Weird World Adventures Season 2 Spotlight: Episode 8 Adventures Out West

I should tell you upfront that this episode starts with trees. Specifically, with the largest living things on earth, which are not whales or elephants or any of the other large animals you might reasonably guess — they are Sequoia trees, and they are so incomprehensibly large that standing beneath one produces a feeling that I can only describe as productive insignificance. You become acutely aware of your own smallness, which, in the right frame of mind, is actually extremely pleasant. They were one of the main reasons we went out west for Weird World Adventures.

For this episode of Weird World Adventures, Michael and I began this road trip at Sequoia National Park, specifically in the Giant Forest, where the General Sherman Tree — the largest tree on the planet by volume — stands in a grove of its peers like a quietly magnificent fact. The trail to Sherman is easy enough, which means you arrive at the tree without having exhausted yourself, which means your entire capacity for wonder is available when you look up and realize this tree has been alive since before the Roman Empire. Before Christianity. Before most of the civilizations whose mythology I’ve spent my academic life studying. I found that genuinely humbling, which takes something.

We also hiked the Tokopah Falls Trail, which (sometimes) rewards you with a waterfall that cascades down granite walls in a way that seems almost performatively beautiful, like the landscape is showing off. California’s wilderness does tend toward the theatrical.

From Sequoia, we drove down to Long Beach to spend Halloween aboard the Queen Mary — a decision I stand behind completely. The Queen Mary is a 1930s ocean liner that has been docked in Long Beach since 1967 and is now, depending on who you ask, a hotel, a historical site, a paranormal hotspot, and home to one of the more elaborate Halloween events in Southern California. Dark Harbor transforms the ship into a haunted experience every October, and we were there for it.

But I want to make sure I mention the Dark Arts Emporium in the same breath as Dark Harbor, because it deserves more than a footnote. A curated collection of occult artifacts and curiosities, it’s the kind of space that speaks directly to a specific kind of person, which is to say it spoke directly to me. There’s something about the intersection of the maritime and the macabre that the Queen Mary embodies completely. Ships have their own folklore — ghost stories, superstitions, the mythology of the deep — and the Queen Mary carries it all in her riveted steel bones.

Then we went to Las Vegas, because of course we did.

I want to be clear that Las Vegas is a genuinely weird place beyond the gambling and the spectacle, and this episode makes the case for it. We attended CSI Con, which is a convention for skeptical science.

We also played Twilight Zone Mini Golf (this is a real thing that exists and is exactly as wonderful as it sounds) and visited the Cabinet of Curiosities, which is the kind of attraction Las Vegas rarely gets credit for having. Weird Vegas is real, and this episode proves it.

Adventures Out West is streaming now on Amazon Prime, free for Prime members internationally. Find it free on the Fawesome app via Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and other platforms. Pack light. The Sequoias have been waiting since before you can imagine.