It’s summer again, which means barbecues, water parks, fireworks, outdoor human sacrifices, and of course, the humble American road trip. Road trips are a staple of fair-weather activities. You and a carload of people set out to experience the open highway and the freedom to do whatever you please and find yourself wherever you end up. After all, it’s about the journey, not the destination. The hallmark of any solid road trip is the little stops at novel roadside attractions, put up in big cities, small towns, and the middle of nowhere alike. From the breathtaking to the bizarre, these attractions are meant to fish a few coins from your pocket in exchange for the memory of being there. While I tried to avoid things that are already famous, there are a few which stick out, and if you don’t see your favorite (or something you feel must be included), you may either a) cram it or b) let me know via social media. See details on that at the bottom of the article. Behold, my list of often-overlooked, but not-to-be-missed slices of pure Americana, by state, alphabetically.
In the Southern state of Alabama, there exists a town called Dothan. This is a worthwhile stop for the road tripper as it contains within its borders not only a "Monument to the Hog" (which is a 26-foot-long pig made of metal) but also the World’s Largest Peanut Statue. If that’s ‘nut’ enough for you, there are also smaller peanut statues scattered throughout town, including a golden peanut and an Elvis peanut.
Alaska is huge, and it’d be impossible to name all the weird shit they have there, but notable is "Mukluk Land," in Tok, where can be found not only a giant boot but also a sight called "Santa’s Rocket Ship." The jolly old elf went all space-age on us. Additionally, of the famed dog runs bringing precious serum antidote to quell the 1925 Nome diphtheria outbreak, we recall Balto, who got a couple movies, but seldom his fellow sled dog, Togo, who is taxidermied and on display in Wasilla. Also, there’s a place called Trapper Creek, which has a store called "Wal-Mike’s," that retails junk and boasts a jar containing a severed human hand of unknown provenance, begging for your gander
In Phoenix, there’s a pyramid constructed by a beloved early 20th-century governor, which actually is his (and his wife’s) tomb. There’s also a rock in Scottsdale which looks like a floppy, flaccid cock, featuring free parking nearby. Moving on to Sun City, which is itself a giant old folks’ home, has a museum about... old folks’ homes.
There’s a 30-foot tall, giant, dancing hog— the second hog-related entry on my list. It doesn’t actually dance but is instead frozen in mid-dance step. Also present in the state is a Monster Mart, enshrining the local version of Sasquatch, known as the Boggy Creek Creature1. And speaking of monuments to strange creatures, you can also visit the house where Bill and Hillary Clinton got married.
Cali is known for many popular tourist attractions but seldom mentioned are the Alien Fresh Jerky outlet in Baker, which sports statues of UFOs and giant little green men. There is also a Pee Wee Golf place in Guerneville, with utterly bizarre mini-golf statuary, such as cannibals cooking a man and a deranged head of cartoon Yogi Bear. They, too, have a giant metal hog named "Lord Snort" in Healdsburg.
There is a castle made of scrap aluminum, mostly beer cans, in Antonito. It is run by an eccentric fellow named Cano, who built it because God told him to. Also made of aluminum is the largest fork in the US, which is not (in any way) related to the previously mentioned castle and is in the town of Creede. No hogs in CO, but there’s a monument to the Alferd Packer cannibal massacre in Lake City, which is "America’s Favorite Cannibal Town," according to them.
PEZ museum! Everyone’s favorite candy dispensed by heads on a stick has a whole museum dedicated to its existence and thousands of unique dispensers. It’s in the PEZ factory in Orange. CT also sports another severed limb attraction: the severed arm of St. Edmund, in the appropriately named town of Mystic.
Delaware has a "merman" on display in Lewes, one of the famous "Fiji Mermaids" from the mid-1800s. It’s appropriately gross and cheesy at the same time. The municipality of Milford also has a large statue of an Amish man, and Georgetown contains the World’s Largest Frying Pan. You could fry a whole cow in this thing, or as they tell you, 200 chickens.
Behold the nightmarish landscape that is the seat of the United States government! Postcards available.
