Join us as we hit the road with Jeff Wagg, host of the 'Built to Go' a vanlife podcast, and adventure junkie. This episode takes you on an enthralling journey, traversing the length and breadth of the United States and Canada. As we venture into the lesser-known towns of America (Named Aurora), Jeff regales us with extraordinary tales from his van life experiences. He shares his intriguing encounters, from a buried Alien in Texas to his nostalgic visit to West Virginia and the fascinating history of Aurora Nevada, a ghost town once home to Mark Twain.
As a geocaching enthusiast, Jeff unveils the thrill of treasure hunting in remote corners of Florida and the exhilaration of discovering hidden secrets in museums and cemeteries. His tales are captivating, imbued with a spirit of adventure and a deep-seated love for exploration. A fascinating aspect of Jeff's journey includes his visit to every Aurora he could find, an expedition that required meticulous research and planning, further highlighting his unfettered curiosity and thirst for new experiences.
This episode arms you with a trove of insights into the rich, vibrant history and culture of American and Canadian towns. You'll be privy to Jeff's philosophy of life on wheels and his perspective on the intersection between van life and homelessness. From the terrifying encounter with a NASA rocket in Kentucky to the awe-inspiring beauty of Maine, every anecdote is a testament to the incredible adventures that life on the road offers. So, buckle up and prepare for an exhilarating journey filled with unexpected surprises, delightful insights, and life-changing experiences. It's more than just a podcast episode; it's an invitation to an adventure of a lifetime.
Built to Go Podcast
Jeff Website - College of Curiosity
Built to Go Youtube
Join us as we hit the road with Jeff Wagg, host of the 'Built to Go' a vanlife podcast, and adventure junkie. This episode takes you on an enthralling journey, traversing the length and breadth of the United States and Canada. As we venture into the lesser-known towns of America (Named Aurora), Jeff regales us with extraordinary tales from his van life experiences. He shares his intriguing encounters, from a buried Alien in Texas to his nostalgic visit to West Virginia and the fascinating history of Aurora Nevada, a ghost town once home to Mark Twain.
As a geocaching enthusiast, Jeff unveils the thrill of treasure hunting in remote corners of Florida and the exhilaration of discovering hidden secrets in museums and cemeteries. His tales are captivating, imbued with a spirit of adventure and a deep-seated love for exploration. A fascinating aspect of Jeff's journey includes his visit to every Aurora he could find, an expedition that required meticulous research and planning, further highlighting his unfettered curiosity and thirst for new experiences.
This episode arms you with a trove of insights into the rich, vibrant history and culture of American and Canadian towns. You'll be privy to Jeff's philosophy of life on wheels and his perspective on the intersection between van life and homelessness. From the terrifying encounter with a NASA rocket in Kentucky to the awe-inspiring beauty of Maine, every anecdote is a testament to the incredible adventures that life on the road offers. So, buckle up and prepare for an exhilarating journey filled with unexpected surprises, delightful insights, and life-changing experiences. It's more than just a podcast episode; it's an invitation to an adventure of a lifetime.
Built to Go Podcast
Jeff Website - College of Curiosity
Built to Go Youtube
I'm really curious about what that would be called.
Jeff Wagg:You know you saw the alien. It was attached to that. So yeah, oh, wow, the alien, yeah, alien yeah, yep, yep.
Joshua:Jeez. Do you love the outdoors, do you love to travel? Do you love finding hidden treasures in towns all over the USA? Hi, I'm Joshua.
Craig:And I'm Craig, and welcome to Treasures of our Town, the podcast that takes you on a journey to explore the unique and charming towns scattered throughout the United States.
Joshua:Join us as we venture to some of the country's most intriguing destinations, uncovering hidden gems and local secrets along the way.
Craig:On today's episode, josh. Josh, a special guest we have been. I personally have been listening to this man's podcast for a few months now. We can welcome Jeff Wag from the Built to Go Van Life podcast.
Joshua:Oh my gosh.
Craig:So we'll get to that very soon. Get to him very soon. He's actually on hold in the green room.
Joshua:I am so excited to talk to him because, in the words of Johnny Cash, he's been everywhere.
Craig:You always have these things, josh. What have you been up to mate In the last what three days since I've spoken to you?
Joshua:Well, first of all, I just want to say to you, as an American myself, and as you as an Aussie, happy Thanksgiving.
Craig:Oh, thank you mate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been asked often by other Americans as well. Oh what? When do you celebrate Thanksgiving in Australia?
Joshua:I have to then explain that we don't have it. Do you have anything like it Are you? Are Aussies grateful at all?
Craig:I ask what's Thanksgiving about? And people just say normally they go, uh, turkey, eating turkey and giving thanks. That's what Americans can't really tell me what else it is actually about. So we do that, that's enough, yeah, but we do that at Christmas time. Like you know, we have a big lunch at Christmas time and you know we enjoy family then and family barbecues. We don't need to actually give thanks on one particular day of the year.
Joshua:You know, I'll just say this I think Thanksgiving and Halloween are my two favorite holidays. I love Thanksgiving because, different than Christmas, there's a lot. There's a lot of pressure taken off. Christmas. There's a lot of pressure and like giving gifts to Aunt Martha and there's a lot of stress around Christmas, but Thanksgiving it's just like enjoy the community that you're around, have a nice meal, maybe watch some football, go for a walk and call it a day.
Craig:Well, actually at my in-laws, because I normally do Thanksgiving at my in-laws they've got like an open backyard. It's very, very strange compared to Australia. Australia, we've all fenced in here. You've got open yards like no, no fence between neighbors here, like it's insane. Um, and they don't have any fences between neighbors and no fences at the back, and they open up to a, uh, like a big outdoor woodsy area. Yeah, they've got this wild turkey Josh that comes every single day to their backyard. They've named him Kokomo Kokomo.
Joshua:And and I thought you were going to say it wild turkey came just on Thanksgiving.
Craig:No, no, no, that's your money, but he doesn't come on Thanksgiving, that particular day. I don't know what it is. I don't know if he can smell it he can smell it in the oven or what but yeah, he doesn't come on that particular day, so the year. But yeah, that's Kokomo, kokomo Joe they call him. Oh, I love that Very strange, very strange.
Joshua:I love that. So I was on the Geocaching podcast this last Wednesday.
Craig:Oh, the GCC yeah.
Joshua:I was. I was talking all about what we were grateful for, because you know what us Americans we love being grateful. I don't, you know, I'm a little skeptical about the Aussies, but uh, and just talking about what we were grateful for in the geocaching world. So if you're a geocacher listening and we know we have lots of geocacheters that listen to this podcast uh, make sure you listen to that.
Craig:It's a geocaching podcast, it's a call in podcast and we love only the only call in only geocaching podcast in the world.
Joshua:Yeah, the GCPC Love those guys and yeah.
Joshua:And Chaz. Yeah, hey, you know what? Yeah, this is sort of a follow up on a previous podcast. I was scrolling through the tick tock, like you do Friday night. Yeah, I was editing video for my YouTube channel and an advertisement came up on tick tock, for the rock and roll hall of fame induction ceremony. Oh, wow, and I was like wow. And I was like it's, they're like, it's on right now on Disney plus and I turned it on and it was so cool because, uh, if if you have not listened to the episode our Cleveland rocks episode Craig and I visited the rock and roll hall of fame. I'm guessing Jeff probably has because, as we're going to find out, he's been everywhere. Well, maybe he hasn't, I'm not sure. But uh, the rock and roll hall of fame, craig, we were big fans of that and we got to see on the wall who was about to be inducted, so it was fun to actually watch the ceremony. Well, I've got a question for you, josh.
