Satisfying Andy Licious’s thread about Kansas made me think of “tourist attractions” that, well, aren’t – things that celebrate stuff that most people aren’t interested in going to see. A couple of items from my list:
The New York State Museum of Cheese was actually underwritten by state funds. Obviously, the first thing you think of when somebody says “New York” is “cheese,” right?
25 miles south of me is the Ava Gardner Museum. I have a soft spot for this one; I have a great deal of respect for Ava as an actress and as a woman who “made it” and kept her ties to her home. And the story about how the museum came to be sounds like the plot of a movie from her heyday, but is quite factual.
Well, I’ve always enjoyed Neola Iowa’s Hoo-Doo Days and locally, Conrad’s Black Dirt Days. The Grout Museum is of course, named after the big bucks what started the museum, but that’s not nearly as amusing.
While in Muscatine Iowa, one can visit Weed Park, which is much lovelier than it sounds.
Well, considering that pretty much every town in Louisiana has some kind of stupid festival every year, I guess I have a lot of ammo. The stupidest, however (or at least the one with the stupidest name), is the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City. Appetizing, eh?
Other stupid festivals:
The Cypress Sawmill Festival - Patterson, LA
The Church Point Buggy Festival - Church Point, LA
Rayne Frog Festival - Rayne, LA
Lecompte Pie Festival - Lecompte, LA (When come, bring pie. [Sorry, couldn’t resist.])
Well, this isn’t bizarre or strange, but I think it’s neat–and one of these days I’ll get off my butt and go! It’s the A.C. Gilbert’s Children’s Museum in Salem, OR. Several Victorian-era houses from around the city have been moved to the riverfront to make the “Discovery Village.” Remember a year or two back when there was a fuss over Raggedy Ann would be added to the “Toy Hall of Fame”? The Hall of Fame is at the Discovery Village. And who was A.C. Gilbert? Why, he was only the inventor of the erector set and many other educational toys. See? Neat stuff, and only a few miles from my home. I’ll go one of these days.
Carhenge. Hands down. Found in Alliance, Nebraska, and in my opinion well worth the 40 miles out of the way we had to drive to get there. (We were on an Oregon Trail-themed road trip at the time.)
MrWhatsit got a great picture of the sun rising over Carhenge. And I, of course, bought a bumper sticker at the local gift shop/gas station.
My personal favorite is The Chair House of Eagleswood Township in New Jersey. It is a residential home on Route 9 with a chair on the roof.
As a child we would go camping a few miles up the road and I would beg my parents to drive by as often as possible. I just couldn’t figure out why it was there and I was simply fascinated by it.
Seriously, I ought to know; I had open a thread of yours on the Unaboard and Satisfying Andy Licious’s Kansas thread here, when the idea for this thread struck me. And of course I got who started which thread crosswired.
How about the Museum of Bad Art (http://www.glyphs.com/moba/) in Boston? That seems like a place one would be likely to AVOID, yet you can pay to enter. Go figure.
And while we’re on the subject of museums, if there’s art in an art museum, what’s in a children’s museum?
My family just got back from a three-week trek hither and yon, but one of the main things they were going to see was the World’s Longest Yard Sale. It was … interesting.
They also saw the vacuum cleaner museum. Oops, it’s called the Hoover Historical Building, or something.
For a surreal experience, don’t miss Wall Drug Store in Wall, South Dakota. They have signs for this place for mile after mile along the Interstate, each advertising a different and bizarre reason to stop. When you finally get there you have been thoroughly hypnotized by them and must go in.
I feel a strange compulsion to go back some day too. :eek:
And the meta-weird tourist attraction - The House on The Rock. Sort of like everything in this thread rolled into one.
It was featured in the novel American Gods, and people who aren’t from around here often do this :eek: when they find out it’s real. It features and indoor recreation of a main street in the 1900s, the world’s largest and second largest indoor carousels, the world’s largest mechanized orchestra (mechanical monkeys, if I remember right) and a ton of weird ostentatious junk this guy had collected in his lifetime.
You go in there, and the first two rooms are a little odd, but they’re basically nothing an eccentric with packrat tendencies and some weird buddies couldn’t accumulate in a couple of decades.
Three hours later, you’re almost done with the tour.
Total madness, I tell you. I keep meaning to visit it again someday.
The Corn Palace is a monument to people who don’t have a whole lot to do and all the time in the world to do it in. After a South Dakota winter, those folk are desparate for entertainment—without the Corn Palace, who knows what they might do?
And, koeeoaddi, Wall Drug’s claim to fame is based on its signature sign “Free Ice Water.” The concept of “Free Ice Water” is hard for us to imagine, but thousands of years ago, when the Wall Drug Store was just a simple little place, free ice water was a big deal. People found the sign amusing, and began putting them up in places far removed from Wall Drug. Today, Wall Drug is a tourist trap par excellence, but you can still get “Free Ice Water” there. And buffalo burgers, jackalopes, bumper stickers and a whole slew of other useless junk. Kids love the place.
