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Roadside Oddities
People had to stop. To get gas.
To go to the bathroom.
To stay the night. Why not combine that need to stop along with something to bring in more money?
Roadside attractions started springing up everywhere. And the weirder the attraction, the better. Like carnies hawking their weird sideshows, signs sprouted up along the highways. Take a look at our two-headed calf! See the Eighth Wonder of the World! In Texas. Washington. Mississippi… Yeah, really. Who hasn’t heard of Wall Drug’s excellent signage? They have a bunch of oddities there, including a jackalope. And what about “SEE ROCK CITY” that was painted on barns across the countryside? Not many of those barns Or maybe just “The Thing!” What is the THING?
And simply “Here It Is” along Route 66. Roadside oddities are caves, buildings, old diners, larger-than-life sculptures, water towers. Most anything. Well, anything odd, that is. So water towers are weird? Well, sure. If they’re painted to look like a
peach.
Or built to look like the
Leaning Tower of Pisa.
You know, those buildings built to look like something else. Like maybe a
duck.
Or a
goose on her nest.
And then along came the freeways. Many of the wonderful old tourist traps were bypassed. People started to hurry from place to place.
They didn’t want to eat at a funky old diner that looked like an old streamlined train car. They wanted the same boring meal from the same boring chain restaurant. Stay at a motel room shaped like a teepee And so many of those great old roadside oddities disappeared off the face of the earth. Luckily, a lot of the great old roadside attractions have been refurbished. Especially along old Route 66
Another of those great two–lane highways is the Lincoln Highway, America’s first coast-to-coast road. There used to be tons of cool roadside oddities along this highway. One by one, they seem to be disappearing. Kitschy old diners go bankrupt. Funky old drive-ins turn into parking lots. The Lincoln Highway goes through 12 states – New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. So there’s still plenty to see along the Lincoln Highway. And let’s not forget Highway 395 This highway went from Southern California up through Oregon and Washington to the Canadian border. Besides refurbishing old roadside oddities, some people are building new ones.
Like mimetic architecture that looks like a mortar and pestle and actually houses a pharmacy. Like “Hare It Is” ”, a play on the famous “Here It Is” signage mentioned before. Like hay sculptures along rural highways. More and more, people are becoming interested in saving the weird tourist attractions of before and in creating new ones, too. 
From Roadside Oddities to Weird Tourist Attractions Home Page
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left, but Rock City is still a weird tourist attraction that’s going strong.
.
? Forget it. Grab a room at a chain motel.
, that famous road that went from Chicago to the Pacific Ocean.