Craig:Who did you cause in the rock and roll hall of fame? You can actually vote for next year's inductees Right. Who did you vote for? Again, you voted for America.
Joshua:I voted for. I voted for a band called America, which was in the seventies. You know, I've been through the desert on a horse of no name. They had lots of votes.
Jeff Wagg:Did they get in there?
Joshua:Well, some day they will be inducted, but I'm not so sure your choice will be ever inducted in the rock and roll hall of fame Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And we're not talking about.
Craig:Queen, they're already in there.
Joshua:No he wants vanilla ice and that will not happen, please. He's a Florida man, please rock and roll. God's do not allow vanilla ice to be in the rock and roll hall of fame.
Craig:Well, josh, speaking of ice, I've actually started your Christmas special edit as well, for your YouTube channel too. It's looking cool, man. It's looking literally cool.
Joshua:Also, you know, speaking of Cleveland, because the Christmas episode is going to take place in Cleveland and that's all we have to say about that. Let's keep it a surprise but thank you for working on it, that's right, that's right.
Craig:And the other thing I've been busy doing as well is the other podcast, the.
Jeff Wagg:Munzie the official.
Craig:Munzie podcast yeah.
Joshua:We've talked about your podcasting and fidelity. Yes, yes.
Craig:You're enjoying it, though you like a podcast voyeur. I guess we're going down a rabbit hole that we shouldn't go down. Josh Just saying, yes, exactly. How about we bring Jeff on? Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Wagg his name is. He is the host, the sole host, of the podcast built to go. That's right, Built to go. That sounds good and this is how he says it to Josh. I'm Jeff Wagg from built to go, a van life podcast. He also hosts a YouTube YouTube. He does do a YouTube channel. It's called built to go, a YouTube channel. He also does a Facebook group called built to go, a Facebook group, and discord as well built to go, a discord server. So it's sort of been binge watching here or listening to his podcast itself. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Jeff Wagg welcome, mate Well thank you very much.
Jeff Wagg:This is. I feel like this is almost like a job interview, because now I have to talk about myself, and there's a reason I talk about vans, so I don't have to talk about myself, and then yet I have the tails from the road segment, which is always anyway.
Joshua:Hi, thank you very much for having me on the podcast.
Craig:Thank you.
Joshua:My thanks to Joanie is I don't think you're going to have any problem talking about yourself, because I listened to your podcast. I'm very impressed. I mean, Craig and I, we can bounce off each other, but you are. You are a solo podcast and you can just keep it flowing. I'm just so impressed. The professionalism is next level and we can only aspire, Craig.
Craig:Oh geez, I know, I know, especially doing it solo to Jeff. I know Most of the time you do it solo.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah, most of the time. Now, ironically, let's see, there was a guest hosted episode as I was traveling in the Panama Canal. So, but the very first time I trusted someone to actually do the podcast and he did a podcast and he did a pretty good job.
Jeff Wagg:So, but no, yeah, typically I find that I kind of work best by myself and I have done podcasts with others and they were fine. But the way my brain works, I seem like this non scripted, just kind of go is what I do. So I am built to go.
Craig:There you go. So, jeff, how did you actually get started with built to go? When did you start the actual podcast and how did that come about?
Jeff Wagg:I started in 2019. So the podcast was a result of me wanting to listen to a podcast. While I was working on my van, I bought an NV 200 and old beat up thing it used to be a Dairy Queen maintenance vehicle and I knew that because there was ghost signs on the side of the van. I could just barely make out the shape of Dairy Queen. That's fun and it's a lot of work building out a van. I mean, if you've listened to my podcast, you know this, and I was trying to find something to listen to and unfortunately I did not find your podcast, because I absolutely would have listened to that. But I listened to all the van life podcasts I could find and none of them were talking about all the realities of van life. They were like here's our day and the cat threw up on the carpet and I was like that's fine. Those podcasts are fine. If you're invited for coffee and someone's living in a podcast, that's totally a fine thing, very popular. But that isn't what I wanted, and so I wrote a sketch of what would I really like to listen to and I decided I wanted a magazine style podcast with different short segments that lasted about half an hour and I wrote down well, so what would those segments be, and so on and so forth. And then, oh, 180 episodes in. I think I'm sort of starting to get into a rhythm of it, but I just I try to approach different aspects of van life.
Jeff Wagg:The philosophy of van life is one of my favorite topics. Not you know, why are we doing this and how do we intersect with other groups? You know, like the topic of homelessness comes up a lot because we are often considered homeless by some and a lot of people who are homeless live in vehicles. So there's a big intersection there. I talk about that a lot, but I also talk about technical stuff. Like you know why 12 volt accessories are better than 110 volt accessories, For example. It's one of my buggerboos.
Jeff Wagg:And then I tell a story every week and I started off telling stories based on my experiences in the van, but very quickly the episode count was bigger than my van story count. So sometimes the story stray a little bit. And then I recommend a resource, which you guys will be one in an upcoming episode, and I review a product of some sort. That's basically the thing. It's like a magazine, you know, you flip through the magazine and if you don't like a segment like, you've already got your batteries sorted. You just don't care to hear more about lithium batteries, that's alright. If you just wait a few minutes, we'll be talking about taking care of pets in your van or something. That's where it came from.
Joshua:I love that. Now, to back up a little bit, you said you know the philosophy of VanLyme. Now you are based. You're based in the Chicago area. I live in Chicago, yes, yeah, right in the city, but you would consider yourself a van life person Is that, yes, I there are, there are.
Jeff Wagg:There are van life purists out there. Okay, they get more and more pure to a ridiculous extent, like I've been told that unless you have a Volkswagen bus you're not a real van lifer. And I'm like you know what people have been living in vehicles as long as there have been vehicles. I mean, think about it, anything that moved people have lived in. Remember the wagon trains? What were they living in? Wagons? That was their van, they were doing van life. As far as I'm concerned, I've played.
Joshua:I've played Oregon Trail many times, Absolutely.
Jeff Wagg:You know, if you're at the river and you absolutely can dive dysentery in a van it's the same thing?
Jeff Wagg:Yes, you can. So I I'm a big tent kind of person and to me Van life as a phenomenon is the idea of travel, of being in transit, how you're in a different state of being when you're doing that. And so, while I'm not a full timer, I do not live in my Villean full time, I don't pretend to. I do travel a lot in my van and I would rather be in my van and someday maybe I will do full time, but no, right now I'm in my van at least once a week and I'm starting to collect them. Now I've got, I've got the ambulance, I've got a 1973 Winnebago that has been redecorated like a tiki shack. That's a whole story. And then, and then somebody said hey, do you want a scamp? So I have a scamp too. I have all these different aspects of van life. So anybody who says that you know you have to be a full time van lifer to be van life is kind of missing the big picture to me.
Joshua:Yes, so when did you decide? Was there a point in your life when you decided, okay, I'm, I'm going to explore the country or the world through your van, and could you tell me a little bit about your personal process, about, about deciding to do this?
Jeff Wagg:I can. It was a date I was. I was 50 years old. I'm 57.
Jeff Wagg:I was 50 then and when I moved to Chicago, I sold my car. I had a Honda pickup truck and I lived right downtown. So I just used public transit for years. You know, I was like, ah, my, look at, my vehicle costs millions of dollars. It's a whole subway train. And then we, we got dogs, we moved to a house still in Chicago and my wife said well, we're going to have to get you a car here. And then I bought a smart car, because my wife has a scion IQ, which is get it IQ smart. That's like the scion smart car and we could fit both of them in the garage. Okay, so I have the smart car.
