Dylan Thuras: Hey, Dylan here. You have reached the Atlas Obscura podcast line. I’m not home right now, but leave me a message about the first time you left home to live away on your own, to live away from your parents, to experience what it was like to be an adult for the first time. Maybe you were leaving a small town. Maybe you were moving from one big city to a different one. Tell me about your adventures. 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.
Jane Zimmerman: Hello, my name is Jane Zimmerman. The first time I left home was when I graduated college early in December of 1983. And I went to college in Minnesota, and the first big blizzard and subzero chill was coming down from the Arctic, just as a friend of mine who had graduated in spring said, Hey, I need a roommate in San Francisco, California. So I flew from the Twin Cities all the way to San Francisco, California. I was enchanted. And I loved San Francisco from the very beginning. I count it as my first time away from home because I did find temp work, but I also was covering all my own rent, my health insurance. I was a fully fledged adult. I was off my mom’s payroll, my single mom who really didn’t have a whole lot to keep us going. I woke up to strange smells I couldn’t identify. It turned out to be roasting coffee from all the little Italian coffee roasteries that were on Telegraph Hill in North Beach at that time. I would walk down the hill to the financial district, where I had a bunch of temp jobs until I finally did land a permanent job that came with health insurance and benefits. And on my way down the hill, I would stop at a little Italian bakery. When I was feeling sad about not being able to find a job, the owner, Maria said, as I was buying a donut from her, “Why you look so sad? You are young, you are beautiful. You are just like me at your age.” There was just always something wonderful to wake up to every morning. And at night, the sound of the foghorns you could hear from the bay.
Jennifer: My name is Jennifer. And the first time I left home was when I was 19 years old. I was in college, and I met a man in a band. This was 1999. I don’t mind saying the name of the band, the Bloodhound Gang. Actually, maybe that is embarrassing. I fell in like with someone in the band. And at the time, my mother, who is a fully recovered drug addict, was still using, so there was a lot going on in my personal life. So the fact that I got attached to a man in a band that had an album called Hooray for Boobies should surprise absolutely no one. And we kept in touch after he came through the town where my college was. And I visited him in Los Angeles. And I decided that I wanted to live there. So in early January 2000, I packed up everything I owned. My mother wanted to know where I was going, I said I was going to see a friend for a little bit. And I flew to Los Angeles with no plan, showed up at his doorstep and was immediately told that he was leaving the country to go on tour, I couldn’t stay with him. And I ended up living in a youth hostel on Hollywood Boulevard. I stayed there for three months. In exchange for room and board, I worked at their front desk, got a job at an internet company. This was during the dot com boom for all you youth out there. And I ended up staying for about nine months before crawling back home again. The good news is that I almost immediately got into another relationship and ended up back in California for another four years. So to be clear, as awful as this might sound, I think that I was sort of projecting a lot of things onto these relationships and really just wanted to leave an already tumultuous home life. I don’t recommend dating anybody in a band, especially if one of their songs has a line about “something something animals” and “the Discovery Channel.” If you know, you know, as the kids say.
Samantha: Hi, my name is Samantha. I grew up about 45, 30 minutes south of Chicago. And I grew up very, very Mormon. When it came time to go to college, I put all my eggs in the Brigham Young University in Utah basket. I had never been to Utah. That’s really it was in my mind Mormon Mecca. So I got in, drove across the country with my parents to go to BYU, had no problem saying goodbye. So they left. I’m at BYU. Long story, how I got into this apartment off campus, but I ended up in an apartment with me and four blonde people. I’m not blonde. A lot of Utah Mormons are blonde. And did the Utah thing. Coming from the flatland, Utah was just magic to me. It was—I couldn’t believe mountains, and how beautiful mountains were. And for the first time, I knew which direction things were because the mountains made it very clear what’s north, south, east and west. I was in love. I was in love with Utah. I was in heaven having everybody there be Mormon and having their billboards that were Mormon oriented movies, bookstores. I had never seen that before in my life. Ironically, Utah, BYU and Mormon culture led me out of the church, eventually. I got married at 19, much like a lot of Mormons do. By the time I graduated from BYU, I wanted out so desperately. Me and my husband were so, so—we would have done anything to get out. So we ended up getting a job teaching English in Japan. So we moved over to Japan. So that was a whole other experience of living in a culture that I had never been in and learning a lot of things about that culture. So that’s my “when I moved away” story.
Alex: Hey guys, my name is Alex and I currently live in Rockaway Beach, New York City. But the story of my first time living home actually will go back to my junior year of high school. My family moved to Brisbane, Australia during one of my dad’s work trips. And while I was living there, I really got into the sunshine, beaches and doing lots of photography. So when I graduated high school, I wanted to go to school in Australia for university. But the cost as an international student was just kind of too much of a risk. So I’m back home in Washington State. I went to college in Bellingham. And I really enjoyed it there. Bellingham is an awesome town. But only a couple hours from where I grew up in Tacoma, I don’t really consider leaving home. But when I graduated college, I decided that I wanted to live by the beach again, try to find that taste of Australia. So I applied for several jobs in Southern California. And basically to get any interviews with these companies, I had to lie to all of them and say that either I already lived there or had family I could stay with there. And it kind of got to the point where I was so desperate that I bought a one-way Greyhound ticket to Santa Monica so that I could apply for an interview for jobs in person. But in the end, I really lucked out because I ended up getting a great job offer for a marketing job in a travel company. And that offer came on a Thursday. And two days later, that same Saturday, I had a little going away party with my family, packed up my old 1997 Ford Ranger, and started driving down 1,500 miles from Tacoma, Washington to Huntington Beach, California. And that was on Memorial Day weekend. And now every Memorial Day weekend, I try to take a road trip of at least 500 miles to commemorate that move. And even though I haven’t made it back to Australia since high school, somewhere I have it in my mind that I might end up back there someday. And I still have a really strong love for that culture and where it’s kind of taken me in life since then.
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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 Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.