey Years. You go and you go on the path train, Yeah, to the shitty and beat around be like kill at morning? Do you come here? So when this guy, a local tow truck driver, learned about what we were doing, going around the state finding odd points of interest, he got really into it. We abandoned Turnpike in Pennsylvania. You know what I like to go because that stuff to test lit like where like all island And one employee was a town. Yeah, I don't know. Have you ever been out to Manto? I've never been a hero? Looked at him, Wait, what is that? They actually had battles of sixteen inch guns, that's the biggest, were on a battleship. Said, do you know about Atlas? Do you know about Atlas Obscura. It's a website. It's just like well stuff like that. You can check it out. You might like it. Okay, So what was amazing in there? The driver? Yeah, he had all of those places that he really loved that. He was just like firing off and they were all in the atlice Obscura database. So that was really cool, Like, is like he never heard of Atlas Obscure, right, And ultimately, what Atlas Oacure is trying to do is give people the tools to we have a life of curiosity and one that is seeking out wonder and obviously that guy does a fair amount of that on his own, Alice, I know, I wish you would have been a little bit more exciting when he heard it that there's like, oh, wembid and dedicated to this pursuit. I'm just upset that I didn't try to pitch thrill us to him, like and hey, if you want somewhere to eat on the road, you know. So now we're onto the next stop in Montclair, New Jersey, to look at a house. That's a good look at house. It's very I like, wouldn't notice anything, excuse So it's it's in the middle of these like older looking Victorian houses, right, and it's a little boxy and a little pre fab um. I don't think to live in a hast to people try fin like, oh, that's not someways I thought it was gonna be. If you were just driving by this house, gray boxy, two stories and looking just slightly out of place. You might do a double take and then just forget about it. You wouldn't know it was. The house made totally out of concrete, with each level poured into a giant mold, including features like the stairs in the fireplace. It was a failed experiment in futuristic architecture by New Jersey's own Thomas Edison. Do you think people ever knocked on the doors? And I'm not suggesting we do that that would be weird, but I'm sure they must and I'm sure they hate it. Yeah, do you want to try? Okay, let's do it. What's the worst thing that happens? They say, now, right, Yeah, we knocked? A woman answered, and very graciously she agreed to talk to us. Of course, this has happened before. Yes, people do come here a lot, I have. It's mostly people who are interested in either Thomas Edison or a concrete And as an added bonus, she's an architect herself, so she was able to explain why this model of home building didn't exactly catch on the way they were planning on building it. Some of it failed, not all of their original ideas were they thought they're going to do it with the single pour from the talk to the bottom, but they ended up having to do it in different levels because they didn't have the technology to get the concrete vibrating and just stipping through the forms from top to bottom. So not all of it was successful and it ended up being much longer than they thought, but it was interesting to its time. The one thing that we really fascinated in is the bathom because we read that it was part of the mold. It was. It was not actually built, so it was planned. They thought about it. He also thought about doing a piano. They ended up just doing this fireplace and I mean you can come in and take a pick. It's also the stairs that are crazy idea. Wow, yeah those are totally concrete stairs. Yeah, that's a stupid thing to say. Where to concrete? Yeah, everything is concrete everything, and it does come with some major ban if it's what's the best part. Oh yeah, it's completely soundproof. We hear absolutely nothing. So it's solid. It feels like a bunker. Um, it's fireproof. It's just it's stable. It feels it feels. I like the feeling of it. Absolutely. That's cool. Good for sneaking around too, yes, good for when like you're a teenager and you're coming oh yeah, And part of what makes travel satisfying is having that context, those stories, that information, Like it's actually not very interesting to go to a place that you don't know anything about, Like you kind of come away from it a little bit empty because you're like, well, what was all that? Like what I don't I didn't know how to connect it to bigger stories. And so for for me, a lot of what als is about is like that storytelling, even if it's just like it's a concrete house in New Jersey, like it's not obviously amazing, but once you know about it, it becomes amazing. And that's that's kind of the whole premise. So after we profusely thank the owner of the concrete house and I apologize for my dumb jokes, we got back in our car and headed to our most remote destination, the fluorescent zinc mine in Ogdensburg. This is where it started to feel like a bona fide road trip. We like sort of made a itinerary for today, Like part of the pleasure of a road trip is there's an opportunity for serendipity. But the other thing I'd say about road tripping and about exploring by car. Is it gets people out of the core travel is really ruining a lot of a lot of places. I mean, you know, Venice obviously is the classic example. But to the extent that you can help facilitate people exploring other areas and can show them the value and like not going to the thing that is top on the you know, trip Advisor list or whatever. I think that's really good for everybody. And that kind of dispersal of tourism I think is actually going to be a very important trend in there is a supplying demand problem and you know, to the extent that you can show people that the supply is actually much more expansive than they might have realized, and there's a lot of amazing things worth their time and attention that will hopefully help to create a more sustainable kind of travel experience for the world. Um Dinnsburg historic mining town. I am excited about this. You know what else is well, we made some detours, but how far is this really from midtown? Man? Animal? Like an hour maybe and it is completely just in the woods, middle of nowhere