Jeff Wagg:And then I'm 50 and I had been to 48 states. And my wife said you know, you should really see all 50 states by the time you turn 50 or by the time you leave. You're for 50th year. And the two I was missing. Can you guess which two I was missing? Alaska and Hawaii. Those are always the two people guess. But no, no, there's actually. There's actually two others that are more common, and so, so much so that one of these states. If it is your 50th state, they will give you a prize.
Joshua:Oh I, is it North Dakota.
Jeff Wagg:It is. So the two I was missing was North and South Dakota. Now, unfortunately, I Wanted to go to the Minnesota State Fair, so I actually went to North Dakota as my 49th states and then down to South Dakota. But how that relates to the van life thing is, I found myself chasing hotels. I've got a reservation at this hotel. I have to make it the city, but oh no, the biggest ball of twine is right there.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah but if I detour that, I'm not gonna get to the. And it was frustrating being tied down to schedules and I was like how, if I could just sleep in the smart car except I'm longer than the car there's no way I'm gonna be able to do that. And then I just, you know, I started thinking and then I watched, I found a YouTube video that had the words stealth van in it. I was like what's that? And it was this video with this guy who had built this van that looked like a beat-up work truck and he was living in it and then he had his Xbox in there and he had a disco light and he had this whole pad set up in his van and you couldn't even tell from the outside. I thought that's the coolest thing ever, and so I bought an NV 200 and built my own, and that's why I'm on your show, yeah.
Craig:Yeah, yeah and Josh, I've been binge watch, or binge listening, as I said before, to Jeff's podcast. But as always, josh, like normal people, I didn't want to start where he is actually at now. I've started at number one, some after number 80 or 80 odd and up to the 80 odds.
Craig:Jeff, you just actually Sold your NV, yeah, and you're still building out your ambulance, yeah, even, even talking about how building out the ambulance and the struggles you have about the actual ambulance, and I think I just heard one of your one of your previous ones in regards to you driving the ambulance home after the purchase and People waving you, flagging you down because there was a car accident there.
Craig:That's right and I'm like you're not thinking you're an ambulance and how bad you felt because you couldn't actually help and and again. This is one of the things, as you said before, about the stealth thing about the van and travel it's like an ambulance. That doesn't matter. No, because they're removed, it's still gonna look like an ambulance.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah, no, it's true. And just real quick on that story in case people are curious. It was night and a car had rolled over on the side of the road and I had put blue tape over anything that said ambulance on the van. I hadn't had a chance to move the decals, but there's no way they could tell I wasn't an ambulance but I'm not a. I'm not an ambulance. I mean I don't know what to do. I had a gurney in the back. I can't hold somebody around somewhere. So I actually did turn around to go back and try to go to the scene, because what I did have was lights I can light up the world with this thing and I thought, well, that's at least a little bit of safety factor. But by the time I got there the real ambulance was on its way. But yes, it's absolutely true, I've kind of had to abandon the stealth idea.
Joshua:Because no matter what.
Jeff Wagg:So in another episode you'll hear me talk about let your freak flag fly. Yes, yep, yes, yet another approach to van life. And now my, my ambulance has a big Well, I'm sorry folks on the radio, the. I have this symbol. I have a symbol that is like the symbol of everything I do. It's a question mark, a greater than symbol and an explanation point, and I have that emblazoned on the side of the ambulance.
Jeff Wagg:And Now people stop me to ask what it means. But and what does it mean? Well, in comic speak it's called hook, walk, a bang, because in comic books they have a word for every character. So a hook question mark, walka because it looks like a Pac-Man. Greater than symbol, walka, and then a bang as an exclamation point. And what it means is Up to personal interpretation. To me, it is a symbol of curiosity, and you can interpret the question mark and the explanation point any way you want.
Jeff Wagg:But what I'm finding is that this really resonates with a lot of people. For me, what I hope it will give to people is permission to pause, mm-hmm, and ask questions before coming to conclusions. Mm-hmm, the conclusions are less important than the questions. In fact, the conclusions will change based on new evidence, hopefully, but the questions remain and I, anytime I'm frustrated at something or I see a lot of drama happening on the internet, I always go back to the symbol and say, yeah, let's back up, put the emotion aside for a second, put all the judgment aside and ask ourselves questions. We want to do this. Why are we doing this? What are we actually doing? What are our definitions? Is that so? That's it, that's what it means, and it's also not Googleable.
Craig:No, it's not, I've tried.
Jeff Wagg:What so if someone sees me driving down the road, they see the symbol.
Craig:They're gonna have to be really curious to figure out what it is, and Josh Jeff Jeff is a is part of the College of Curiosity.
Jeff Wagg:I love that. Actually, I love that in my day job.
Joshua:But we we do programs on character and every program we do has a character trait. So one of our programs is actually the curiosity retreat.
Joshua:Oh, that sounds great, yeah, well, and you know, without becoming political, I love the symbol because a lot of people they like to shout out their opinions and right, and a lot of us need to stop and we've been given two years, one mouth and Really be curious about the things around us. And that's one of the reasons I love travel is because when we travel around we we learn a lot about ourselves, but, of course, the the places we visit as well.
Joshua:So it this is an audio podcast. I'm just gonna say the symbol is it's a circle. Yeah, almost looks like a sign. There's a question mark and then there's a greater than sign and then there's an exclamation mark. So I love that. That's really cool. Jeff, I'll send you guys some stickers if you give me addresses. Take them. I love the stick oh yeah, josh loves the stickers.
Craig:As curious people though, josh, our listeners are curious people too, because obviously most of them are Geocaches or bungee players, that sort of thing. So they're used to the travel and they and as our show is, it's our show is our travel is guided by our love of geocaching, thanks, etc. Now, jeff, you know about geocaching too. I heard oh Podcast.
Jeff Wagg:I heard in your early podcast.
Craig:You mentioned the G word, the geocaching word, and my ears pricked up straight away. We're what.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah, no, I I've done a lot of geocaching. I used to go to Santa Belle Island off the west coast of Florida a lot, and it's a very, very isolated Kind of a place it's. It's it's quite a bit different than the rest of Florida. They keep any time a piece of property goes up for sale, this organization buys it so people won't build a house on it, so it's very focused on nature. And there's all these geocaches on there and these places You'd never imagine. So I used to, that would be my recreation as I would just wander about on a bike. And well, where's the geocache by the lighthouse today? And a lot of microcaches, you know, yeah, little film canisters or the double bottle caps kind of together, you know, but unfortunately the hurricane probably wiped them all out. I don't know what their status is, but I loved that. And then Recently I started to get back into it. Now I don't do it so much anymore Because and you may have talked about this in your podcast but there are so many geocaches now that I went to we have a botanical garden here in Chicago and I thought, oh, I bet someone put a geocache here. They were 40. I mean is like well, did you find the geocache in this 10 square feet of land, because there's another one over there. I even found one on my own property. Once I used to have a house in Vermont on six acres and I found a geocache on my property that I didn't put there.
Jeff Wagg:But yeah, I love geocaching. I love the idea. Used to play Pokemon go a lot. I played the Harry Potter game while that was around. I would love to get into Ingress more, but, holy cow, that's a time sink. I just don't have that much time. I think the idea of Muncie is awesome because you don't have to mess with leaving stuff and you know, you know Caches get trashed over time, right? Yeah, yeah, I did actually create a geocache on Cocoa Kay in NASA in the Bahamas. It's now called perfect date. Okay, it's Royal Caribbean's private island and someone stole it from me. By that, I mean, is I registered on the geocachecom or geocachingcom website, mm-hmm? And then I went back two years later and everything I had put there was gone and someone else claimed they made it, which?
