‘It’s not fair to say that ‘The Entrance to the Underground’ is dangerous because it leads to dangerous places. In fact, those sensible travellers that choose to remain within a kilometer of ‘The Entrance’ on its subterranean side have very little to fear. It’s around the kilometer point that ‘The Underground’ begins to fork, and that’s where danger lies, still not from any one aspect but in the broad sense that it becomes increasingly likely one will get lost past the first turn. 

Why?

Well because nobody has yet found ‘The Exit to the Underground,’ though it could be argued ‘The Entrance’ serves both purposes. ‘The Entrance’ leads down into a nation-sprawling web of subterranean infrastructure, some of which is abandoned and some of which, like the New York Subway System, remains active. From ‘The Entrance,’ located at the back of a mineshaft in Eastern Wyoming, a careful traveler can find themselves in the dank sewers of New Orleans or the basement cities of Iowa without ever having found a way to reach the surface. Unless one backtracks through ‘The Entrance,’ it is impossible to leave. 

Those travellers who have come upon the bottoms of open wells or underground warehouses repurposed for raves report that those exits that should exist, those exits through which other people seem to pass, are inaccessible to those who have moved first through ‘The Entrance to the Underground.’ A cave-in will occur. A door will lock. An immovable bouncer will block the way. ‘The Underground’ rearranges itself to prevent exit through any other means.

Why risk it then?

There are a few reasons. Suspected criminals sometimes avoid capture in ‘The Underground,’ leveraging their seeming inability to leave by normal means. And reckless explorers believe that because a thing is dangerous it must be conquered. Finally, braving ‘The Entrance to the Underground’ is currently the only known means by which to access ‘The Hidden Operahouse,’ a Wayside attraction in its own right.

Those hoping to attempt a viewing of ‘The Hidden Opera’ should pack for two weeks travel and a night’s stay for the show itself. Other guides suggest food for an extra week as a buffer- it’s easy to get turned around in ‘The Underground.’ This guide suggests that the week will only prolong a miserable end. ‘

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘‘The Library of Bookmarks and Worn Soles’ consists entirely of items donated in pairs: one book, marked and unfinished, and one pair of shoes, worn at least a year. These are displayed together, the bookmark glued in and the soles of the shoes turned outward. Some say ‘The Library’ is a shrine to unfinished business but this author believes it is a testament to lives lived right up until their ends.’

It smells, ‘The Library of Bookmarks and Worn Soles.’ The smell of the books isn’t enough to cover the smell of the shoes which, admittedly adds to the realism of the exhibit but practically reminds me that some of these were the shoes people died in. They stink and they distract me from the books which are sad in their own way. I recognize a number of books with stellar endings sitting unfinished at the halfway point.

More than one section of the museum includes bookmarks placed in books for children, accompanied by the shoes of their parents. I wonder if it’s better to have gotten halfway through Paddington with your kid than never having started it in the first place and I’m interrupted in this thought by the smell, again. I wonder if waterproof shoes collect the blood of their owners during violent deaths. I wonder if that’s the smell.

-traveler

‘A sight to behold, indeed, ‘The Leaking Man Fountain’ in Southern California is criminally undersold. The man, a statue, does not leak so much as he forcibly propels water from every conceivable orifice, largely overshooting the shallow basin in which he is installed. This means that within a day, ‘The Leaking Man’s’ water supply tends to dry up, at which point the mixture of air and residual moisture being forced through ‘The Man’s’ systems takes on an outrageously flatulent sound for about an hour before the water is truly all gone. Then the noise becomes a keening whistle, loud enough to disturb those who live nearby. 

For this reason, locals begrudgingly tend to ‘The Leaking Man’s’ liquid needs, feeding the basin with buckets of water from their homes and keeping the supply free of detritus that might clog the pump. Blockages have proven to be dangerous: a penny lodged itself in ‘The Leaking Man’s’ systems in 2016, leading to a week of dry silence, during which the statue was seen to tremble on its base. The coin was violently expelled into the head of a passerby on the evening of September 17th. The man survived but refuses, to this day, to say from which end the penny emerged.

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘It’s true that there is a grassy acreage in Pennsylvania within which one might find a place outside of time. ‘The Everhill,’ as it’s called, dips at a perfect angle for childlike rolling but, due to some quirk in physics, seems to catch rolling bodies at its center, spinning them in a loose, almost gravitational, grip until something from the outside interrupts their perpetual rotation, at which point they continue to the bottom of the hill. While spinning this way, a human (or animal, and don’t ask how this has been discovered) will not age. 