There’s a headless brontosaurus statue in Brooksville. It’s headless because the guy building it fell off a ladder and died halfway through, so the citizens said "fuck it" and left it there for the last 54 years. Jacksonville has a restaurant, Clark’s, which has a taxidermied sasquatch head, among thousands of others, as well as a live alligator. Also, while you’re in FL, visit Marathon and see the grave of Flipper, the TV dolphin who captured the hearts of a generation, which is, you guessed it, a giant statue, though not in the "world’s biggest" range of size.
So, this one may be more well-known than some of the others, but it’s another giant peanut—this time with Jimmy Carter’s trademark grin, and it lives in his hometown of Plains. It has been featured internationally in the popular Internet meme, "this pleases the N U T." There is also a lunch box museum in Columbus and an amusement park of sorts, called "Tank Town," in Morganton. Here you can drive tanks (actually, tracked APCs2) over junker cars for a couple of hundred bucks.
Hawaii seems like an outlier here, as you can’t really drive there. That said, for completion’s sake, here it is on the list. There is, for some reason, a statue of Abe Lincoln chopping down trees with an ax in Ewa Beach and a giant bust of Jack Lord, from Hawaii Five-O, in Honolulu. Hawaii also sports its own phallic rock in Molokai. I’ve actually been to this one. It’s decidedly less cock-like than the one in Arizona but is sufficiently cock-like nonetheless.
Potato-themed stops are the norm here, the more notable of them are located in Driggs, with its giant spud drive-in theater and the Big Idaho Potato Hotel, wherein you can actually stay in the eponymous tuber, which has way more room than you might think. There’s also a museum to prostitution in Wallace, called the Oasis Bordello Museum.
There’s a Dungeons and Dragons-themed park featuring sculptures of wizards, knights-errant, ogres, and, of course, dragons littering the grounds. There is also a maze of hidden passages and secret doors. Sounds pretty boss. The town of Casey is home to not only the World’s Largest Pitchfork but also a giant mailbox, birdcage, and pair of antlers, for some reason.
There is nothing of note in Indiana. Please avoid the entire state.
There’s a giant spider sculpture in Avoca, where the spider’s body is an old Volkswagen Beetle. There is also a tour, by boat, of "Spook Cave," which is a haunted house-type deal with extra cheese, but the water and the boat trip are the real deal, and all in an underground cave. There’s also a movie theater in Newton, where there’s a domestic pig who sits in on every showing, in a seat of her own, often sporting costumes related to the film being shown.
These motherfuckers keep the World’s Largest Ball of Twine in Cawker City. There is also a 60-ton concrete buffalo in Longford, and Lucas features "America’s Most Artistic Giant Toilet." No word on whether there are larger, more artistic toilets in other nations.
Kentucky features the world’s premier hillbilly museum. Located in Calvert City, it’s chock full of, well, hillbilly art and is curated by a man who once played a Romulan on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Admission is free. You can also see famed frontiersman and politician Daniel Boone’s skull in Frankfort.
Behold! Another severed limb! This time, it’s the arm of St. Valerie. Would it be too much to ask for a leg at some point? The arm can be seen, though not touched without a significant bribe to staff, in Thibodaux. There’s also a Jerry Lee Lewis Museum and Liquor Store in Ferriday. They have his training toilet from when he was a small child. Lewis, who is still alive as of this writing, presumably doesn’t care that people come to see where he shat as a child.
They have their own desert. A freak natural phenomenon, the desert of Freeport looks nothing like the rest of Maine. It’s an arid collection of sand, dunes, and sand dunes. It’s buried its surroundings in the 100-some-odd years since it showed up and remains to this day. Also, be sure to visit the Future Burial Site of Stephen King, an open pit in Bangor, just waiting for his corpse to be tossed in.
Baltimore has, like, a dozen Edgar Allan Poe places, including two of his ostensible graves, but if you must truly visit Bodymore, you should see the head of Frank Zappa on a pole. Well, it’s a sculpture, not his real head, which is presumably interred with the rest of him. You can also visit the grave of famous drag queen Divine in Towson and Van Gogh’s "Starry Night," recreated in doorknobs in Bethesda.
