Category: Big Things/ tourist traps/ road-side attractions

America is full of things like this, with the world’s biggest ball of twine probably being the most famous (In the movie “Michael” (1996) the Arch Angle Michael — played as less than angelic by John Travolta — comes to earth to see these things); I argue that anyone doing a roadtrip across America is sort of obliged to search them out… because they are “Americana” — (that said, I’ve found them in Australia as well)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_largest_roadside_attractions#Illinois

Found a very good quote on the topic, courtesy of Neil Gaiman
“So what is this place?” asked Shadow, as they walked through the parking lot toward a low, unimpressive wooden building.
“This is a roadside attraction,” said Wednesday. “One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.”
“Come again?”
“It’s perfectly simple,” said Wednesday. “In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or…well, you get the idea.”
“There are churches all across the States, though,” said Shadow.
“In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists’ offices. No, in the USA people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they’ve never visited, or by erecting a giant bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.”

― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Big Mac Museum; Irwin, Pennsylvania

Everything is invented somewhere, and while you might think that the Big Mac, the signature burger for McDonald’s might have been created by Ray Kroc, the chain’s founder, or the two McDonald brothers he had partnered with (it was they who had invented the business model) and whose business interests he ultimately bought out… or maybe at their food labs in their global headquarters in Oakbrook, Illinois, you’d be wrong. The Big Mac was invented in Irwin, Pennsylvania by a franchise owner by the name of Jim Delligatti in 1967…

To be honest, I don’t think I’d eaten a big mac in 20 years (I tend to go for the quarter pounder with cheese) but since I was here, I felt it was obligitory.

Different containers the Big Mac came in, my favorite is the tin one

McDonald’s collectables, I THINK they’re figurines of corporate managers

I am deeply embarrased to admit that there’s a 14 foot Big Mac somewhere on the property and I missed it… it is my intent to go there again at some point and take a picture of it.

Dog On The Tucker Box; Gundagai, New South Wales, Australia

This statue titled, “Dog on the Tucker box” is a tribute to Australia’s pioneers, and a ‘well known’ (to Australians) bush poem whose author (may or may not) have been lost to time; it is located on the road between Sydney and Melbourne.

But here’s the thing, when I googled to try to find the famous poem the statue was based on I found multiple different ones and partial ones, and variations on the same theme, or variations of wording…. so if you play the video below, and then follow some “different” poems that various sites were pointing towards as the poem, you’ll see my confusion.

[NOTE: That said, I’m writing this blog post well AFTER my visit. I was at the Dog on a tucker box about 4 months ago, on Feb. 26th, 2018, almost a month after my accident that had resulted in a sever concussion … Even a month later my brain wasn’t close to good (I was talking really really slowly at the time, searching for almost every word) and as such I just haven’t gotten around to writing about it till now. The accident made it impossible to focus my brain the way I needed to in order to blog, and as such I fell woefully behind on the posts the Australia trip … but as I’m currently holed up in the Chicago area (i.e., my home base) doing things like doctor’s visits — including some related to the post concussive syndrome which I am STILL suffering from (albeit very mildly at this point, thankfully) and the fact that I hit the ground so hard that I dislocated my jaw (requiring some expensive visits to my dentist who is trying to fix the damage) — I am taking the opportunity of being back on my home turf to rectify that lapse.]

That said, the “or worse” referred to in the above image, was explained in other versions I found that said that every time you read “the dog sat on the tuckerbox” you should actually convert it to “the dog shat on the tuckerbox” … i.e., the past tense of to shit… in other words, this is a poem about a dog that took a dump on this guy’s lunch box.

Bullocky Bill — by anon

As I came down Talbingo Hill
I heard a maiden cry,
‘There goes old Bill the Bullocky
– He’s bound for Gundagai.’

A better poor old beggar
Never cracked an honest crust,
A tougher poor old beggar
Never drug a whip through dust.

His team got bogged on the five-mile creek,
Bill lashed and swore and cried,
‘If Nobbie don’t get me out of this
I’ll tattoo his bloody hide.’

But Nobbie strained and broke the yoke
And poked out the leader’s eye,
And the dog sat on the tucker-box
Five miles from Gundagai.

————————

‘Nine Miles from Gundagai’ by Jack Moses (A PC version from the 1920’s)

I’ve done my share of shearing sheep,
Of droving and all that;
And bogged a bullock team as well,
On a Murrumbidgee flat.
I’ve seen the bullock stretch and strain
And blink his bleary eye,
And the dog sit on the tuckerbox
Nine miles from Gundagai.