Jeff Wagg:I thought that's rude, but yeah, I love it. I think it's a great, it's a great sport to do, and I'm always telling people that Every place is interesting, I don't care where you are in the eyes, every place entry. Geocaching is just one way to find interest in a place, because you'll find geocaches, I think, everywhere. Now, I didn't, I didn't look in Antarctica, I didn't, I was just there, I didn't. There is, I'm sure there is it like the basis, and I there's one Curiosity rover I heard on one of your podcast.
Joshua:The Miriana trench, the lowest point.
Jeff Wagg:And it was placed by.
Joshua:It was placed by the same person that placed the space station one and an astronaut. Oh yes, that wanted to have the highest and the lowest. It's gonna be a while before that's beaten, I think yeah that's oh for sure, or found the one in the Miriana tranches not been found? No, I, yeah, I'm pretty confident and Based on recent news. I don't. I don't know if people are gonna be going to deep Places.
Jeff Wagg:No, anytime soon, especially using a playstation controller, but anyway, yeah, I actually had someone contact me to make sure I wasn't on that, because I do that kind of stuff, but not at that level and certainly not in that vehicle. Just, I think I would have been scared off, not by, if not by, the price, definitely by the shape.
Craig:Well, I know by your YouTube channel, jeff, as well, because I've watched you do a high location in Canada where you off some sort of what was it? Some sort of high-pointing tower yeah, the C&T in Canada.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah, c&t. It's why, you know, I live in Chicago. We had the world's tallest building for a while here that everyone still calls a Sears Tower, even though it's not, it's the Willis Tower. But I Realized as I was on top of the C&T tower in Toronto that I would be several hundred feet Above. This building that we think of is this tallest thing in Chicago. And if you ever do this, you go up to the top of C&T tower and they put you in a harness and they kind of push you off the side. I mean, you are only, your toes are touching the structure, you're hanging off and I they do everything in meters up there. So nothing really registered in my head because they're a civilized country and you know I Was peer pressured into doing it. It wasn't something I would have gone out of my way to do, but I'm glad I did and I'm glad I never have to do it again.
Craig:I was gonna say you look like you actually enjoyed it, jeff, to be honest good in comparison to the others that were with you. We took in terms of the group as well. Some were very, very frightened. Oh no, I'm not letting you back any further than this. I'm fine with this, but you actually embraced it. You know, you went. You know what I'm gonna trust. I'm gonna trust it's it's Canada, not America, so I'm gonna trust the.
Jeff Wagg:Years ago in Utah I worked at a hotel in Utah called Little America, which is the largest hotel in Utah. I was a night order and some of the guys there said, hey, let's go do some bungee jumping. This was in the late early 90s and I was like, all right, whatever. And we go to this bungee jumping place out in the desert of Utah and it's out of a hot air balloon and you ride up in the hot air balloon and jump off and I thought, oh, that sounds like fun. It's gonna feel like you're flying, you can be Superman.
Jeff Wagg:And we roll up in there and the first thing we see is a guy jump out of the hot air balloon and then we hear this blood-curdling scream and he grabs the bungee cord which folks Don't ever grab the bungee cord and ever wax him in the face. He's instantly covered in blood. And then he has to hang there as the Hot air balloon lowers to the ground and he just kind of collapses in the dust. And we roll up and they're like, okay, right, this way We'll show you how to get started. What have I got myself into?
Jeff Wagg:And then, when you ride up in the hot air balloon, so it's a 300 foot drop. So I think you have a hundred and fifty foot bungee cord. It's a pretty big one and they make you ride on the outside of the hot air balloon. Yes, you just hold on to the basket. And I'm thinking this cord is a hundred and fifty feet long. We're only a hundred feet in the air. Let's see. If I let go, I'm really going to fall to my death. And then by the time I got to the top and I was supposed to jump, it absolutely didn't feel like I was going to fly anymore. It absolutely felt like I was jumping to my death. And then I was horrified to discover that I could actually do that Mm-hmm, and I did, and I jumped off and did the perfect arc. And when I got to the bottom to review the videotape which they were recording on a VHS camcorder oh yeah, back a while ago Nothing but static. Oh, no video.
Craig:So you can say it was a perfect arc, when in actually reality probably was no, they, I was told that.
Jeff Wagg:I was told when I got.
Craig:Oh, you did that, perfect. But yeah, now I can't even prove I didn't come down with blood on your head.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah, no, yeah. So another thing I never have to do again.
Craig:Exactly exactly. Josh. Are we gonna get started on? Why? Just here as well? I'm really excited.
Joshua:So, on the treasures of our town podcast, it's all about finding those hidden gems, those hidden, sometimes smaller towns throughout the United States. But we have never focused on. We focused on, like one particular town, like we focused on, you know North Grand Forks, north Dakota, you know Cleveland, lotta, owensboro, these places right, we never focus small things as well, like Georgia.
Craig:For instance, it last week episode we focused on little little pieces of Georgia, throughout Georgia, but we haven't actually focused on this day.
Joshua:Yeah, but.
Craig:But we're gonna focus now on Any town in the United States by the name of Aurora, aurora, so let me say this one for you before you go, and I've always been wanting to say this, because I say this every single time I listen to your episodes Tales from the road. Now, if you listen to one of Jeff's episodes, you'll hear him say that he says it the same way each time. Jeff, give me tales from the road, like you normally do, and then go into these auroras that you were talking about first. Tales from the road go. Tales from the road. There it is. There, I've heard it live. Oh, I've been wanting for that for so long.
Joshua:So, before we go into the details of these auroras High-level please help us understand, mm-hmm, why? Why did you want to visit? So you wanted to visit all the auroras in the United States and Canada.
Jeff Wagg:There was only one, and it was on the way back, so I was like sure I'll do perfect.
Joshua:Why Aurora? All right, so Just like the sound of it, did you just like boy? Is it because there's a lot of them? Tell us.
Jeff Wagg:Why do you?
Joshua:want to visit Aurora.
Jeff Wagg:There's three pieces. Okay, the first off is I had a van that I had just built out and nowhere to go. So, like I have to come up with something I have to do, I have to go to every National Park, I have to do something, every something, and like, but what, but what? I go to a dark sky thing every year in Colorado and Garden of Colorado from the Rocky Mountain. It's called the Rocky Mountain Star Stair If you want to. We saw the moon of Pluto, sharon with a telescope there. You know it's Unbelievable what you can see at this place. But anyway, on the way there I noticed there were a lot of auroras. There's Aurora Illinois, there's a lot of Dakota, there's a Rora Iowa and of course is Aurora Colorado. And I thought, huh, why would you name a place Aurora? You know I understand why you name a place Brookfield.
Joshua:Yeah.
Jeff Wagg:I know why you name a place. You know Moon Bay or something. I don't understand why you name a place Aurora. Did you see the Aurora there? And I thought Every place named Aurora has to have something interesting about it because it's called Aurora. And I learned that they're all different reasons. Some of them were named after Sleeping Beauty, whose name was Aurora. A lot of people don't know that, but that I didn't know. The name of the character was Aurora. Others were named after the goddess of the dawn, aurora Aurora Nevada was named after the colors of the rocks which reminded them of the Aurora borealis.
Jeff Wagg:Oh so, but I thought I, and I thought, well, this might work, but I'm not sure it's gonna work. So I went online and you know, an extremely difficult question here how many auroras are there in the United States? You'd think that would be a fairly simple question. Yeah Well, what's a? What's an Aurora? How do you define an Aurora like? Does it have to have its own zip code? Does it have to have a Wikipedia page? Does it have to have a name on a map? And it turns out that's a very difficult question to answer. So I came up with my own criteria, which was had to have a zip code that was its own, like it can't share a zip code, like it can't be. There's an Aurora neighborhood of Seattle, for example, but that's not gonna count, which which was good because there's an Aurora and Fairbanks, alaska.