You can see the skull of legendary cranial puncture veteran Phineas Gage, as well as the giant steel rod which penetrated it in Boston. If you’re keen, you can also see that "controversial" statue of Baphomet in Salem and the grave and statue of a man "Persecuted for his Beard" in Leominster.
In Mackinaw City, there’s a 65-foot hot dog, the world’s largest, atop a restaurant called "Wienerlicious," which serves smaller versions. Ossineke features a "Prehistoric Zoo," which has statues of dinosaurs, some of which you can go inside of... only to find statues of Jesus. Gotcha! There is also another taxidermied dog inside Crane’s Pie Pantry in Fennville.
The SPAM Museum in Austin. That’s all I have to say about that. Oh, and MN boasts the world’s largest statue of fictional lumberjack Paul Bunyan in Akeley.
Ever want to eat well-reviewed "home cookin’" underneath the skirt of a giant Aunt Jemima knockoff-shaped building? Well, visit Mammy’s Kitchen in Natchez to do just that. Also, if you’re really into that antebellum South vibe, you can stay in "a cotton picker’s shack" as part of an odd motel called Tallahatchie Flats. You may pick your very own cotton while there if you so desire. In fact, you can pick as much as you like and do whatever you want with it. Cotton gin not provided.
Not to be outdone by the other "world’s largest" objects in the rest of the country, Missouri claims, as their own, the World’s Largest Goose. No, not a real honker, but a 40-foot-tall statue of one, in Sumner. Also, they feature a 12-foot pecan with the title of former World’s Largest Pecan, having been surpassed in giantness by another pecan sculpture in Texas about a decade ago.
Okay, I finally get to mention Cut Bank. An eye-blink of a place, purportedly the "coldest spot in the nation," is made more prominent by a 27-foot-tall, giant, talking penguin. It is a statue that does indeed talk. It doesn’t converse but instead plays an endless loop of telling people to buy postcards with its likeness. For yet another severed limb, visit Virginia City to see what they call "Club Foot George’s Club Foot." You could probably make an entire road trip out of just seeing preserved limbs.
The Cornhusker State is the birthplace of popular beverage Kool-Aid and has a Kool- Aid history museum, called "Discover The Dream," in Hastings. In Omaha, you can visit the Alpine Inn, which features large windows, so you can watch raccoons eat the leftovers they throw in front of them while you, yourself, eat ideally fresher food. There’s also a creepy "Klown Doll" museum in Plainview, which is worth seeing if you sleep too easily.
Not to be outdone by Nebraska’s museum, the town of Tonopah has a whole clown MOTEL, for if you really want to see if you can sleep with clowns leering at you. Oh, and it’s located right next to the town cemetery. Pleasant dreams. Additionally, there’s a UFO-themed bar called the "Little A’Le Inn" over by famously top-secret Area 51 in Rachel.
The town of Laconia features the world’s largest video arcade, and a large portion of this arcade is dedicated to classic game machines from the earliest days of video gaming. Not only is it a blast from the past, straight out of 1984, but they play naught but ‘80s tunes on the PA to really take you back. Now that is what I call a road trip stop!
The famed Atlantic City has many an interesting sight within its borders, but one of the lesser-knowns is "Hot Lady Liberty," a fully nude statue of the famous patroness of freedom, seductively posed atop... a mound of dead WWI soldiers. Newark features the so-called "Catacombs of St. Joseph." You might be thinking there’s another severed limb here, but nah, just weird wax replicas of saints in tombs.
The famous atomic town of Alamogordo, apart from many nuclear-themed attractions, sports the World’s Largest Pistachio, at some 30 feet tall. You can also visit the grave of the real-life Smokey Bear, upon whom the famous cartoon character was based, in Capitan.
The locality of Flanders hosts a building shaped like a duck, known appropriately as "The Big Duck," which sells merchandise of itself inside. On a farm in Kerhonkson, there exists the World’s Third-Largest Garden Gnome, named "Gnome Chomsky," for the famous linguist. Rome, NY contains a caveman statue dressed and armed as a US Army soldier... or maybe a GI Joe. Ooga booga.