I’ve been jilted, jarred and crossed in love,
And sand-bagged in the dark,
Till if a mountain fell on me,
I’d treat it as a lark.
It’s when you’ve got your bullocks bogged,
That’s the time you flog and cry,
And the dog sits on the tuckerbox
Nine miles from Gundagai.

We’ve all got our little troubles,
In life’s hard, thorny way.
Some strike them in a motor car
And others in a dray.
But when your dog and bullocks strike,
It ain’t no apple pie,
And the dog sat on the tuckerbox
Nine miles from Gundagai.

But that’s all past and dead and gone,
And I’ve sold the team for meat,
And perhaps, some day where I was bogged,
There’ll be an asphalt street,
The dog, ah! well he got a bait,
And thought he’d like to die,
So I buried him in the tuckerbox,
Nine miles from Gundagai.

———————————–

Author unknown about 1850

I’m used to punchin’ bullock teams across the hills and plains.
I’ve teamed outback for forty years through bleedin’ hail and rain.
I’ve lived a lot of troubles down, without a bloomin’ lie,
But I can’t forget what happened just five miles from Gundagai.

‘Twas getting dark, the team got bored, the axle snapped in two.
I lost me matches and me pipe, so what was I to do?
The rain it was coming on, and hungry too was I,
And me dog shat in me tucker-box five miles from Gundagai.

Some blokes I know have stacks of luck, no matter where they fall,
But there was I, Lord love a duck, no bloody luck at all.
I couldn’t heat a pot of tea or keep me trousers dry,
And me dog shat in me tucker-box five miles from Gundagai.

Now, I can forgive the bleedin’ team, I can forgive the rain.
I can forgive the damp and cold and go through it again.
I can forgive the rotten luck, but ‘ang me till I die,
I can’t forgive that bloody dog, five miles from Gundagai.

The infamous Australian sense of humor at play

This is one of those roadside attractions that means nothing unless you’re conversant with local folk culture … which I was not. My travel mate however was born and raised in Australia, so he insisted we stop here. And this ladies in gentleman is why it’s always helpful to travel with a local.

MVIMG_20180226_185131

Just next to the statue was this restaurant, Oliver’s Real Food, which my friend said was must try, as it is the Australian “healthy” version of a fast food chain, i.e., lots of organic and vegetarian ‘fast food’ options.

In front of the restaurant was a big Koala, but as I had already seen a much BIGGER Koala while in Australia, I didn’t really consider it to be particularly worthy of note (other than for sheer cuteness) … but of course a picture was necessary.

At the restaurant I had some nothing to write home about sushi and edamamae (hard to screw up). That said, they had what I ultimately decided was probably one of my favorite ginger beers in all of Australia… it had a really STRONG ginger bite, which is how I like it — with the added advantage of it was supposed to have a good dose of probiotics

Casey IL: the land of 8 world record holding big things, and a lot of Jesus

If you’re the sort of person who is into BIG things, i.e., roadside attractions designed to lure motorists off of main roads and into small towns that they would otherwise have no reason to pass through… at least long enough to stop and have a meal or fill up their tank, than you’re going to LOVE Casey IL, pronounced ‘Kay-zee‘ by the locals.

I first heard about Casey NOT from billboards or Tv, but rather from the woman whose Airbnb I stayed in during the Total Eclipse of the Sun that passed through downstate IL on August 22, 2017, (not one I’ll ever go to again, the woman who ran it was kind of despicable in her unmitigated greed) and I had been trying to work Casey into my travel schedule since then.

That said, when I say Casey is a town you probably would never come to otherwise (unless your family or job necessitated it), I mean it ! THIS ladies and gentleman is pretty much the whole of town (plus or minus a side street or two), if you don’t count the fast food options located adjacent to the highway off-ramp, about a 15 minute walk, or two minutes of driving away.

These photos were taken at around 4pm on a Monday afternoon, and so many of the businesses were closed, even the ones that were still in business, that at first I thought I might have made the strategic error of showing up on a Sunday.