Jeff Wagg:That was gonna be really hard to get to, but I was able to get that out of the way, because it's just a neighborhood and there actually wouldn't be in there. So zip code and a Wikipedia page, mm-hmm. I made a couple little exceptions, but they were very minor and they were for good reasons. And then I ended up with a list of 22 22 and I, and they were nicely distributed throughout the country. That was something else. I wanted to see the country, and I mean I've been to all 50 states but still I wanted to have this trip go everywhere. So furthest west is Oregon. Furthest east and probably north is actually Maine. It's up near Kalei or callous, I think they might say it up there. I don't speak, may not, even, though it was just in Maine two days ago, I feel that. And Then the furthest south was Texas, which is pretty south, far south, and so I thought, okay, this is a fairly good distribution. It's not perfect, there's a little bit too much in the northeast. And and then I made plans on how I was going to do it and I came up with I didn't do it all at once, I did it in sections that made sense because, again, I'm not full-timer, I have, and then I even had a job I had to pay attention to, and Every single one that I went to I fell in love with.
Jeff Wagg:They're all Interesting. There are no boring auroras. So when you said, pick your 10 favorites, I was racking my brain trying to figure out what's a fate, I mean. But then if I say this one and I don't mention this, and then what about New York? There's two of them in New York and they fight over which one's the real one and I. So I have done it, I have whittled it down to 10. Mm-hmm, but I'm not happy about it.
Craig:Josh, I will say this Jeff's number one, aurora, and I don't think they're in in particular order.
Jeff Wagg:No, they're, and that I wanted to say that that yeah, no, this is not no, number one is just the first one they came up with yeah, yeah, number one is in Texas itself.
Craig:Now, josh, I did, actually did. I had 10 minutes spare before we started the podcast. I did look at the Aurora Texas and there's one thing in Aurora Texas, the one. There's only like one or two geocaches totally in Aurora Texas, but one geocache location is at probably the most point and reason why you would go to Aurora Texas, jeff. What's in Aurora Texas?
Jeff Wagg:Well, there's an alien buried in the cemetery.
Craig:Yeah. Yeah, so with his, with his spaceship, to the spaceships there next to the sign it's um, yeah, I mean, I Can't, I can't.
Jeff Wagg:I could easily do a whole podcast episode on each one of these cities, so I have to be careful that. The story is that in the 1870s a they saw a cigar shaped object flying around and it crashed into a windmill In Aurora, texas, and they found the body and a strange alloy unknown too bad. And you know what do you do with a dead alien? Well, you give it a Christian burial in your cemetery. Apparently, you know, you don't turn it over to an, a university or anything like that. And Nessa, no, no, well, there was no NASA back then.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah it's pre airplane days, but still. And then what happens? When you bury an alien in your cemetery? People come and try to dig it up and try to steal the tombstone, and it happened over and over and over again, and the last one, I think, was stolen in 2007. And now they've just given up, except they put a massive boulder on top of the site of the supposed grave and people Leave trinkets and stuff on it. So when you find the cemetery now, you'll find this very large boulder covered with what is essentially the stuff you'd find inside a geocache.
Craig:Yeah, yeah yeah, I was saying as well, and the actual fact I think if I ever attend there, I'll have to have a look at this boulder and see what it's made out of, and you probably put an earth cache there.
Jeff Wagg:You could. Yeah, I believe it's sandstone I'm not entirely sure and out of galaxy earth cache and and when I was there, the, so that's, this is an Aurora. I visited twice. I did a pre-covid and post-covid Aurora tour and I didn't know it was pre-covid but I found out. And that comes into play because when I did, when I went back in post-covid, the town had really grown and what I'd found was that a lot of these little tiny towns were growing after post-covid because people were leaving the cities Interesting. So real estate and all these little towns that had been dead for years was was going up.
Jeff Wagg:In Texas they had a they finally embraced it and there was a bar that sold Jeez, I even got a sticker here Martian Margaritas they're out of this world and they had a little steel flying saucer there and they had aliens snot drinks for the kids. Yes, aliens snot. So I mean, go with what you got. You know the yes, yeah. So, backing up, the real story is that this Aurora was named because they were trying to attract people here. It was a real estate thing after the Civil War and Aurora sounded nice. It worked on me, just like it worked on them. But nobody came and they had a cholera outbreak and all the sheep died and the cotton died, and then they Invented the UFO story to try to attract more people there.
Jeff Wagg:At least to get on the map.
Joshua:It's a great story.
Craig:I mean.
Joshua:I think probably all of us have been to Roswell and it's like that. I mean their whole town is based on of alien. You know you want people to come. Just tell them an aliens there or landed there.
Jeff Wagg:They even had an alien themed brothel there for a while. So I Think that's close.
Joshua:I'm really curious about what that would be called. I.
Jeff Wagg:It was. You know, you saw the alien, it was attached to that. So yeah, oh wow, the alien. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's Texas.
Joshua:All right, let's let's head over to the east side. All right, west Virginia, aurora, west Virginia.
Jeff Wagg:West Virginia. I have a hard time talking about West Virginia because I went to school there. I was born in Salem, massachusetts and I went to Salem College in Salem, west Virginia, and then I went to Salem State College in Massachusetts and then I went back to Salem College in West Virginia and no one has ever been able to figure out my college transcript. I actually finally got a degree from Georgetown, but my heart at least a part of it stayed in West Virginia. What an absolutely beautiful state. Yes, and it's an interesting state, because you don't go there unless you plan on going there. There are certain states where the interstates don't connect anywhere you care about. You're always gonna go around them, and West Virginia is one of those. Vermont is kind of another, except it's its own big destination spot, but West Virginia is Just so wild, let me wild, wonderful West Virginia. You say that license plates, or at least used to. I've never been anywhere like it and we're living in this little town. And when I went back to, when I went to Aurora, west Virginia, I had all these memories flood in. It's such a tragically beautiful place and just so economically Devastated, with really no chance of ever getting out of that with the way things are. But Aurora, west Virginia, is in the hills. It's. It's in the north central part of the state, which it's a weird shaped state, so it's it's not that far from the Maryland border on the east side and it's in the mountains.
Jeff Wagg:West Virginia is our most mountainous state Colorado is only 25th, actually, believe it or not and they have an old stand, an old growth of trees there called Cathedral Grove, and it's the oldest stand of old growth hemlocks in the country. So hemlock trees People get a confused with Socrates. It's not that hemlock. Hemlock is a type of evergreen, a little bit like a fur. If you've seen a Douglas fur, think of a Christmas tree, but it has very flat branches.
Jeff Wagg:They have the largest and oldest ones in the country there in this little Aurora, west Virginia, and that's really their only claim to fame. When you go there, you can, you can see that and it's beautiful. And they also have an old schoolhouse that actually has a working out house still next to it. And this was one of those places where I met my major frustration on this trip, which was that they all have these little local museums. They're never open. I want to see what's in there and it's open like every third Tuesday, unless there's a full moon. And oh so I did the best I could, because they're all run by volunteers.
Joshua:It is. I used to be one of those volunteers.
Jeff Wagg:I know how it is. They have no funding at all. Jake might go down and open up this afternoon, but as Lombago's acting up, so I don't know. Yeah, but I mean absolutely beautiful. There's this one place in the Royal West Virginia's cemetery and it seems like they always build cemeteries on hills there, probably because of flooding. I thought of that afterwards. It was like they just pick the prettiest spot and put the cemetery there and then I thought, no, it's probably the flooding, because any of the valleys there flood.
