Located on Route 66, this place was advertised as a town that had taken its name and run with it…. unabashedly. This appealed to me… That said, the place turned out to be SUCH a major tourist trap that it managed to lack ANY charm, wit, or finesse at all, and the joke … which I admit totally made me want to come see the place, gets REALLY really old after the first 15 minutes of actually being there… to the point of irritating.
From everything I had read the place was a very small town with 25 residents. AND, having just driven past any number of very tiny towns along route 66, that is what I was expecting… 25 residents maintaining a few business all of which played on the name of the place in order to draw tourists to somewhere they’d have otherwise just driven through… All hail the entrepreneurial spirit!
BUT, once I got there, it was very sad… Firstly, as you can see from the pictures, it’s not really a town. I was expecting a small town… a downtown with a handful of business, surrounded by a few houses… like all the other aforementioned small towns I had passed on Route 66…
Instead what I found was a massive attraction that looks like a strip mall tourist trap …. essentially a single business broken into a few separate areas….which is not just unforgivable… it’s lazy. When you arrive you see the fake water tower, intended to make it feel like a “small town” with the implication that they have a school somewhere back there, with team called “the Pirates” — but I think they’re referring to themselves… as in the way Carneys think of the customers as marks to be taken advantage of… only these guys are pirates ripping off the sea of traffic…
What was doubly frustrating was that in the gift store they have lots of magnets focused on the town’s name…. but no bumper stickers (my car is COVERED in bumper stickers)
… When I asked about that the woman working there said that up until now everyone’s wanted magnets, so they ordered lots of them… but now people are starting to ask for stickers, but those they haven’t gotten in yet… (not sure I believed her)
and apparently, just recently a big group had come in and bought out all the good women’s T-shirts (scoop or V neck) so there were none of those either — and definitely none were available in the only design that I was interested in buying — as apparently I’m not the only woman who preferred that design. She suggested I check their webpage over the coming weeks — I did, and didn’t see it there either.
By the time I was done walking around the place… and I admit I stayed longer than I might have had I not been intent on writing about the place, because this place seriously annoyed the CRAP out of me … just … that… much!!! … by the time I got done, I was seriously…. SERIOUSLY pissed at having fallen for this particular tourist TRAP
SO annoyed in fact that I managed to completely miss the fact that around there somewhere (according to Wikipedia) they’ve got the World’s largest Belt buckle … one that even has a Guinness World Book of records designation… yah, I missed that… saw the Funkyard where it’s supposed to be…. did NOT see even one sign promoting it…
Pounding head into wall… will have to go back… pounding head into wall again… THAT said, I’m not seeing it on google either…
Rebecca Radnor's Personal Blog: Consider yourselves warned! 