Let’s be clear, Casey isn’t just kind of quiet, its dying. According to Wikipedia the most recent 2010 census, the population of the town was 2,762, down from their 2000 census count of 2,942, and while the next census isn’t for a few years, the estimated numbers for 2016 are even worse, 2,698… to put this in perspective the suburb I grew up in has a population of 12,187 and my highschool had a population of about 4,500 when I graduated, although it’s down to about 4K now…

That said, there’s something kind of brilliant in the efforts of town local, Jim Bolin to not only bring attention to his town, but do something to try to revive its economy, which is something I learned from these postcards in his wife’s shop:

That said, the following video is worth seeing, as Casey made the iconic CBS Sunday Morning show, in that section where they talk about wonderful and/or odd things to be found off America’s beaten paths….

Watching the show I found it really interesting how its producers assiduously opted to ignore a huge element of the oversized objects scattered around town… namely, Casey is a town that takes its love of all things biblical, SERIOUSLY!

Note the Star of David and Fishes motif on the chimes

Apparently, the wind chimes were the first item Jim built (with the aid of the Guinness organization), in order to hopefully draw traffic from the highway (with the aid of billboards) to his wife’s failing coffee-house, and it proved so successful that he started to create other items to help other stores in town…. that were “appropriate to the business” being helped.

For the yarn store he created the world’s largest knitting needles and a crochet hook, which would have brought me into the store and I might have purchased something, but for the fact that in spite of it being a Monday afternoon, the place was closed. (I’m pretty sure these had biblical text on them as well, but since the store was close I don’t know what it was.)

… But that said, THIS is the password for the free wi-fi his wife’s business, the local coffee-house, offers. My provider is T-mobile and while my phone worked there, there was absolutely NO data other than this available for me in the whole town; otherwise, I might not have spotted this.

I looked it up, the verse is “And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” Once I saw that, I got a tad suspicious, as it’s not the sort of thing you expect as a WiFi login outside of a religious institution.

Note: even more biblical stuff in this mural

After seeing the WiFi password it quickly became clear that every single one of these oversized item in town (from what I saw), while it does clearly serves to help bring customers into the various stores who might never otherwise enter them, each item also comes with an apropos bit of evangelicalism … via bits of biblical text.

According to the (very) professional video located at this web site, the shoes weigh 1,500 lb, and according to the video from CBS, not only does the mailbox work, but if you mail things from it the postmark stamp says “world’s biggest mailbox” rather than Casey, IL. (Wish I’d known that when I was there, I’d have sent some post cards.)

While most of the items are located in the downtown area, and were kind of easy to find with these sign posts that were scattered around town:

Easily the single biggest “big-thing” in the whole town was the rocking chair… although is a rocking chair a rocking chair when it’s not allowed to rock?

One of the stores in town sold a service where they would Photoshop you onto the chair

While the final two items, the golf-tee and the pitchfork were both in locally owned businesses (not a national chain, etc), these were not in the downtown area but rather nearer to the highway.

In addition to Guinness World record holding items, there were also other big items scattered around town items that did NOT earn that merit, but were none the less very big… and again, evangelical….

Also while walking around town, I came across this sign referring to a road I’d never heard of, “The National Road”

… it wasn’t until I got home and wrote this blog that I learned it was actually the Cumberland Road, the first federal highway built by the United states government, which ultimately became route U.S. Route 40 …. so of COURSE that I had heard of that …

That said, there’s a quote from one of my favorite books, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, that comes to mind anytime I’m in one of the tourist trap/roadside attractions

“So what is this place?” asked Shadow, as they walked through the parking lot toward a low, unimpressive wooden building.
“This is a roadside attraction,” said Wednesday. “One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.”
“Come again?”
“It’s perfectly simple,” said Wednesday. “In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, or…well, you get the idea.”
“There are churches all across the States, though,” said Shadow.
“In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists’ offices. No, in the USA people still get the call, or some of them, and they feel themselves being called to from the transcendent void, and they respond to it by building a model out of beer bottles of somewhere they’ve never visited, or by erecting a giant bat house in some part of the country that bats have traditionally declined to visit. Roadside attractions: people feel themselves being pulled to places where, in other parts of the world, they would recognize that part of themselves that is truly transcendent, and buy a hot dog and walk around, feeling satisfied on a level they cannot truly describe, and profoundly dissatisfied on a level beneath that.”

― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

So who knows, maybe there is something special about Casey…

Metropolis, Illinois: a tourist destination for Superman fans

In keeping with my obsession with big things… how about a 12 foot tall fiberglass Superman?