The Tar Heel State has its own world’s largest, of course, and it is the World’s Largest Chest of Drawers in High Point. There’s a taxidermied horse head in New Bern of a famous firefighting horse named Fred, but the mother lode of taxidermy lies in Southern Pines, home of the Taxidermy Hall of Fame (and Creation Museum), which pretty well sells itself.
The world’s largests in NoDak include the World’s Largest Holstein Cow, the World’s Largest Buffalo, the World’s Tallest Salesman, and the world’s largest turtle, made from old wheels. They are not all in the same location; they are in New Salem, Jamestown, Rugby, and Dunseith, respectively. A good state for checking off a lot of very large things on your to-see list.
The Buckeye State has a surprisingly vast array of weird shit on display, despite its boring reputation. Sadly, I can’t touch on all of them. There are severed human fingers in a jar in Bowling Green, a deformed, taxidermied set of bovines called "Andy D-Day and the 2-Headed Calf" in Brookville, and the "History of Contraceptives Museum" in Cleveland, which is free to enter.
OK is OK for world’s biggest things as well, with the World’s Largest Praying Hands, in Tulsa, the World’s Tallest Gas Pump, in Sapulpa, and the World’s Largest Pop Bottle (and store!) in Arcadia. Not to be missed, as well, is the Twister the Movie Museum in Wakita and the bone overload at the Museum of Osteology in OKC.
My home state. I know about all sorts of oddball shit we have here, so it’s hard to pick just a couple, but I’ll say if we’re doing the whole state, then there’s a real-live, government-approved Sasquatch trap in Jackson County, which is out-of-the-way, but... it’s the only one such thing in existence. The Oregon Vortex in Gold Hill is fairly well-known and is the first of such "mystery spot" attractions in the USA and worth a stop. Sadly, there’s only one world’s largest here, and it’s Howard Hughes’ famous "Spruce Goose," which is the world’s largest wood airplane in the aviation museum in McMinnville. Also in McMinnville (an otherwise dreary place) is Alf’s: a burger joint with a live monkey who fucks around and does monkey things while you eat. Avoid Portland; it’s full of assholes. Assholes like me.
Penn’s Woods is home to an edible world’s largest: world’s largest hamburger, which clocks in at 15 pounds (6.8kg) and is available at Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield. There’s also the shopping mall from "Dawn of the Dead" in Monroeville, and while already famous, the bones of freaks at the Mútter Museum in Philly must be mentioned all the same.
Providence is home to the world’s largest bug, which is a giant termite. There is also the grave of a suspected vampire in Exeter and a rejected gravestone, intended for JFK, in Newport.
Their world’s biggest count includes the World’s Largest Fire Hydrant, World’s Largest Man-Made Crab, World’s Largest Boll Weevil, world’s largest child (a statue, not a real one, thank fuck), and largest boiled peanut, located in Columbia, Myrtle Beach, Bishopville, Columbia again, and Bluffton. You can crawl through the intestines of the giant kid, but not inside any of the others.
In the southernmost Dakota, their world’s biggest count includes the World’s Largest Log Chair, in, fittingly, Deadwood, as well as the World’s Largest Wooden Bigfoot in Keystone, the World’s Largest Hairball in Webster, and the World’s Largest Quarter-Pounder, a non-edible statue, in Rapid City. There’s also a remarkably large prairie dog statue, but it is curiously not billed as the world’s largest, which leaves me with questions. It is in Cactus Flat.
Tennesseein’ is Tennebelievein’, but they have only one world’s biggest thing: the World’s Largest Museum Attraction, which features half of the legendary steamer Titanic, recreated in very-far-from-the-ocean Pigeon Forge, where it is noted that one cannot, anywhere, purchase a forged pigeon. There is also a giant statue in Knoxville in the likeness of Alex Haley, of "Roots" fame, and while it doesn’t boast of it, it is considered the largest statue of an African-American in the USA.
