Life-Changing Trips: Olympics, Cicadas, and Once-in-a-Lifetime Concerts

Hi, Dylan here. You have reached the Atlas Obscura podcast line, the last functioning voicemail message machine in the world. Unfortunately, I’m not home right now, but leave me a message about a trip you took to experience some special event in person, whether it was a concert or a convention or a sporting event, whatever it was that you were dying to see and willing to travel for. I want to hear about it. After the beep.

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.

Dever Probst: Hey, Atlas. My name is Dever Probst and I live in New Mexico and my story is about cicadas. Last year was the first time that broods 13 and 19 emerged together since 1803. So I figured it would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to go see trillions of insects crawling around and decided that the best place for me to go see these insects would be in a forest. So I drove about two hours south to the Shawnee National Forest and I spent all day wandering through the forest. And it was amazing. There were bugs everywhere. There were birds. There was a rattlesnake that I almost stepped on. I got lost a few times, but overall made it out alive.

The one thing that I didn’t see, though, were cicadas. After nearly six hours in the forest, didn’t see a single one. Didn’t even hear them. So I got back to my hotel and I only had really that one day to go look for this. But the next morning I had a little bit of time before I needed to go to the airport, so I decided to go to a park about 10 minutes from my hotel just to relax, kind of sit on the bench, read a little bit. And I drove in there and as soon as I turned the engine off, I could hear them. You could hear the buzz of cicadas.

I opened the door and they were everywhere. The parking lot was covered in them. The lawn of the park was full of these bugs coming out of the ground or crawling around. You could see them buzzing in the trees, flying overhead, and the park was just full of life. There were birds everywhere eating the cicadas. There were chipmunks all over the place, little kids running around picking them up. And I got to spend a good couple of hours just relaxing amidst this buzz of trillions of insects. It’s truly a once in a lifetime experience to see these two broods come out at once.

Megan: Hey, Atlas Obscura, this is Megan. Last year, my friend and I got to go to the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics. My friend and I have known each other since second grade. We have always been Olympics obsessed, and it was absolutely an incredible trip.

I think one of the things that was most surprising was how mundane it was, or almost less exciting than watching at home at some point. I ended up going to 18 events, which for anyone who knows is a massive number of events. I think most people go to something like three to five. But even at 18, we would go and today was the day you saw swimming, or the next day is the day you saw beach volleyball. At home, you throw on the TV and there’s four sports at any one time and you’re always switching back and forth.

So being at the Olympics was actually the least amount of Olympics that my friend and I had ever watched in a given year because we were just seeing the one event live. And so we ended up catching a lot of stuff on TV while in Paris. And then on the other hand, it’s just the most vibrant live experience you could ever imagine.

The most memorable experience for me was watching the men’s gymnastics team finals. And about 10 rows in front of us was a gentleman who very clearly was a family member of one of the teammates. And so it was the very last round. There was only one gymnast left on the floor, and it was a Japanese team on the high bar. And this man, every single time that the gymnast let go from the bar, he would let go of the rail in front of him and then grasp back down, moving in sync with every single one of the gymnasts moves. So he was obviously connected. He knew every single move.

When that gymnast finished and after it was scored, that is what put Japan into the gold medal position and they unexpectedly won gold. And this man was in front of us and just fell to the ground and put his hands to his face and was crying. For me to witness that experience is something I would never, ever have from home. The games are something unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced. I’m so, so glad I got the chance to go.

Kennedy: Hi, my name is Kennedy. Recently, I’ve been really into Thai TV shows, and it’s really interesting because the Thai actors do meet and greets. So I was working in Brussels last summer and they were having a meet and greet in Rome. So I was like, perfect. This was during the same time I could go. So I bought my ticket for the event. Then I was looking for plane tickets.

Because of the Olympics, oh my gosh, plane tickets in Europe were so expensive that summer. Even people who usually use Ryanair were surprised. So my round trip ticket from Brussels to Rome cost me $200. But when I got to the airport, the flight was delayed four hours. So I didn’t end up getting to Rome till midnight. And even though my Airbnb was only two minutes away, my Uber was 50 euro because of how late it was. Luckily, the next morning when I went to the convention center, because it was at the airport, it did not cost me as much, but I didn’t realize how far away the other airport would be. So I chose to land at one airport and leave out the other one to make it cheaper. But I was told on the internet that there was like a train or a bus that would take me from one airport to the next. That was wrong. There was none. So I had to book an Uber and it cost me so much money. And when I got to the airport, the flight was delayed another three hours. So it ended up being a lot of me just sitting around, but the event was really great. I love my Thai actors and I always have fun watching their TV shows.

Drew: Hey, Atlas Obscura. My name is Drew. I love music—like, love music. I’ll listen to all kinds of varieties. And a good way to know if you and I are getting along well is that we will likely share music recommendations.

About six or seven years ago, a dear friend of mine tried to share with me a band he was falling in love with called Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties. At the time, it must not have hit me in the right place or I wasn’t ready for it. I listened maybe once and moved on. Each album is a season in each song and episode. It’s a fictional story. It’s made up of an amalgamation of all the people the band’s ever met, but it’s really a guy who’s had a bad year.

His dad dies. His wife has a miscarriage and then his wife leaves him. It’s a rough start, I know, but stick with me. Fast forward a few years in my life and my youngest son, who was 19 at the time, introduces me again to Aaron West. And this time it sticks. In the interim between these two events, I had done a lot of processing trauma in my life from a messy divorce with the mother of my children, and also struggles with my oldest son, as he had some stumbles in his beginning of his adulthood journey.

The songs of pain and loss, as well as the work of rebuilding a life, really resonated with me deeply. I spent the next two years devouring every aspect of the band. I gifted my youngest son a live stream of the most recent album release concert for his birthday and we watched it together and it was incredible. It was at that moment I knew I’d need to find a way to get him and I to a live show somehow.

This last summer it was announced that they would be having a pair of concerts to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first record. But it was in Philadelphia and that’s a long ways from Nebraska where we’re from. And there were some questions though whether or not there would be more music or more touring, so I knew that now was the time. I bought the tickets the minute they went on sale and in celebration of my son completing half of his bachelor’s degree, we made the trip a reality. We weren’t about to waste 18 hours in town.

We walked to Washington Square Park and we saw the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall. We had a cheesesteak at Campos. We saw the historic Walnut Street Theater which happens to be the longest running English-language theater in America. But that was all followed by a simply incredible celebration of new music that has helped my son and I connect in a meaningful way. And we were able to process a lot of personal things together with it. And I gotta tell you, I will do this again if I can. It was an incredible experience.

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This episode was produced by Manolo Morales. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holdford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.