October 17th

What are our best travel memories with romantic partners? Sexiest? Most frustrating? What part does travel play in our hopeful romantic futures? And what do our desires — highbrow, lowbrow, and everything in between — say about who we are and how we love?

On today’s show, Ella Morton — co-author of ATLAS OBSCURA: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders — joins to discuss some of her book’s most mysterious and romantic offerings. What weird and fascinating food and love destinations are out there for us? And what has traversing the globe seeking out weird wonders done for her love life?

LISTEN

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About Ella Morton

ELLA MORTON is an Australian-raised, New York–based nonfiction writer specializing in the strange and wondrous. She has written for Slate and CNET. As the host of travel show Rocketboom NYC, she uncovered New York’s underground oddities and interviewed Cookie Monster and Elmo on the set of Sesame Street. Visit Ella online at @ellamorton.

About Atlas Obscura

These days, when you can buy a plane ticket and be in Borneo in less than a day, the world can feel awfully small. A breath of fresh air proving that there are marvelous treasures behind every corner if you just know where to look, ATLAS OBSCURA: An Explorer’s Guide To The World’s Hidden Wonders, by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton, is an immersive cabinet of curiosities sharing the world’s most astonishing off-the-beaten path destinations. As bestselling author of Stiff and Gulp, Mary Roach, puts it, “ATLAS OBSCURA presents hundreds of surprising, perplexing, mind-blowing, inspiring reasons to travel a day longer and farther off the path….here are self-mummifying monks and shrines to slain insects. The Mound of Ears. The Jihad Museum. Bioluminescent squid and the world’s largest drain.” A joyful antidote to today’s gift-boxed travel culture, ATLAS OBSCURA inspires wonderlust as much as wanderlust by sharing places—from the glowworm caves of New Zealand, to the Icelandic Elf School—that could never be found without a tip from someone in the know.