For that you need to go to Metropolis Illinois, a quiet, tiny little town (to put just how tiny this place is in perspective, my HIGH SCHOOL had 4,500 students)

Metropolis is located on the southern border of Illinois, along the Ohio River, and it’s so quiet that even at 4:30pm on a weekday, it has mostly empty streets, seriously, where are the people?

Besides Superman, it does not really have much else going for it, other than there is a riverboat casino on the Ohio River…

So, in an impressive attempt at working with what you’ve got, the town has taken as much advantage as a town possibly can of having the same name as the fictional town Superman is supposed to be from.

There is superman stuff all around the center of town…

There’s a superman museum, that is ostensibly a massive store that sells everything superman, with an exhibit in the back ($5 entre fee)

But, since it was declared Superman’s official home in 1972, by the Illinois State Legislature… I guess it’s official.

I will say I was VERY happy to find this statue of Louise Lane located at the other end of town from Superman

And just near her I found this….

So, all in all it’s a cute place to stop and stretch your feet if your taking a road trip that passes by it or near it …. or if you have some hard-core superman fans in your family

BUT… that said, on the way out-of-town I drove by a grocery store called Big John that’s had a statue out front that I sware looked to be about twice as big as the Superman statue… What’s up with that?

Australians like big things too… who knew?

I’m no longer sure WHO started the trend, if it’s an Americana tourist trap thing that Australians began to copy because it draws in the tourists, or visa versa … but I’m happy to announce that the Australian countryside is just as inundated with these big fiberglass monstrosities as the US is, there are in fact 150 of the things scattered around the mainland, according to wikipedia.

fullsizeoutput_39b4

The first big thing I spotted was via the window of a bus/coach that I was taking from Ballarat to Adelaide (it actually involved a one hour train ride and two connecting busses — bleh) … my friend in Ballarat, knowing my like of these sorts of things, had mentioned the bus might pass it… but the driver offered no warning and sadly the it only pit-stopped at the location in order to pick up new passengers, with no chance given to get off and take pictures… so this is the best one I managed to get (there were two others but they were all blurry because the bus was moving).

And then earlier today while road tripping on Australia’s Great Ocean Road with my travel buddy (so far it’s all good, hoping we do this regularly), we unexpectedly drove past a second big thing, a Lobster by the name of Larry … who according to Wikipedia is the worlds largest lobster!!!

Size is a bit distorted as I’m actually standing a bit in front of the thing, see next picture down to see how big I actually am relative to the thing

I’m 5’4″… my friend who is 193cm (or 6 feet 3 inches) wasn’t able to touch the bottom

Louiseville Slugger Museum, KY

What the name suggests: it’s very touristy, but interesting; and worth driving by, if only to see the worlds largest baseball bat (but made of carbon steel, not wood). It is an oversized replica of the bat the Louisville Slugger company made for Babe Ruth (aka, ‘The Bambino’ or ‘The Sultan of Swat’) in the 1920s.

Among the sources I used when planning my trips, there’s a web-page/iPhone app resource that I use, called Roadtrippers.com where you can load in your destinations, and the application/web site will pop up a list of all the various things you might want to consider stopping at along the way (in its “oddities” category, which I love). You chose the ones you want, and then on your iPhone you load the list… HOWEVER, I have also found that the addresses appended to those locations are NOT always correct, so it’s best to then double check them with google. (For instance, on this day I was TRYING to get to the Louisville Slugger museum which is in downtown Louisville, and got misdirected to a residential neighborhood in what seemed to be the worst part of Louisville (really run down). But there were factories there so I thought MAYBE this right… till I ended up on a residential street. That said, it wasn’t a complete waste, as I learned from the myriad of signs (advertising the fact), that this was the neighborhood where Muhammad Ali, formerly known as Cassius Clay, had been born.)

I then (thank the lord for the iPhone and cellphone data plans — folks not old enough to remember a time before such things don’t appreciate just how magical it is) googled the attraction and found the correct address, which was a good thing because an old friend of mine was actually driving in from her small town in Indiana (two hours away) to meet up with me there.

As I waited for her (she was, thankfully, running late as well) I discovered that Louisville has done something very smart, they’re historic downtown is full of these amazingly beautiful historic buildings. When the area got run down and the businesses for the most part left for safer neighborhoods, they ‘restored’ most of them, by leaving the amazing facades and ripping out everything behind it. Most of these buildings they then filled up with museums and other touristy attractions. So there’s now a ‘historic’ museum row / tourist mecca that is centrally located with most of what you’d (as a tourist) want to see when visiting Louisville.