mining town. Yeah. I would like jump on a subway and be on a subway for hour ago, like, you know, meet somebody for lunch or something. Oh, an underground mind door. I just missed our turn. Okay this is six Yeah, all right, We're gonna take a quick break and find the right turn. But when we get back, we're going inside of an old zinc mine with some surprises that really honestly blew my mind. Stick around. This is a geological hotspot. There's over four hundred different minerals here, which is a crazy, crazy number. This is Andy, former science teacher and our personal tour guide of the Sterling Hill Mine Museum. So this was the locker room. Yeah, the changing room. We left a couple of shower over here. One bart to the museum is in a giant warehouse where the miners used to change and shower. There are literally hundreds of rocks and minerals on the splay. There's an interactive periodic table. There are geodes bigger than my head, a rock from the moon, an asteroid that hit an old Chevy, and the lung nut that came off said Chevy. But none of that could top what happened when Andy led Josh and I into a seemingly normal looking room filled with seemingly nondescript rocks and turned off the lights. So the lights, oh, really shit. So when the lights turned off, a few specially placed black lights switched on, and all around us these giant rocks were glowing with brilliant shades of violet and neon pink and incandescent blue. It was like a glow in the dark fever dream this this is our signature color here, yes, red and green and red and green. Okay, And why do these particular rocks fluoress that a little bit of manganese makes fluorescence happen here. It can be with other metals in other areas, but with ours, it's it's the manganese. Andy told us. If you want to learn about fish, for example, you can't just spend all day in the aquarium. You gotta get out to the ocean. So we left the confines of the museum and headed underground to see these rocks at their sources the world, probably eight hundreds. So here already, wine, there's a lad, there's the lake there whoa. So the mine was actually active until the nineteen eighties, and now it's open for tours with attractions like this one ft deep underground lake. And while there's a lot to learn here, they definitely have one too. Well. We do have a diver that comes in once a year to go into that leak for our haunted Halloween tours. And he goes in and he's a scary, right. But here they have somebody that kind of joins the tour, right it's his wife. Yeah, so he comes out, grabs her and pulls her under and they just disappear in the show. Yea, it is part of the show. It is. But you know, oh my god, the largest that is wild. It is totally. We have had a bunch of movies filmed here and music videos. Do you know Joey Banass? I didn't know him either, Is it like with two dollar signs? I think so? Okay, I think he filmed the video here. That's usually so for anyone interested. The video is actually for the song Long on My Ship by Phony People featuring Joey Badass. It uses the glowing rocks built into the Minds as the setting for an underground club and also for a handful of kind of idiosyncratic uncut gems references throughout the video. I still really want to show it all day. I'm so excited about this. Well, c yeah, you're just go jogging down here five day and no way a time. And if you've ever seen the Ben Stiller movies Zoolander, you've seen this mind for like three years. So I think I'm getting the black long Bob. It's not very well ventilated down there. Christ like Derek be down it one day. So along with being the mind from Zoolander, Sterling Hill still has some of those phosphorescent rocks inside the mine. You can see these glowing giant slabs actually built into the rock walls, even if they occasionally loan them out to places like the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for example. But what they found out, the architects they're sitting now that rock is too heavy, so they had to slice like a piece of bread, and they sent the slices back to us. So here's the thing about Sterling Hill minds. I would recommend anyone living within a couple hours to take a day trip here. But I also understand why if not prompted by a friend who's been there, or maybe stumbling upon it on a resource like Atlas Obscura, you'd miss it. As travelers, we too often prioritize the big name attractions, the famous destinations whose core virtues are rooted in that fame, and not the quality of the experience itself. People get stuck in this bucket list mindset. Travel is not about like ticking every box, but allowing yourself a little bit of the mental freedom to like have serendipitous experiences and then oftentimes interesting things sort of happened along the way. You know, a lot of these places they're not super popular, so you get there and you might be able to talk to like the person running the museum or the art project. That's all part of it for me, just seeing things that you already have seen. It's like it feels important and it can feel good, but I think you want to balance it with giving yourself to do permission to do things that you don't know what is going to happen. You do you maybe you'll have a bad experience, maybe a wonder for an hour and a half and be like we couldn't find a place to eat and like I didn't know where I was. That's like also okay, you know what I mean. I don't know. It's just like everyone's trying to optimize all the time, and I'm trying to like anti optimize. If you think about out like the idea behind National Geographic, Like the message one gets from National Geographic is like that wonder is a thing that you experience over there, like you know you have to like climb a tall mountain or or go to a different continent. And part of what motivates us is this idea that actually, wonder is an extremely accessible uh what do you want to call it? An emotion, an aesthetic experience. It's all around us if you just know how to look for it. Here we are in New Jersey, which doesn't exactly have like the reputation for being you know, the most out there place in the universe, but like it's filled with incredible things to go and find and discover. Like the Morris Museum in Morristown, the permanent exhibition musical Machines and Living Dolls is worth of islam. Well, that's what we're here for. The incredible collection is due to one passionate collector's lifetime of