The Quest to Visit 1,000 Places

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. I’m Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. So I don’t know about you, but I like to keep track of all the places that I have visited, say, in the past year. I have lists of all the countries that I visit in a given region. Each year I go back to my handwritten calendar planner book because, yes, I still write everything down. I have kept track of all my trips, and that helps me remember all the places I’ve visited and the people I saw. Most people I know are, of course, more advanced than this. They actually keep digital records like lists of restaurants where they want to go or Google Maps with pins on places. In case you have somehow stumbled upon this podcast and you don’t know too much about Atlas Obscura, we actually have a map, an Atlas, filled with thousands upon thousands of unusual places across the globe. Each place is submitted by a person, and it is a fun tool to use whether you are on vacation or you want to get to know your own hometown better. My guest today has visited over 1,000 of these places. Her name is Caroline Mazel-Carlton, and she has been working toward that goal for more than 10 years. This project, Visiting 1,000 places, was about more than just taking items off the list. She says it helped save her life. Caroline, welcome. This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. This episode contains discussions of suicidal thoughts. If you or someone you know is struggling, contact the Suicide Crisis Hotline by calling or texting 988. Caroline Mazel-Carlton: Oh, I’m getting teary already. It’s so good to be here. Thank you, Kelly. Kelly McEvers: Yeah, welcome. So talk about your first ever visit to an Atlas Obscura place. Caroline Mazel-Carlton: Yeah. So one of the first times that I remember using the Atlas Obscura was when I wanted to take my now-husband on a romantic interlude, like a nice weekend away. And so I was looking for spots—bed and breakfasts—and the Atlas Obscura was so helpful because it showed me that not too far away in Fall River, Massachusetts, you can find Lizzie Borden’s house. Kelly: In case you’re not familiar, in 1892, Lizzie Borden allegedly murdered her parents, Abby and Andrew Borden, in their house with an axe. Lizzie was acquitted. And Caroline believes she was innocent. But the whole thing has become a bit of a folk story. And the house where the murders took place still stands now as this untraditional bed and breakfast. Caroline: They had this whole getaway that you could have and sleep in Lizzie Borden’s house. They had dummies set up, sort of positioned where, Andrew Borden, what he would have looked like after the crime had been committed. So it was this beautiful Victorian house full of wonderful Victorian hair art, which I’m a big fan of Victorian hair art as well—some great specimens of that there. So it was just an amazing experience. Kelly: And I would imagine that your now husband was into it? Caroline: Oh, yeah, yeah. It was sort of like a litmus test in a way. Kelly: I was going to say, if he passed that, then he knew he was a keeper. Caroline: There’s a beautiful picture of us taken where we were sitting on this like Victorian couch and we have the dummy representing Andrew Borden’s bloody corpse splayed out across our laps. And we’re just brimming with young love. And it’s such a beautiful photograph. Kelly: Yeah. I love it. You’re like, this is the one for me. Caroline: Absolutely. And I did try, when we got married, I tried to convince my mom to let me use that photo for our save the date. But she said, “No, I’m not into the idea of this bloody corpse photo.” So we ended up using a picture from another trip we took to Paris. Kelly: Nice. And I would love to just know where your urge to go places started. What was one of your most memorable trips you took as a kid? Caroline: So my family growing up, we weren’t the type of family that went to the same beach or the same lake house every year for vacation. One of my family mottos was, “We’ll go anywhere once.” Kelly: Oh, I love that. Caroline: And so my dad has always been a history buff, but he’s never shied away from the weirder and grittier parts of American history. Some of my early memories are definitely wandering around graveyards. I remember seeing the taxidermied horse of Stonewall Jackson in some weird museum in Virginia. One place we went, and sadly, you can’t go here anymore. My dad has sort of, like, a dark streak, like, dark humor. And he became obsessed with the story of this guy named Floyd Collins, who was a cave explorer that actually got trapped and died in the Mammoth Cave system. So my dad and I actually did some caving together and visited the museum that honors this man. A tribute to explorers everywhere, but sadly he did not make it out of the cave. Kelly: Mm-hmm. You actually set this goal of trying to visit 1,000 Atlas Obscura places over a decade ago in 2012. And for so many people, you know, travel and seeing the world, there’s all these reasons we do it, but a lot of it is like: I want a change in perspective, or I want to learn more about this culture. I want to be wowed. For you, it sounds like there was a really kind of specific reason that you did this. Can you take us back to that time and talk about what was going on in your life? Caroline: So for me, I grew up experiencing a lot of bullying over how I looked or the way that I acted. And I started to struggle a lot with thoughts of suicide. And in fact, for certain parts of my life I was hospitalized and was in treatment programs where you’re not allowed to leave places like that. So it’s kind of a smaller existence. For me, it was always trying to figure out, how do I survive? How do I find a way to exist in this world? And what I realized is, for a lot of us that grapple with suicidal thoughts, it’s not truly that we want to literally die, but that the life that we’re living needs to