Just out front of the Museum was a fairly in-congruent statue of Captain America… I have no idea WHY it was there, but it was pretty cool… and purely coincidentally, it matched my shirt.

But it may have been reflective of the large number of street pieces along Museum row, of which I only photographed a few.

And then lining the sides of the museum were these highly inconspicuous, to the point of one almost tripped me… little memorials to various famous players who had preferred the Louisville slugger bat.

The first (and last thing) you see upon entering the building is the gift shop, which impressive in it’s own right, with everything from key chains and bumper stickers to collectors items, like baseballs signed by some of the greats, which you can buy.

The one things that I found “tempting” was walking sticks made out of mini baseball bats. As I’ve discussed previously I’ve been suffering from periodic bouts of benign positional vertigo now for about 15 years, so for me walking sticks are useful, AND these could double as a self-defense weapon.

that said, the Baseball Bat Museum is reasonably priced (see below); but that said, my friend and I were actually able to get in for FREE!! (can’t beat free). It was an off-season weekday, and the tour, which was just about to begin, was far from sold out; as such they were just handing out the tickets. (This made me think that the store is far more profitable than the museum itself, while the latter draws new customers to the former.)

In the waiting area before the factory tour there’s a museum devoted to Louisville Slugger bats, and baseball in general.

In it, there’s a batting cage area where you can put on gloves, and get to hold and test the weights of various bats that were ACTUALLY used by some the greats.

In addition to an extensive collection of memorabilia, and explanations about the history of baseball, there are also Madame Tussauds type wax figures of some of the greats that you can can go right up to, take your picture with — and I saw some people touching them.

At a certain time, an announcement is made, and all the people wandering through the museum file into a loading area, and watch a movie loaded with facts and figures regarding the production and sale of Louisville slugger bats.

After the movie, we walked through the factory area, with demonstrations of bats being made by hand (solely for the purpose of the tour), and then there are explanations of how they are made now. There are low tech systems, which are used to make bats for sale to the general public, or little league teams. One interesting factoid she shared was that, if you’re a baseball player in the minor leagues, odds are you’ll use a custom made bat to your preferred configurations, however, you have to pay for your own bats, the teams don’t pay for them for you — while they DO pay for the major league players‘ bats.

But, on the seemly unrelated topic of “why the jobs are not coming back” — a conversation I had had a few weeks before with a progressive liberal friend who was sure Bernie Sanders would be able to do this (I spent a few hours trying, but failing, to convince him otherwise…. I now offer the case of the Louisville Slugger:

According to our tour guide, it used to be that the bats were all turned by hand on the lave, each one taking about four hours of very careful shaving, smoothing and measuring to produce. Then, the industrial revolution reached baseball, and the bats were, and (for the most part) continue to be produced by a factory mechanized system which, while nowhere near as precise, allowed them to make bats that were much cheaper and therefore able to reach a broader market; and as I said, these are the ones that are today sold to the home market, Little League’s, and customers like that. Then they showed us a brand new very expensive computerized machine that, in just one hour can produce the entire needs of a major-league team … THREE times over. They spoke of it with great pride, noting that at that moment it was making special order bats for the Chicago Cubs that were painted blue and said “World Series champions” — having just broken their 108 year losing streak by beating the Cleveland Indians, who were the 2nd most losing team in the country. And everyone in the group was all happy and impressed until I chirped up…

Question: “You said that untill the computerized system arrived professional bats, for minor league and National league players, were made by hand… correct?”
“yes”
“Then, could you tell me HOW many workers this one machine put out of work?”

Suffice it to say the girl leading the tour didn’t look happy, and the people in my tour group looked at me annoyed (how dare I point out the obvious)… She didn’t know but promised to get the answer by the end of the tour, which was that this one computerized machine has replaced/made redundant 50 highly skilled workers.

Jobs that be done cheaper aboard, enough so that the added shipping still results in a cheaper product than what can be produced at home will be produced abroad. At a certain point, labors who previously were happy with 10 cents an hour are now asking for $1.50, and that becomes no longer true. AT THAT POINT, it then becomes cheaper to invest in a computerized production system that can do a job as well as any skilled laborer, only much quicker…. And THAT ladies and gentleman is why the jobs aren’t coming back.