Craig:So I would have thought that, jeff, it's actually for the views, because they're going to be there.
Jeff Wagg:I think you know it's both, but a cemetery in the bottom of the valley would be a very bad idea.
Joshua:It wouldn't be there very long.
Jeff Wagg:And the view is stunning. I drove up there at sunset and it was one of the highest parts and everything's just green and lush and nothing flat enough to put a soccer field on anywhere that you could see. It's just a football field yes, anywhere that you could see and just beautiful. So I actually cried as I drove out of West Virginia. It was that beautiful, wow, and it had that much of an impact on me, even though it doesn't have a story like Texas does or like Kentucky does, which is a totally different subject.
Craig:Well, let's talk about it in Kentucky. I'll say something real quick before we go there.
Joshua:I just looked at the map. It is two hours drive west of Martinsburg, west Virginia. So Martinsburg, west Virginia, is a geocaching mecca because some of the most fantastic geocaches are in this little little county in Martinsburg. So West Virginia team, west Virginia team, a legend in the geocaching world. So if you're interested, there's. Yeah, I agree, I've driven through there. It's beautiful. You're right, you would only go there because you want to go there.
Jeff Wagg:It's true, but you should want to go there, yeah.
Craig:Okay, so Kentucky, kentucky, kentucky.
Jeff Wagg:So we're in Kentucky. It's been around for a while. There's a place in Kentucky called Land Between the Lakes. If you look at the geography this is very strange. It's three long lakes that kind of make a square. It's a very strange thing and of course a lot of it's man made. But Aurora was this little town. There it's something of a tourist, not an attraction, but an oasis. Now there's a lot of camping and fishing and that's why people go to Aurora and they have some old buildings and stuff you can see. But the most fascinating thing there is this park called Cherokee State Park.
Jeff Wagg:Now, back in the days of separate but equal, there were parks for white people but there weren't very many people, but there weren't very many parks for black people. And in this town they built this enormous resort, beautiful, with log cabins and lots of waterfront, just for black people and they flocked there. I mean it was a huge attraction. People would drive from Michigan and all these places to go there because it was one of the few places that they could feel comfortable doing the stuff most of us take for granted, and it was a unique kind of. It was actually an example of the state of Kentucky saying see separate but equal works. Now we know better, but back then this is what people were trying to do.
Jeff Wagg:And then, ironically, the Civil Rights Act came and separate but equal went away and the park became integrated, meaning white people were allowed to go there, and five years later it wasn't a park for black people anymore, it wasn't a park for white people because they didn't feel comfortable going there. And I'm not going to get into all the politics. I mean it's a very complicated subject but it's interesting to visit such a place that had such a historic impact. And you know, you've seen the movie Green Book maybe, or you understand that black people in the US, when they traveled around, had to have a book to tell them where it was safe to go. This would have been like the Disney world for them, and a lot of it is still there. So I wandered around there quite a bit and tried to imagine what it was like and actually bought some postcards of people just having fun.
Craig:Jeff, I'm looking at them on the map and, yeah, you're right, it's along the Kentucky Lake itself and it looks beautiful, like gorgeous location to be.
Jeff Wagg:It's very nice. They have a kudzu problem. We'll say that, like much of the southern US, is kudzu everywhere, but still it's beautiful. The other weird thing that they have there if a rocket is built, let's see how this works. In Alabama there's a NASA rocket assembly station and if they build a rocket there, it has to go by Aurora, kentucky to get to NASA. Now you're looking at the map and you're saying, but Alabama is way the hell down there. With that We'll understand. It's the way the rivers go and the way the bridges' heights go. So they actually go north up and under the bridge into Kentucky Lake and then they hook up with the rivers and get down to Florida or to the Atlantic and then to Florida and one of those rockets hit the bridge and collapsed it and it cut off these two communities in Kentucky for like 18 months. I actually did a whole YouTube video about Aurora Kentucky that details that more. But yeah again, little place a lot of people haven't heard of. But you just dig a little bit and there's so much history there.
Craig:Yeah, yeah exactly Fascinating.
Jeff Wagg:I love it. I'll bet they have geocaches too because of all the tourists. Oh yeah, oh, I'm sure, all right.
Craig:One of the geocaches there that would be shaped in little rockets. Yeah, that'd be perfect.
Joshua:All right, let's go up to gosh, a state I've never visited that I want to visit.
Craig:I haven't made any yet, and it's.
Joshua:Aurora, Aurora main.
Jeff Wagg:So I was just in Maine yesterday. I just got off of a ship in Maine, and not yesterday, well, two days ago. Whatever Time is, time is an illusion. I love Maine, Maine. I grew up in New England. I'm from Salem, Massachusetts originally, so New England is home to me. Maine is the wilderness of New England. It is this massive state that it. It's as big as all the rest of New England easily. And if you look at the population distribution of Maine, it's all along the southeast coast. There's nothing else, it's just it's Appalachian Trail ends up there. It's absolutely a beautiful wild state in its own unique way. It's certainly very different than Colorado. You know they both have their wonders, but they're different. Aurora main was a challenge because it's way up there. I had it was a lot of driving to get there, but I finally got there, and it's endless fields in the, in these rolling beautiful hills, endless fields of what do you think they were growing?
Craig:I say it looks red and orange in the photos. I'm not sure what it is, though.
Jeff Wagg:So go ahead, richard, take a guess Again I don't know my flora stuff, so it says the town is named for the Goddess of Dawn.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah, that's right. That's a Goddess of Dawn one, because it's on the east side of a hill, so the dawn comes up there. Yeah, now the answer is blueberries. It's famous for blueberries and this is where they grow blueberries, so the whole place is covered with blueberry fields and they're just kind of this. So rolling fields of wheat is like an American icon thing, rolling fields of blueberries not so much, but it's there and it's beautiful.
Jeff Wagg:It's on a road called the airline and it's been called that since before airplanes were invented because it skims the mountaintops across northern New England in an east-west fashion. Now, I used to live in Vermont and one of the sad truths about Vermont is that if you live in Burlington, vermont, which is on the upper east I'm sorry, upper west side of the state, and you want to go to Maine, if you look at a map, you're like, well, you just drive across to New Hampshire. No, you actually have to go to Boston and then go up, because that's how the roads go, except for the airline. The airline route two is this windy little road that could go by Mount Washington. I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous and it goes right through Aurora and probably the most famous place in Aurora other than an old schoolhouse, is an ice cream stand that everyone stops at on the way to Calais or Calis and I'm sorry, maina's, I'm pronouncing it wrong. I should have looked up.
Jeff Wagg:I had a really interesting experience with this ice cream stand. First off, if you buy a small at this place, it weighs six pounds the small, so you've got the cone. The small was like five times taller than just the cone. It was ridiculous. I can't even imagine what a large would be. It's an American cone, yeah, I mean almost a Texas cone. I mean the thing was huge. So there's two women working there, young women about to go into college, graduate from high school, and I just started talking with them and said this is the biggest ice cream cone I've ever seen. And we start chatting.
Jeff Wagg:And then in this five-minute conversation they represented the two youths of America. And by that I mean there was this one woman who had spent her life in the small town and was excited to get out and see the world. She was applying to colleges in other states and I was that person back then, when I was 17 or 18. I was like, oh, massachusetts, blah, I want to go see the world. And I came to learn later that Massachusetts is actually pretty awesome. But I thought, yeah, ok, I can totally relate to you.
