gleaming in a dark sea

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/barutana-memorial-area

On September 29, 1991, during the Siege of Bjelovar Barracks, the "Bedenik" ammunition depot was detonated by Major Milan Tepić of the Yugoslav People's Army, who chose to blow up the facility rather than surrender it to Croatian forces. The resulting blast was so powerful it shook the entire city of Bjelovar and left a massive crater where the warehouse once stood. Eleven Croatian soldiers lost their lives in the explosion while trying to prevent the catastrophe.

Today, the site has been transformed into a peaceful memorial area. Visitors can walk through the forest paths to see the monument dedicated to the fallen defenders, a chapel, and an open-air museum featuring military equipment, including tanks and armored vehicles used during the war. It serves as a stark reminder of the "Bjelovar War" and the high price paid for the city's freedom.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/barutana-memorial-area

Posted by Louise Story

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/i-m-on-a-quest-to-visit-all-50-states-before-america-turns-250

I have been traveling my entire life. As a journalist, I've reported from places most people never see, like small towns in Malaysia and factory complexes in Tijuana. As a traveler, I've chased the unusual, the overlooked, the wonderful, and the natural around the world. I run marathons and rock climb, so discomfort in the name of discovery is basically my love language. And yet, until this past December, I had never once asked myself a simple question: how many of the fifty United States have I actually been to?

The answer came courtesy of Atlas Obscura, the travel and culture company I lead as CEO. We launched a new feature — a 50-state map where users can log the states they've visited. I sat down one evening, started clicking, and felt something unexpected: genuine suspense. When I finished, the number staring back at me was 39.

Thirty-nine states. Not bad. But also: eleven gaps. Eleven places I had somehow — through decades of movement and curiosity — never set foot in. And then I did the math: America's 250th birthday is July 4, 2026. That gave me a deadline. Suddenly, 39 felt less like an accomplishment and less like a finish line ... and more like a starting gun.

I wasn't alone in this feeling. Atlas Obscura recently partnered with YouGov to survey roughly 1,285 American adults about their travel habits and relationship to the fifty states. About 29 percent of Americans say visiting all fifty states is a lifetime goal. But only 4% have made it to 40 or more. I am going to be in rare company — and yet, paradoxically, that made the remaining eleven feel more urgent, not less. The survey also found that 53% of Americans have visited 10 or more states, which means nearly half the country hasn't even crossed that threshold. We are, it turns out, a nation of people who haven't fully seen our own nation.

The more I work at a travel company whose entire purpose is to show people the wonders hiding in plain sight, the more it seems to me that we should all lean more into exploration afar but also exploration at home.

Here is where the intellectual stakes come from for me. I majored in American Studies in college — specifically the counter-cultural strain of American History, the version that asks hard questions about who gets remembered and who gets erased, whose stories get told and whose don't. I became a journalist because I believe, at a cellular level, that there is no substitute for going somewhere in person. You cannot understand a place from a dateline. You cannot understand Americans — their humor, their grief, their contradictions, their resilience — without standing in their actual geography.

John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley that he had discovered he did not know his own country. He was in his late fifties when he made that admission and set out to fix it. I find myself in a similar reckoning. I lead an American content company, a travel content company, one whose editorial mission is built on the idea that every place holds something astonishing. It would be a strange thing to have gaps in my own map.

So is this a patriotic exercise? That's a more complicated question than it sounds. The 250th anniversary — the Semiquincentennial, if you want to be formal about it — has become contested territory. For some, it's a moment of pride; for others, a prompt to ask harder questions about what exactly we're celebrating. But I’m taking a third path that cuts through this kind of false binary we find ourselves in: I am choosing to see more of the country, so that I can know our country and our people better.