They say everything is bigger in Texas, but despite all that, their only prominent world’s biggest is a giant pair of cowboy boots in San Antonio. Lubbock has a 13-ton sculpture of John Wayne’s head, which I feel must be the world’s biggest one of these, but it is not boasted as such. There’s also the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, where you can see "Old Sparky," the electric chair through which 361 condemned souls met their demise. Oh, and the actual World’s Largest Pecan is in Seguin.
Utah has the world’s biggest, uh, hole. A large, open-pit mine in Herriman, which is some 2.5 miles wide and 1/2 mile deep. There’s also the World’s Largest Watermelon Slice in Green River. Another taxidermied domestic animal, previously the world’s largest St. Bernard, has its head on the wall of the Shooting Star Saloon in Huntsville.
Their credits on the world’s biggest list include the World’s Tallest Filing Cabinet in Burlington and the World’s Tallest Ladderback Chair in Bennington. There’s also a grave with a window in New Haven and a museum featuring art constructed entirely of bugs in St. Johnsbury.
Regular Virginia doesn’t have a lot of world’s biggest anything, save for the World’s Largest Apple in Winchester. However, they do sport the World’s Oldest Edible Ham, though they will not serve you any, and in the same place, there’s the World’s Oldest Peanut. Not sure how they’re quantifying that one, but they’re both in the same building in Smithfield.
The Evergreen State’s contributions to large things include the World’s Largest Collection of Chainsaw Carvings in Allyn and the World’s Largest Egg in Winlock. Also worth mentioning is the World’s Largest Spitting Clam in Long Beach, which does indeed spit water— every hour on the hour or if you shove a quarter in its clam-hole. Next to that clam is the former World’s Largest Frying Pan, since surpassed by the one in Delaware.
The Mothman State’s contributions to America’s roadsides include the World’s Largest Teapot in Chester, the World’s Largest Horse, a taxidermied equine in Point Pleasant, and a pair of mummified corpses of former insane asylum residents in Phillipi. Also, if you’re a fan of the former Weekly World News, you can visit the ostensible home of "Bat Boy," introduced in that publication in 1992. It’s a cave in Lewisburg, and apart from that notable credit, it’s also huge, and well worth a tour.
The Cheesehead State just might be the king of very large things. It features the World’s Heaviest Ball of Twine in Lake Nebagamon (not to be confused with the aforementioned World’s Largest Ball of Twine in Kansas), the World’s Largest Badger in Birnamwood, the World’s Largest Six Pack (of beer) in La Crosse, the World’s Largest Talking Loon in Mercer, the World’s Largest Cone-Top Beer Can in Potosi, and the World’s Largest Fiberglass Fish (which has an observation deck in its mouth) at the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward.
The Cowboy State has a few world’s biggest things as well, such as an archway over a downtown highway in the town of Afton (made entirely of elk antlers), the World’s Largest Jackalope, former World’s Largest Jackalope in Douglas, the World’s Largest Hot Springs in the appropriately-named Thermopolis, and of course, the World’s Largest Active Geyser, in Yellowstone. The town of Rawlins also has a pair of shoes made from the flesh of a former horse thief. They take that shit seriously there. Fuck around with a horse, and you end up as a pair of goddamn shoes.
That’s all fifty states. Nothing on territories or Canadian provinces, as yet.
So, gas up your ride, grab some friends and set out to capture the essence of the obscure, the bizarre, and, of course, the world’s biggest.
Safe travels,
-WStM
1-We’re drivin’ down the road, lookin’ for a Waffle House, drinkin’ lots of Wiiiild Turkey!
2-Armored Personnel Carriers — basically steel-plated, tracked minivans, typically full of infantry.
-Wombstretcha The Magnificent
Wombstretcha The Magnificent is a greasy burger connoisseur, severed limb analyst, world’s biggest enthusiast, writer, and retired rapper from Portland, OR. He can be found at Wombstretcha.com, on Twitter as @Wombstretcha503 and on Facebook (boo!) and MeWe (yay!) as "Wombstretcha The Magniflcent."