Mia Long holds the known record for a spin at nearly three years. She came upon ‘The Everhill’ alone and failed to find a ‘spotter’ before attempting the roll. A study of her cells has confirmed this little mortality cheat and her memoir details the lived experience of anti-aging at ‘The Everhill.’ 

Tortuous, in a word.’

It is almost suffocating, the spin at the center of the hill, and time seems to slow such that I worry my spotter, who is a man I met only in the last few minutes, will forget about me or, for some reason or another, choose not to break me from the slopes grip. It isn’t a smooth roll, neither slow nor fast, and I see the summit and the foot in split-second turns, both seeming very close and very very distant. When I reach out my limbs, which goes against much of the advice in these forums, the ground pummels me and still I spin.

There is no breaking oneself out of this. 

Ages seem to pass and I fight a feeling in my stomach that threatens to blossom into nausea. Would my vomit escape this? Or propel me out? I try to remember what I’ve read but am jolted, suddenly, by a sharp force on my ribs, the toe of a man’s foot. I jettison forward, out of the spin, and feel myself approaching the bottom again.

I garble a ‘thank you’ and make my merry way to the parking lot, shoulder over shoulder and pockets full of grass.

-traveler

‘The owners of ‘The Museum of Ultimate Virtual Reality’s’ are like a collection of angry dads who learned to communicate only through passive aggressive demonstrations and intermittent huffing. And if they are dads, their families have abandoned them and they’ve turned to a new audience for the vaguely trauma-inducing but not entirely off-base point of ‘The Museum,’ which seems to be: technology is bad.

Video games. Blu-ray discs. QR menus at restaurants. The entirety of the internet. No digital realm is safe from ‘The Museum of Ultimate Virtual Reality’s’ commentary and they seem to find a new bone to pick each year.

The experience itself requires a traveler to strap a non-functional pair of goggles to their head in order to peruse an environment that might be compared to Wisconsin’s ‘House on the Rock.’ The discomfort one feels at viewing ‘The Museum’s’ scenes through this narrow vantage point is meant to evoke the reins of the tech industry and our experience of the world through iphone selfies and, yes, virtual reality which seemed like it would become much more of a ‘thing’ when ‘The Museum’ was established. This foundational perspective ages ‘The Museum’ in a way that is actually ironic, but that doesn’t seem to have registered with management, who have largely doubled-down on their anti-tech stance with a notable exception for the use of AI-generated imagery on posters, a trait for which all men of their generation are known.’

‘The Museum of Ultimate Virtual Reality’s’ gimmick is the draw, making it an innocuous stop.

But it’s not an easy experience.

It’s a lesson built on the try-hard irony of previous generations with an emphasis on the ‘trying-hard.’ The venue is impressive, both in scope and maintenance. It covers just under an acre if the website is correct. Much of it is inside or sheltered in such a way that it can be traversed in poor weather and a great deal of care has been taken to fill out the details in a way that is evocative at every turn but not busy. 

The trouble is that it’s taken in through blinders: ‘The Museum’s’ proprietary virtual reality visualization system which is essentially no more than a cardboard box strapped to one’s head. The box is assembled with such little care and maintained so poorly that ‘The Museum’s’ derision comes through with a vividness one might attribute to parody. The people I meet exhibit no such self-awareness.

They’re just angry.

They make me put away my phone and they glance begrudgingly at my watch which is digital but not smart. They take my sunglasses simply because they sometimes can’t tell what’s tech and what isn’t. This is spoken with the confidence of people who not only believe that tech might be so inconspicuous as to be invisible in my (largely translucent) frames but assume everybody else is on their side already. Once I’ve been de-teched, I’m given my ‘goggles’ which are thinner and rattier even than I expected, the cardboard stained and weakened by the face-grease of wearers before me. 

Wandering the acreage is… nice.

For a while I’m left alone to peer at scenes arranged from mis-matched dolls and massive, highly-realistic statues of global cryptids and collections of old books turned to illustrations too vulgar or gory to grace modern pages. There is a wild garden and a hive of colorful beetles and an army of animatronic presidents from a world in which the runners-up actually won.

The goggles begin to chafe midday and, after checking again that I am alone, I choose to slip them back over my forehead for a short break. An alarm blares and employees rush in. They surround me, ignoring my apologies, and they begin to clap. 

Taking the goggles off is the lesson, apparently. 

-traveler