After the tour was over we were taken into a final room, and were allowed to choose our only miniature baseball bats out of the bin in this picture, to take home as a souveigner.

And then towards the back of the building there is an actual batters cage where you can try out your skills against an automated pitcher, using different types and weights of bats produced by the company.

On one side of the building that houses the factory tour, they also have a small Ripleys believe it or not subsection (believe it or not… seriously WHAT is this doing here?). Most of what’s there is less the “believe it or not” sort of stuff that would show up in a circus side show, and more art in utilizing “unusual” mediums, so like duct tape, chewing gum or nuts, but some of it is the more exotic stuff — at Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory.

After we finished with the museum, and walking around the downtown area we headed back to the neighborhood I had been to the day before, where Zachary Taylor’s grave yard is. We HAD wanted to have dinner downtown, but a staff member in the museum had STRONGLY warned us against it, saying that once the businesses had closed up it would quickly become an unsafe neighborhood. As such, I suggested that we go to the same restaurant I had gone to the night before, a place with AMAZING food in a neighborhood full of what looked to be multi-million dollar homes.

Anoosh Bistro was a restaurant I had found the day before using Yelp. The first time I came I was deeply impressed with how Anoosh and his wait staff were HIGHLY accommodating to my medical dietary needs. The first time I had the Cioppino (Fresh Fish, Shrimp, King Crab, Mussels, Clams, Tomato Saffron Clam Broth — all of which was incredibly fresh, and there was so much fish that I ended up taking home half) & the poached pear salad, which was incredibly tasty — I ate the salad before the meal and saved the pear for my desert (there was SO much alcohol in the pear that it left me tipsy).

As I was leaving, the first time, I discovered that this place is actually halal (the owner is Lebanese — considered by many to have the best pallet in the middle east) — which is a good thing.

This time, with my old friend from University … I had the red snapper special with black rice and vegetables (they had modified it to meet my dietary needs) while she had the chicken curry which smelled amazing… and both of us were doing the ‘happy food dance’… Although Andie ate my carrots for me cause I hate cooked carrots (and they’re not good for me either, too much sugar) while I ate her asparagus for her…. She said my carrots were also amazing.

Then, for dessert — something I generally skip unless they have fresh berries… she ordered the white chocolate bread pudding with their home made pistachio ice cream in place of vanilla. I had a tiny taste of both and they were amazing… especially the ice cream which we were sure was made in house… (we tasted a tiny undercurrent of rose water in it).

My Dad would’ve approved (and he always really liked Andie, and he loved bread pudding). As she ate it (I did have a small taste) we were remembering the one time my dad made her dinner, and it was mind-blowingly amazing… but it was one of these things where he just kind of improvised with whatever happened to be in the house, so that afterwards he could never duplicate it because he could never remember how he got there.

A Grave in the middle of the Road, Franklin IN

This is one of those historic oddities that make for a nice pit stop during a long drive. It is quite literally a grave that is located in the middle of a side road that led off to some very pretty farm land.

Among the sources I used when planning my trips, there’s a web-page/iPhone app resource that I use, called Roadtrippers.com where you can load in your destinations, and the application/web site will pop up a list of all the various things you might want to consider stopping at along the way (in its “oddities” category, which I love). You chose the ones you want, and then on your iPhone you load the list… HOWEVER, I have also found that the addresses appended to those locations are NOT always correct, so it’s best to then double check them with google. (For instance, the next day I went to the Louisville Slugger museum, and got misdirected to a residential neighborhood in seemed to be the worst part of Louisville, although based on the myriad of signs it was also the neighborhood where Muhammad Ali, formerly known as Cassius Clay, had been born.) This time however the address was true, and my GPS device in my car led me to it no problems, only the whole look of the place had changed.

Previously, as evidenced by some of the videos and photos I found, there had been an actual grave that stood above the road level

—– (borrowed Image by: Tony Frampton – Tumblr; found on Urban Ghosts)

And above the grave there was a fancy marker sign that had read:

Nancy Kerlin Barnett
Born May 14, 1793 – Died Dec. 1, 1831
Married to William Barnett. Feb. 29, 1808 [I did the math, she was 14]
He was born Sept. 27, 1786 [he was 22]
[He?] Drowned in the Ohio River Sept. 24, 1854
William was the great, great, great grandson of Pocahontas and John Rolfe.
Daniel G. Doty, 1846-1934, protected his grandmother’s grave by staying here with his gun, while the county relocated this cemetery in order to build the road. A concrete slab was placed over the grave to protect the marker, Aug. 8, 1912.