acquisition, which he donated over seven hundred antique mechanical figures and machines. It's one of the largest collections in the world on public display this. I'm like so psyched for this. All right, let's go to it. I love animatronic stuff. We're going to see some early animatronics. Oh, this is so cool. The museum was filled with player pianos, player violins, player hurdy gurdy's, people who have record players do whatever it is. Yeah, if you couldn't play a piano yourself, you there's no way to listen to music. It was stocked with wind up animals from the eighteen hundreds, statues that would actually play the flute, and little toys that would perform acrobatics. Honestly, it either looked like a steampunk wet dream or the potential setting for a horror movie. And speaking of horror movies, this wouldn't be a day with Atlas Obscura without stopping by an abandoned town. Luckily, there was one on the way back to the city, the deserted village of Feltville, which brought to mind another very pertinent travel question that I wanted to get Josh's take on. You know, one of the things that I feel like we kind of trapple with thrill us, But it's like this idea of you kind of tell people about hitting gems. Do you ever have fear that you are going to turn them to ruin them? Yes. When we started Atlas Obscura, that question consumed a lot of our brain space and like that was the thing that we worried about most having. I have been doing this for over a decade um. I feel very very confident in saying that was a misplaced fear. That in the ten years that we've been doing this, we've seen plenty of places just disappear, go out of business, and places disappear because as they're underloved, not because they're overloved. And again and again and again we hear from places that are featured in the atlas that, like how grateful they are. There are places in the world that really are being overrun with tourists. And one of the functions that Atlas Obscure serves is to disperse people right, like to say that the menu of places that are worth visiting is much larger. So. The deserted village of Feltville, Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, is from Alice Obscure. Originally Settled in the early seventeen hundreds, the small village of Feltville has existed in a number of formations, including a milltown, a religious community, and a mountain resort. But with each makeover, the village keeps living back to its status as a deserted ghost out. Okay, so it's kind of interesting because it says that it was a mountain resort type of town and then a lot of its thunder was stolen by the emerging ray Shure, which is where I'm from. I didn't even know their mountains, No, I really don't. Maybe the definition of mountains is a little bit um. Everybody was shuter back man, you have flexibly exactly, Yeah, wild have no idea. The deserted village of Feltville was set alongside a pretty normal looking hiking path. The buildings were in various states of decay, with perilously sagging roofs, boarded up windows, and green paint chipping on the sides. Again, this is something you would never expect to be hiding in a relatively normal suburban park. Yeah, this is cool. So this is where the electricity ends. Yeah, the last Yeah, literally the end of the line. You could have probably staged a horror film almost everywhere we went to, maybe The White Man at least of wish, But you know, maybe Yeah, maybe that's creepy. Yeah, that's very creepy. These feel very abandoned. The idea of using an app to find an abandoned village, of using GPS to take a spontaneous road trip, it all seems a little counterintuitive. But for me, everything we've been talking about today, this travel ethos that sites like thrill List, an Atlas, Obscure Propagate is only aided by technology. I personally feel a lot better about getting lost knowing that I have a phone that can help me get back. I mean, we sometimes called ourselves way Back an Internet company built to get people off the Internet, like the you know, it's all tools and they have different upsides and downsides. By using you know, the advantages of a smartphone and app GPS, Yeah, it gives you the confidence to say, Okay, I'm gonna take that bus to that bus to go forty five minutes outside of town to see this cathedral this guy has been building. I actually think it's made everybody capable of a little more adventure, a little more risk taking, um, because you know, yeah, you can always figure out how to get home and to do that and then have an amazing experience. On the other side is like a true cathartic. It's truly cathartic to have that happen. It's real like it's one of the delights of travel and adventure. And on the topic of getting home after Felt film, that's exactly where we were headed alright, stuck in traffic entering the Holland Tunnel. But Josh, this is a great day. Thank you so much for showing me around my home states, some places I didn't even know about, and using the app and learning a little bit about Alice obscurity, which is one of my favorite nights. This is great. Thank you man, Thanks for giving me a chance to uh test drive the app and explore New Jersey. I want to ask you, what was your favorite part of the day. Okay, so there was the moment when they turned on the ultra violet lights at the Strong Hill Mining Museum and all of a sudden, all these like totally plain looking rocks suddenly became this electrified, you know, palette of Neon colors basically, and that was kind of like, I mean, forgiving if I'm stretching this, but like a little bit of a metaphor for Atlas Obscura, Right, it's like the idea is like, there's all this stuff all around us and if you just flick the light switch in the right way, you can find wonder, you know, all around you. And that was like a little moment where that happened today and um, you know that's that's what we're trying to do. That was pretty good. Have you been thinking about that? No, I swear to guy that just came to it so big. Thanks to Joshua Fear and Dylan Thuriss and the whole team at Alice Obscura and make sure to download the Atlice Obscure app on the Apple app Store. Ye. This show was produced by myself and me a Fast, edited and mixed by the other worldly Dean White and Abbey Austria. Special thanks to all of my boss is Jim Demiko, Megan Kirsch, Brett Kushner, and Emily Feld. And thanks to you for listening. We'll be back next week. Bye.