Jeff Wagg:And then the other girl or woman right on the cusp there said you know, I like it here, this is where my family is, this is home, and you know, I really don't want to leave. Everything I need is right here. And I was like boy. If that just doesn't sum up the two different approaches to life, you know, we've got people like us who want to travel and go see things, and then we've got people who are very comfortable at home and don't know why they would ever want to sleep anywhere other than their own bed. And these two I have a picture of them and they're dressed in the same uniform, they're in the ice cream stand totally different outlooks on life, and I wish I just had some kind of window where, in a non-stockery way, I could actually see what happened to them as they grew up, you know.
Craig:So yeah, one is probably living the van life now.
Jeff Wagg:One is probably living the hashtag van life. It's very possible. So sometimes what's interesting about a place is the people, and I learned I'm not the kind of person to start a conversation when I'm doing van life. I'm kind of a hermit. I don't really want to interact with people. That's part of one of the joys of van life actually is you're completely on your own terms. But I found that if you're exploring a place, you actually do have to step outside your comfort zone and talk to people, because they are the place ultimately, and that was definitely an experience of Maine.
Craig:Definitely, josh. We're getting on in time. Now We've got to hurry this up. We've got six more to go. How about we do this? We do Illinois, because that's the next one on the list, and then Jeff, we're going to get like a quick rundown of the next five. I can do that. So Illinois, Illinois.
Joshua:The most famous, would you say. This is the most famous Aurora. No, it's the biggest To me it is so.
Jeff Wagg:sadly the most famous Aurora is in Colorado because of the shooting at the movie theater with Batman. But second another movie connection is Wayne's World's Aurora even though there's nothing there about Wayne's.
Jeff Wagg:World. Aurora has two interesting things. First, city electrified with street lights in the country. Of course, other cities claim that, but Aurora calls itself the city of lights because of that, also where almost every school locker in the United States came from. So if you had a school locker in high school it probably came from a Royal Illinois as a van life related thing. Back in the early days, before motels were invented, some communities would set up camps for people driving across the country, and there's an almost perfectly intact one there. That's kind of been turned into a zoo, but the communal cooking facilities and the fields are still there and there's plaques explaining what that was. So that's a. I think that should be a little bit of a pilgrimage of people interested in van life.
Joshua:And that's always the start of Roots.
Craig:I can say, going back to the actual the lockers, the school lockers and stuff, that gets me, because we from Australia we don't have that, oh no, but we see it though in all your movies, in the Red Cups and Bonds. When I first come over here as well I was I wanted to do all the movie stuff, whatever. I saw in a movie. I'm like, is that actually real? Yes, it's real, yes, it's real, yes, it's real. It's like, wow, this is incredible, so yeah.
Jeff Wagg:Yep, well, that's where they come from.
Joshua:Yeah, there you go. So I know we have to move on, but I am a fan of the movie Wayne's World. Is there anything in Aurora that's in the movie?
Jeff Wagg:I don't think so. I'm sorry to say, kings Dominion Park in Virginia used to have a Wayne's World section and they had the car and everything in there Okay. I don't know if that's still there, but no, I didn't see any Wayne's World stuff in Aurora. I'm sorry.
Craig:All right, that'd be something to do, geocaching or like Wayne's World related, for sure, in Aurora Illinois. Something positive, something We'll have to look just later on, probably at the zoo. No, I mean, yeah, you say Aurora. Aurora Nevada is next on the list.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah, now this one I'm going to be very brief about because it's so huge. Aurora Nevada is a ghost town and it used to be in California because they didn't have very good surveying tools and they thought they were building a town in California. But it was actually in Nevada, obviously right on the border, not too far from Bodie, but it's a couple hours of off-road driving from Hawthorne, nevada, which is not a place many people go to, but that's the big town there. It is famous for being gold mining town, obviously, but it's also famous where Mark Twain first wrote commercially. That's where he lived. He was a prospector and he was mining there and his first commercial stuff the stuff that actually got published was when he was in Aurora.
Jeff Wagg:It used to be a town of 10,000 people, had something like 70 saloons. It was this huge place relative to the time. If you go there now, there is a single wall standing. Everything else is completely obliterated, except for the cemeteries, because people from San Francisco drove there and took all the bricks to build their homes. That place has so much history and it goes on and on forever. It's famous for having the grave of a gunslinger there and it actually says on the tombstone gunslinger so-and-so murdered by blah blah blah. Revenge will be ours someday, something like that. Anyway, that requires I beat the ever living heck out of my NV200 going out there. It does require some work, but wow.
Joshua:Does anybody live there?
Jeff Wagg:No, we're not even close. There's an active mine that's nearby, which is good because they keep the road working. Otherwise you couldn't get there in anything other than an ATV. Really worth a Google Aurora Nevada. If you're a Mark Twain fan and you read some of his early works, like Roughing it, I think he's actually written from Aurora. He calls it Esmerelda, though the name chain.
Joshua:I'm looking at pictures right now. I'm looking at a picture from 1934. It literally looks like something out of a Western.
Jeff Wagg:Yeah, in 1934, it was a Scooby-Doo ghost town. It absolutely was. Wow, yeah. Then the San Franciscans came and stole all the bricks. Wow, wow, geez.
Craig:San Francisco. You'd be ashamed of yourself. Yeah, so that one I had. I think these ghost towns for real.
Jeff Wagg:That one was an exception because it didn't meet my criteria, because it doesn't have a zip code, but it's so cool I had them. Yeah, yeah. And again, there's a whole podcast worth just on that one town.
Craig:Wow, all right, next up Josh.
Joshua:North Carolina, north Carolina.
Jeff Wagg:So this was my eastern, southernmost one. I feel like I should have gone to Florida, but the only Aurora in Florida wasn't worth visiting. So rural North Carolina is in a phosphate mining district and it's a town on the edge of the world, or at least North America's largest phosphate mine. Phosphate is the sediment to the bottom of the ancient oceans and they use it for fertilizer and massive equipment they use to pull this out of the ground. It's just stunning to watch these things. They use giant shovels but they find stuff in it and what they find are like sharks' teeth from you know, megalodon sharks, megalodon teeth, all those crazy things. And there is a tiny museum in town dedicated to the stuff they've found in the mines and one of the cool things they do is they'll have the mine trucks come over and just make piles in the parking lot and you can dig through and find your own shark teeth and fossilized shells and stuff.
Jeff Wagg:Oh wow, that's cool, it's really cool. Now there's another notable thing about North Carolina, about rural North Carolina, is they were attacked by a hurricane in the, I think, like 2011, and they just left the town. It's nearly a ghost town. The downtown area has like department stores and the windows are broken out and there's still merchandise on the racks. I mean, it's actually kind of sad, but kind of fun too. So that's North Carolina.
Craig:Yeah.
Jeff Wagg:North.
Craig:Carolina. Wow, you can dig for your own fossils, josh, I like it, yeah, in a parking lot.
Jeff Wagg:You don't even have to get dirty or in a camp. Sounds like a great place to bring kids.
Craig:Yes, I think magic kids Absolutely.
Joshua:That would be cooler.
Craig:Because you think about it too. That's part of geocaching. We're like treasure hunters, that's the feel. That's the thing. Next up we have Kansas, aurora, kansas.
Jeff Wagg:Aurora, kansas is my bet noir of this trip. Everybody I asked about this town said oh, you mean the Catholic town? Like what does that mean? Apparently, in that part of Kansas this was the only place where Catholics lived and on my fourth trip there because it's taken me four trips to understand this place I actually talked to some people and they said, yeah, we have a Catholic church here and this is where all the Catholics live and they don't really commune with the other communities.
