When in NOLA we always stop at Marie Laveau’s crypt in the St Louis Cemetery. We pay our respects, leave an offering, then return to our drinking.
I once visited Curly Howard’s grave.
A good friend and I do this kind of thing as a hobby. We make the trip by motorcycle. We’ve visited the site where Pretty Boy Floyd was gunned down, as well as the former funeral home where his death mask is still on display. We went to Steubenville just to see the Dean Martin mural. We rode to the cemetery where the original Night of the Living Dead filmed. We sought out a mass grave of Spanish Flu victims near Butler PA. We’ve eaten hamburgers in a Burger joint that used to be a Winky’s and is still recognizable as such. We’ve seen the world’s largest tea pot. We toured a now empty prison that sits in the shadow of an Indian burial mound. The next trip will probably be to a nudist colony.
Religious pilgrimage, I suppose technically. When I went to Ireland, one of our stops was a place where there had been an apparition of the Virgin Mary. We stopped there to look around, but probably wouldn’t have bothered if it had been much out of our way.
For other persons, I suppose that I once went to a house where Edgar Allen Poe had lived, while I was living in Philadelphia. The basement was suitably creepy.
This isn’t so much a particular person I admired, but I feel as if I’ve done a pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Nanowrimo four times. (Visiting San Francisco area for the annual fundraiser in November, went by the office in Berkeley several times too.)