[and then in much smaller type]
Erected in 1982, by Kenneth F. Blackwell
Great, great grandson [of Doty?], and his son
Richard Blackwell

However, as evidenced by my photos, by the time I got there this had all been bull dozed flat (including the marker), and replaced by a far less interesting grave-marker embedded into a concrete lane divider — which granted, is arguably far more practical for the locals who drive by the place daily:

To my pleasure, however, I also discovered that the grave-site was a pokestop (I’m currently obsessed with Pokémon go), and it was the photo for that (another reason I love this game) that first allowed me to see the now missing sign and learn a bit more about how the surrounding cemetery had been moved.

NONE of this information was now available at the site!!!!!!

While I was sitting there, playing the game on my smartphone, figuring out where and wanted to go next, and reserving myself a hotel room for the night — God BLESS smartphones, anyone remember the hassle of tripdix from AAA back when they were printouts? — a local guy in a pickup truck drove by me, stopped, and said he was concerned that maybe I needed help. He seemed highly amused that ANYONE would be interested enough in the site to actually drive here intentionally — I honestly don’t think the county really considered the tourism possibilities when they restructured the area… there weren’t even any signs out on the main road leading to this location.

Later that night, when I had stopped for the night and started to write this blog post I was able to pull up more information about the site, such as how the site had been restored to meet current traffic needs

To some disturbing things they discovered when the archeologists from the local University had finished investigating it (they got WAY more than they were bargaining for … literally).

In fact, keeping in mind the story that the Daniel G. Doty had protected the grave with a shot gun, and refused to allow them to move it, you have got to wonder if maybe the family had previously committed some murders, and hidden the bodies in grandma’s grave… and he knew that, and THAT was why he was so crazy adamant about not allowing the body to moved.

Located @ 6844 E 400 S, Franklin, IN 46131

The Sudbury Superstack in Canada

Built for the sole purpose of circumventing clean air laws, I passed this on my trek eastward on the TransCanadian Highway, heading towards Stratford Ontario for the Shakespeare Festival. Costing around $25 million to build, it is the tallest chimmney/smokestack in the western hemisphere, and used to be the tallest in the world, at least untill Kazakhstan built themselves a taller one.

Now you might ask why would I stop to see a smoke stack? Well, a few days before, as I was driving along talking, via my bluetooth hands-free integrated into the car phone system (yes, I love my new car), one of my oldest friends, an UBER Geek (he’s in his 50’s like me, and when he was in highschool he was programming computer systems for the Pentagon — think WarGames). When I told him the route I was taking he asked if I would be stopping in Sudbury… which as luck would have it I had already planned to do, just as a place to spend the night before the last leg of my trip to Stratford.

He said, “Do me a favor and when you are in Sudbury get me some pictures of their superstack while you’re there. I did a factory tour of the place back when I was in my 20’s, but I never took any pictures of it and I would like some.”

“What’s a superstack” I asked

He proceeded to explain to me how when the governments started to implement clean air acts in order to address problems like acid rain, that they would measure the air pollution at a certain height above ground; superstacks were one of the ways that heavy polluters would circumvent those rules by essentially disposing of their pollution above that elevation (see, we’re not poisoning the local air). Built in 1972 by the International Nickel Company (INCO), one of the world’s largest producers of nickel, the superstack was therefore a circumventing regulations; because, by going higher they were effectively dispersing the massive amounts of sulphur dioxide (SO₂) and other pollutants that their plant produced in the higher altitude wind currents, and away from the local area. This, they claimed, was them “addressing” the health concerns of the locals, and the surrounding farmers who had in recent years found themselves unable to grow anything anymore because their lands had become too acidic to sustain life. Was it successful? Sure… if you only local at local impact studies, but the superstack and things like it were part of the problem that lead to our current catastrophe of global climate change.

Driving towards Sudbury, sure enough this thing was impressively HUGE; you could not but see it from miles away, spewing dirty filthy nasty G-d knows what into the air… and my motel for the night was just down the road from the base of the thing… oh joy.