And here is where Atlas Obscura shapes the mission entirely. I am not going to close out my eleven states by hitting the most obvious landmarks. That's not how I travel, and it's not what Atlas Obscura is about. Our research with YouGov found that 34% of Americans who travel to new states are most drawn to scenery and nature, and, while they're there, 68% say exploring local food is a top priority. The AO traveler hits the trails, eats the food, and goes further — past the familiar, toward the genuinely strange and wonderful.

So when I get to Bentonville, Arkansas, I'm definitely going to Crystal Bridges (though that museum — a world-class art institution dropped improbably into the Ozarks — is itself a kind of miracle), but I’m also going to The Bachman-Wilson House — a Frank Lloyd Wright home that was literally picked up and moved from New Jersey to the Crystal Bridges campus to save it from flooding. In Kansas, I’m going to Wamego, and, not only will I visit the Wizard of Oz Museum, I will also go to see the decommissioned nuclear missile silo that was the nexus of a drug operation that, by DEA estimates, accounted for 90% of America's LSD supply in the late 1990s. As someone who studied the American counter-culture in college, I feel almost obligated.

And in Bloomington, Indiana, I want to visit the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center, founded by the Dalai Lama's brother, sitting quietly in the middle of the Indiana limestone belt — the kind of juxtaposition that makes you love this country's capacity for surprise.

Oh and I am definitely going to get myself to Carhenge, in Alliance, Nebraska — a full-scale replica of Stonehenge built from vintage American automobiles, painted gray, standing in the high plains. It is absurd. It is magnificent. It is exactly the kind of thing that makes me proud to work at Atlas Obscura.

Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831 and spent nine months traversing it before writing one of the most perceptive analyses of American democracy ever produced. He understood that you had to move through a place to understand it. I have four months left and eleven states. The deadline is July 4th. The quest is on.

I invite any suggestions in the states I have ahead of me: Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Idaho, Washington, Alaska. Email me at ceo@atlasobscura.com

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/i-m-on-a-quest-to-visit-all-50-states-before-america-turns-250

Posted by Daniel McDermon

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-bar-where-a-future-president-sat-down-with-a-pirate

This article comes from Atlas Obscura’s Places newsletter. Subscribe or manage your subscription here.

On Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Jean Lafitte’s Old Absinthe House looks and feels like it belongs to another century. Andrew Jackson is said to have met the pirate Jean Lafitte in an upstairs room to ask for help manning ships against the British in the War of 1812. Today, the brick interior is lined with mementos left behind by visitors, its convivial history made visible.

The smallest bar in Amsterdam has stayed in one family since 1798, cramming centuries of coziness into a famously tiny room. An old-world Spanish eatery in Madrid is billed as the oldest restaurant in the world, and is still celebrated for its suckling pig. Some say this 19th-century Mexican cantina is the birthplace of the margarita. A storied Baltimore bar claims to have served Edgar Allan Poe his final drink.

Try Historical Food at These 52 Culinary Timewarps

Some stories of the past are told on restaurant plates and in Grandma’s cookie recipe. For anyone seeking to understand another generation and another era, food and drink can be powerful tools. From a Civil Rights-era restaurant that sustained activists to a candy shop reviving nostalgic treats to an English pub from the 12th century, these places offer delicious lessons in history. SEE THE LIST

My New Favorites in the Atlas

This statue, known as “Los Lagartos,” commemorates a live alligator pond that was once in this El Paso plaza.

The Cave Creek Tubercular Cabin in Arizona is a rare remnant of a bygone era of medical treatment, when tuberculosis patients were isolated at sanatariums.

The Hull Lifesaving Museum was once the home base for shipwreck rescues in Boston Harbor.

Did You Know?

Deep in Switzerland’s Val-de-Travers—absinthe’s birthplace—devotees keep the “green fairy” tradition alive by stashing bottles in the forest for fellow hikers to find and share. It’s part folklore, part scavenger hunt.

The Absinthe Enthusiasts Hiding Bottles in the Swiss Woods

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-bar-where-a-future-president-sat-down-with-a-pirate