Jeff Wagg:Very, very small place of population of 300. And basically now it is dominated by windmills. They do have a standalone jail that is its own building that was built in like 1870. That's interesting to see. But Aurora Kansas I use as an extreme to contrast against, say, aurora Colorado, which is actually growing and getting bigger than Denver. Eventually Aurora is going to eat Denver, which is hard to imagine, but geographically it's true. So Kansas is not high on the list of places I would recommend you visit, unless you're really into windmills, because you can drive right up to the base of those giant windmill farms and you can get some really interesting shots. Boy, just a really hard place to find out about If you're a geocacher.
Joshua:If you're a geocacher, you do want to visit Kansas though, because three hours to the east I'm sorry, three hours to the west is Mingo, kansas, which is the home of the world's oldest geocache.
Craig:Oldest physical geocache. Oh, I didn't know that Oldest physical geocache. Wow, oldest physical geocache Yep. Yeah, that still exists. There's older ones, from zero. I think it's from GC30, is it Joe? Is that the GC30?
Jeff Wagg:Yes.
Craig:GC30. There you go. Look at that coming out from the top of my head Pretty good, impressive. And, joe, you and I did that together in actual fact as well, which is pretty cool.
Joshua:Yes, there.
Craig:Next up. There's not much there. No, there's not much else there, it's just the world's oldest physical geocache, Indiana a rower Indiana On my first time doing this.
Jeff Wagg:It was my last place I visited. It was rower Indiana, partially because it was so close. It's not that far. It's three hours from Chicago, where some of these places are 30 hours from Chicago. This is a very interesting town on the river. It's right across the Ohio River from Kentucky and I think it's the Ohio River. I would have to check that Two. Well, basically I'll just focus on one. Well, no two, two of things there. One is they had a high school museum. I Saw the sign. I was like what the heck is a high school museum? And I went in. It's a museum dedicated to the high school that closed in the 50s. The high school has been gone. They don't have a high school. It's not a big enough place. They have a union school, like most places do now. But the people who lived there were so dedicated to this high school that they built a museum of it. You go in its racks of poodle skirts and old banners from games and some football jerseys and Jeff?
Craig:yes, jeff, does it. Does it have the lockers from Aurora Illinois?
Jeff Wagg:It did, and I pointed that out to them.
Joshua:I better.
Jeff Wagg:I went and showed them. So do you know? These lockers come from Aurora Illinois and they're like no, we didn't, and so anyway, yes, they did. Good question.
Joshua:So the museum is not dedicated to just like the American High School, but it's dedicated to that high school that's been gone for decades, but in in their effort to highlight their high school. I'm sure it does Demonstrate what the American High School was like whenever in the in the back to the future days. Yeah, yeah exactly.
Jeff Wagg:You know if you're back to the future, fan, you could look at this is like a store of their props, enchanted enchantment under the sea, you know. Anyway, and they have a lot of these places, have like this big old building that the one rich guy built, you know. So there's one of those there. I won't get into that. The other interesting thing is the cemetery Quick thing for people who are in a place and want to see stuff and don't know what to see, find the cemetery. I mean consider cemeteries to be geocaches, because they always have really interesting stuff.
Jeff Wagg:This cemetery was built on an Indian burial ground, literally because that's where the Indians buried their dead. Oh well, bury our dead there too. And then the cemetery grew and grew and this woman died in In the area and wanted to be buried in her Cadillac. So they did so. She's buried in a Cadillac, el Dorado that takes up like 30, lots of Not lots of plots when we buried dead people, those things and and there's just a big open area and you know that you're walking on a woman sitting in her Cadillac.
Craig:Just really Bizarre little thing in this town you do that just with a DeLorean, wouldn't you?
Jeff Wagg:You could turn a DeLorean into a camper. I'm absolutely sure of it. Yes, you can.
Joshua:I wonder if it's a small, maybe a small camp?
Craig:I've seen actually a photo, jeff, on your Facebook page with a DeLorean as a camper.
Jeff Wagg:Oh yeah, that's right what that was going around. I forgot about that, yeah.
Joshua:You know what, craig, mm-hmm. Aurora, indiana. You know they could have knocked down that high school. That's right. You know they could have knocked it down, yeah, but they looked at that high school and they were like, man, we're proud of our high school. Yep, we're not gonna knock that down. You know, that's when somebody's proud of their town. That's a rare thing these days. Did you know that?
Craig:Did you know that, jeff, that the judge has to get that in every single?
Joshua:Movie that's from no, I don't so one of my favorite travel movies is planes, trains and on the moon. Oh right and they're in Wichita and they take the cab in the middle of night. He's like it's in the middle of the night and John candy turns to Steve Martin and he says well, you know, he's proud of his town. That's a rare thing these days.
Jeff Wagg:So this has become your like. They killed Kenny yeah.
Joshua:And I missed it on one episode.
Craig:Oh, he did he did and I didn't. I didn't. I even said it on one episode instead of him too. So there you go. But that was one, Josh. We've got one more left on Terrier, but guess what we're gonna do. Guess what we're gonna do what we're gonna save that for a golden nugget. What do you? A golden nugget, oh my god wrap up this episode now and then Jeff stay on and we'll do Ontario. That's a golden nugget for our patrons. Sounds good, that was your idea that Josh wasn't mine.
Joshua:Jeff, I just want to say thank you. We need you, have you on the show again. I love it. You, in your Experience, in your knowledge, you are exactly the type of person that this show is about. Finding all these nooks and crannies? I mean, who knew? Who knew there was a lady buried in her Cadillac in Indiana?
Jeff Wagg:everybody, everybody.
Joshua:What Jeff knew, I knew that's wrong and this is exactly geocaches. When it comes to the Aurora thing, we're always, we're always looking for goals and this whole, this whole idea that you were, you were guided by your travel, by just the name Aurora Fascinating, and it's exactly the way we think here. So, jeff, thank you so much for coming on. Jeff, where can people find you? We've alluded to it already, but where can people find you on social media?
Jeff Wagg:Yeah, I mean built to go, whatever it is basically, and when you, if you Google Jeff wag, you'll find me too. I used to work for James Randy the magician, and so there's a lot of stuff about that, but I am not the astrophysicist, so if you come across, a Jeff wag who's an astrophysicist. I'm happy to take all that glory, but it's not.
Craig:I did, but lucky, I knew what you look like before. Hey, he's much better looking. I'm gonna say this as well Josh built to go calm. That's two teas, not one or not three.
Jeff Wagg:That's right. Learning Jeff? Yeah, that's right. He has listened to my shows. No, yeah, built to go calm. A link you to everything.
Craig:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Joshua:All right, everybody. If you've been enjoying our podcast, we would really appreciate your support. By supporting us, you're helping us create even better content and keep it free for everyone, so please consider joining us at patreoncom backslash treasures of our town, and we're gonna have a golden nugget from this episode. We're gonna find out the final Aurora of Jeff's top 10.
Craig:And Josh, as I said last episode as well, we have a free tea now in patreon as well. So if you want to join patreon and get just a little snippet of the nuggets not all of them, but you're snippet of the nuggets for free you can. So go to go to patreoncom For slash treasures of our town, and that you can join up for free as well. So our next episode, josh. We haven't actually physically worked it out yet because we're recording in advance, but we'll have it out very, very soon. So tune in for that. But how can people contact us or find us, josh?
Joshua:Feel free to reach out to us at treasures of our town podcast at gmailcom, or you can follow us on Facebook, instagram, twitter and YouTube.
Craig:So that's fair show for today. Please subscribe, rate and review on your favorite podcasting app and as always Josh Me.
Joshua:Your travels always leads you to the most unexpected and amazing hidden gems in Aurora and beyond. See you next time. Everybody Bye, you didn't say it goodbye.