Author: Sommer Mathis / Source: Atlas Obscura
To celebrate our 10th anniversary, Atlas Obscura is launching First Journey, a chance for one of our readers to win $15,000 toward a meaningful, once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The competition is inspired by our co-founders, Dylan Thuras and Josh Foer, who both went on transformative journeys in their early adult years.Though Josh and Dylan’s trips were very different, their approaches were the same: a clear mission, unrestricted time to explore, and deep, purposeful examination of a place and its cultures. Without these experiences, there would not be an Atlas Obscura. Below, I chat with Josh about his own First Journey, and you can also read my interview with Dylan about his First Journey.
Josh, we’ve been talking a lot about what constitutes a journey, and why the experience of taking one is fundamentally different than other kinds of travel. In your mind, what’s the first real journey that you took?
So when I was 19 years old, I was staring down a two-month summer vacation from college. I ended up getting my hands on a beat-up old minivan, and decided to drive all over the country for seven weeks. And I set myself this goal of trying to have an adventure of some kind every day, and then writing about it.
At that point in my life, I’d been to California once or twice, been all over the East Coast, but I didn’t really know the country in between. So, my goal was to really see America. And that was the frame for the journey. It was the first great journey of my life and it was the most important experience of my life in terms of shaping who I am. Certainly, in terms of shaping the ideas that would become Atlas Obscura, that trip was absolutely seminal.
Did you have a friend with you, or were you doing this by yourself?
I had a friend with me for the first three weeks of the trip, and then the last four weeks I was traveling by myself.
How did you go about executing on this goal to try to have an adventure every single day?
I spent a lot of time preparing. Plotting out places that I wanted to see, or experiences, or where I thought I’d be able to get myself into some useful trouble. So, for example, I started with a map of the United States and imagined that I was going to spend the first half of the trip just in the South, and I said okay: I want to go to Bob Jones University, the flagship evangelical college, where I hoped I’d encounter people who really looked at the world differently than I did. At that point in time, I think they had just eliminated their ban on interracial dating. And so, I wrote them a letter and said, “Hey! I’m interested in transferring to Bob Jones, do you think that I could get a tour of the campus?”
And they said, “of course!” In fact, they really rolled out the red carpet for me. I spent a day and a half on the Bob Jones campus, really getting a sense of how the students thought and how the faculty thought, and what this place was like. And then I went to a roadside motel the next evening, and wrote about that experience.
I also knew that I really wanted to make it to the National Hollerin’ Contest in Spivey’s Corner, North Carolina. It’s a competition—I actually didn’t know this at the time, I subsequently learned it—where you compete in practicing this ancient form of communication that was used in the lowlands of North Carolina to communicate between farms and send messages. And that yodel was being kept alive in the form of this competition. I knew I wanted to see that. I entered the contest, and that was another one of my experiences.
The real thing that shaped the whole experience for me was having a mindset that, every day, my job is to find an adventure. So I also left myself a wide amount of room. If I saw a sign on the side of the road for a gun show in western Colorado, I would pull over and decide, “all right, today, I go to a gun show.” And then I would go to a gun show. Then I would find out that there was a shooting club that used only 19th-century weaponry. “Oh, they’re meeting tomorrow? Okay, I’m going to go to that.”
By letting my curiosity lead the way, and giving myself a lot of leeway in terms of time and freedom, I think what I developed over the course of that summer was a good nose for interesting experiences. I realized that I loved that chase, and I loved telling people the stories that came out of that chase, and that was the summer that realized that I wanted to become a journalist.
Not to get too far on a tangent, but I have to ask you about the night you spent at Bob Jones University. What was that…
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