Since companies can no longer play these sorts of regulatory games under the new global rules intended to help curb global warming, and have been forced to actually reduce how much pollution they dump into the atmosphere… there’s talk of bringing the superstack down. Here are some articles I found on the topic:

‘It’s history, like it or not’: the Significance of Sudbury’s Superstack
Sudbury superstack faces uncertain future
Vale clear to tear down Sudbury’s Superstack

Now you might argue that this is could not possibly be a tourist destination, but I beg to differ. TripAdvisor lists it as #14 on its list of the 58 things you could do while visiting Sudbury, Ontario.

MooseJaw Canada

MooseJaw, is located halfway between Calgary and Winnipeg alongside the Trans-Canada Highway (population 33,000), and has enough local history and street art to be worth a two day visit (I really regretted only having a few hours). The Moose is impossible to miss from the highway, and stands adjacent to the city’s tourist information center/ the starting point for a guided tour of the city in an antique looking trolley/bus, a good way to begin your visit.

I had initially wanted to stop in Moosejaw in part because I had remembered hearing about this town (with a name like that it’s hard to forget, although I forgot in what context) … but after having been massively let down by towns like Medicine Hat (really not much to see), I had decided to just drive through… and then I saw THIS along the highway… and of course, I had to stop in order to take pictures, and utilize the facilities

Once I was inside the building I realized that Moosejaw, even though it is a tiny little town has REALLY invested their tax dollars into doing everything they can towards making itself a worthwhile tourist destination. There is a Casino and a geothermal spa, and its the home base for a lot of fight training (both NATO and Canada’s equivalent of the Blue Angles — which quite humorously, are called the Snowbirds — a term that most people associate with something quite different) — none of which I had enough time in my schedule to enjoy. In fact I had totally underestimated how long it would take me to drive cross country and I had theater tickets already for the night of the 9th of August in Stratford, Canada, so in retrospect (once I realized JUST how much there was to do there) I quite simply could not give this town the time I think it deserved.

From inside the information center I learned that Moosejaw HAD been an important railway town, at one point, from which agricultural goods from the surrounding area were shipped to the cities, and that there was museum in town devoted just to that topic, that was in fact part of an area wide network of museums.

And that precisely because of the existence of that train line from Canada to Chicago, MooseJaw had become embroiled in, and received a massive economic boost from, the prohibition era in the U.S.A.

I knew already from my previous reading on the topic (I had in fact only JUST finished a really good book on the topic a few months previous) that while the town “makes plenty of hay” from Capone having been in their town, there’s actually no hard historic evidence to support the claim.

According to ‘what a local told me’, Capone had stayed here

While walking around the tourist information area, the two things that really sparked my interest (in terms of what to do during the few hours I could invest in the place), was the local tour bus and the tunnels that apparently run below the city. Apparently, if I had timed my stay for a weekend, at night the tour bus, which gives only a general tour of the city during the day, on weekend nights will do Ghost and murder tours of the city.

However, there was a ‘treat’ offered to the regular daytime tourists that unfortunately my diet would not allow me to partake of… a local pizza parlor that was a bit off the beaten path was offering free slices to anyone who took the tour (as a way to draw business).

The bus took us all around town, and in particular made a point of showing us all the local street art, of which it was very proud

Although, I will admit now… Pokémon-Go had come out a few months before, and while waiting for the bus I realized that this town had all sorts of RARE Pokémon I had not seen before, so I got a bit obsessive during the ride, putting more attention towards trying to catching the Pokémon than on listening to the tour guide (me bad — but I will note I’ve NOT seen any of these guys, well except the purple one, since this town).

After the tour was over, I drove over to where the tunnels were, only to discover that while the tours of them leave every hour, the fact that I had arrived during a local holiday period meant that they were overwhelmed with tourists, and the wait to get into one of those tours was a good three hours, meaning I didn’t have enough time to be able to do one; and there are two, one about prohibition, one devoted to the Chinese population of town who apparently lived mostly underground (??) … as such I strongly suggest booking these tours in advance.

World’s Largest (Saamis) Teepee, Medicine Hat Canada

Medicine Hat is the site of the World’s Largest Teepee, which stands 215 feet tall/or, 20 stories high. It was originally built for the 1988 Calgary Olympics and three years later was moved to it’s current location.

Note the Tiny people walk underneath it for frame of reference

The originally name for the town was Saamis, the Black foot word for the tall feather headdress medicine men wore, hence English derivation for the town’s name.