end. It’s sort of this desire to be transformed in a way. For me, trying to figure out how to exist in the world has always been a bit of a battle in and of itself. And I remember one time seeing a book on my uncle. My uncle Doug also loved to travel the world. And he had a book called 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. Kelly: Okay. Caroline: And I thought about that. And I thought about the power of saying to myself, you know what? You can’t die today because there’s still places that you haven’t seen yet. So I used that book for a while, but then when I discovered Atlas Obscura, I was like, these sites are actually more interesting to me. They’re more accessible. They’re weirder. As I visit Atlas Obscura sites, I often learn about weird people like myself. I’ve seen amazing outsider art. So reaching a thousand Atlas Obscura sites before I died became really, really important to me. Kelly: Since then, Caroline has visited Atlas Obscura places around the world, from the grave of Johnny Appleseed in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to a temple complex in Pune, India, with 500 statues of Lord Ganesh. Once, on a 16-hour layover in Hong Kong, she left the airport and took a tram over the mountains to see the world's largest-seated bronze Buddha. She’s been to the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavik and the world’s largest Czech egg in Wilson, Kansas, and a taxidermy shop in Paris that Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali would visit for inspiration. Taxidermy holds a special place in Caroline’s heart. Caroline: There’s one Atlas Obscura site I’m going to give a shout out to, Ole’s Big Game Steakhouse in Nebraska, where you can be surrounded by taxidermy and also you can eat at the same time. Kelly: Which, not going to lie, doesn’t sound great to some people, but I love it. Today, Caroline works in suicide prevention. with an organization that does peer support, advocacy, and training for harm reduction. And she brought her 1,000 places goal into that work. Caroline has led trainings around the world, and sometimes on these trips, she and her colleagues will visit Atlas Obscura sites together. Caroline says it is really hard to choose a favorite memory. Caroline: Oh, there are so many. I remember one time we were doing an alternatives to suicide training and we were in Tacoma, Washington, and we actually found on Atlas Obscura the grave of Kurt Cobain, who was someone that I looked up to when I was younger, one of my favorite musicians, and who did die by suicide. But we went there together and it felt like such a special place to be there and honor him and his role in our lives and the way he could give voice to pain in a way that other people could connect with. I also remember a time where I was giving a talk at The Hague in the Netherlands and we visited a museum. I think it’s called Museum of the Mind, which had been a psychiatric hospital. But then they filled it with art, beautiful art made from former psychiatric patients. So going there and to some of the Van Gogh sites. And it’s just been incredible to do that with some of my colleagues who’ve also struggled with thoughts of suicide. And I really look at this achievement of reaching a thousand sites as something that we did together. And it felt really special because it was all connected to the journey of healing and embracing our weirdness and our desire to live in a world that’s not always, you know, normative. Kelly: So, I mean, you hit the goal, right? You’re over 1,000. You’re at 1,048, to be exact. So what’s next? I mean, how do you, you know, where do you go from there? Do you set a new goal? Are you just going to keep on keeping on at this point? Do you feel like you’re going to travel differently now? Caroline: Yeah. Well, after meeting the goal, I was like, I can rest a little bit because I honestly thought I’m 43. So I thought I would be at least 50 before I hit 1,000. but I hit it much more quickly than I thought I would. But the thing about Atlas Obscura is there’s always more you can do. And one of the things that I really encourage everyone listening to do is to add sites to the Atlas yourself. It’s a thrill for me to do that. I remember one time I was working in Brazil and we were just in this little town that had no Atlas Obscura sites, but I’m like, I’m going to find something. And I found this guy with a little, he had a cell phone store, but then he had sort of in the back rooms, all these historical communication devices. Even one of the first Morse code devices and a phonograph. And we got to, through broken English and broken Portuguese, I wrote an article and posted that on the Atlas, and I checked it today, and now eight people have been there. When you add a site to the Atlas, you really do change people’s lives. You know, I don’t struggle as much in my life anymore as when I started because the world just seems more weird and welcoming. Kelly: Caroline Mazel-Carlton, thank you so much for sharing your story and thank you for the work that you do helping other people too. Caroline: Absolutely. I just seek to make this place more welcoming and, you know, people are struggling. My organization, we have alternatives to suicide support groups. There are places you can go to talk where people will listen and not shame you or judge you and where we acknowledge that there’s many paths to healing. And sometimes that path to healing means walking around a really weird taxidermy store and that’s okay. Kelly: While eating a steak. Caroline: Yes. I’m here for it. Kelly: That was Caroline Mazel-Carlton. She has visited 1,048 Atlas Obscura places. No doubt many more to come. We will put a link to the Atlas in our show notes, so maybe you can start ticking off your own list of 1,000 places. Also, if you or someone you know is struggling, you can contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

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