I used to think roadside attractions were just elaborate tourist traps—kitschy monuments to American excess that existed solely to separate travelers from their cash.
Turns out, I was partially right, but also spectacularly wrong in ways I didn’t expect. The thing about roadside attractions is they’re not really about the destinations themselves—they’re about the people who built them, the obsessions that drove them, and the strange cultural moments they accidentally preserve. I’ve spent the last three years documenting these places, and honestly, the best ones are never the famous ones. The World’s Largest Ball of Twine in Cawker City, Kansas gets all the press, but it’s the smaller, weirder stops that stick with you. Like the Museum of Clean in Pocatello, Idaho, which is exactly what it sounds like—a 75,000-square-foot shrine to cleanliness that includes antique vacuum cleaners and the history of soap. The founder, Don Aslett, spent roughly four decades accumulating cleaning artifacts, and the whole place has this uncanny energy, like you’ve stumbled into someone’s fever dream about domesticity.
Wait—maybe that’s the appeal. These places are deeply, unsettlingly personal. The Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida was built by a single guy, Edward Liedskalnins, who claimed to understand the secrets of the pyramids. He carved and moved massive coral blocks—some weighing several tons—entirely alone, supposedly for a woman who left him. No one knows exactly how he did it, and the theories range from magnetic manipulation to simple leverage systems that he was just really, really good at hiding.
The Strange Geography of American Obsession and Why We Can’t Look Away
Here’s the thing about these attractions: they cluster in unexpected ways. The Midwest has an disproportionate number of giant things—big shoes, oversized baseball bats, enormous chairs. The South tends toward the religious and the reptilian (alligator farms, biblical theme parks, sometimes both). The West Coast goes abstract and artistic, while the Southwest leans into alien conspiracy theories and desert mysticism. I guess it makes sense when you think about landscape shaping psychology, but it’s still weird to see it mapped out. The International Banana Museum in Mecca, California has over 25,000 banana-related items. Twenty-five thousand. The founder, Fred Garbutt, started collecting in the 1970s and never stopped. It’s overwhelming and slightly nauseating and absolutely mesmerizing.
The National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin displays more than 6,000 mustards from all fifty states and over seventy countries.
What Happens When Passion Projects Become Historical Artifacts Without Anyone Noticing
The strangest part is how these places accidentally become time capsules. The Wigwam Motel chain—there are only three left, in Arizona, Kentucky, and California—was built in the 1930s and 40s when sleeping in a concrete teepee seemed like peak modernity. Now they’re protected structures, monuments to a moment when Native American imagery was casually appropriated for highway commerce. The disconnect is uncomfortable, but it’s also valuable documentation of how we thought, what we valued, and what we didn’t question. Lucy the Elephant in Margate City, New Jersey has been standing since 1881—a six-story wooden elephant that was originally a real estate gimmick. She’s been a tavern, a house, and now a museum. When I visited, the guide mentioned they have to constantly repair her because the salt air is slowly eating her alive, which felt like a metaphor I wasn’t smart enough to fully articulate.
The Economics of Weird: How These Places Actually Survive in Modern America
Most of these attractions operate on margins so thin they’re practically transparent. Admission fees rarely cover maintenance costs. The ones that survive do so through gift shop sales, donations, and sheer stubborn refusal to close. The Museum of Bad Art, which started in a basement in Massachusetts and now has locations in multiple states, acquires pieces that are sincere failures—art that’s technically terrible but emotionally earnest. It costs nothing to enter most locations. They survive because people care enough to keep them alive, which is either inspiring or depressing depending on the day you ask me. The truth is probably both.
Why the Weird Ones Matter More Than the Instagram-Famous Destinations Everyone Already Knows
The Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo gets photographed constantly—ten Cadillacs buried nose-first in the ground, covered in graffiti. It’s visually striking and endlessly documented. But the keeper of the ranch, the people who maintain it, remain mostly anonymous. Contrast that with the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which houses medical oddities and anatomical specimens. It’s genuinely educational, occasionally horrifying, and deeply respectful of the human stories behind the specimens. Or the House on the Rock in Wisconsin, which defies description entirely—it’s part architectural marvel, part hoarder’s paradise, part carnival nightmare. Alex Jordan Jr. built it over decades, adding room after room of collections that make no cohesive sense. There’s a room full of mechanical orchestras. Another filled with miniature circuses. A giant whale fighting a squid. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does, and you leave feeling like you’ve been inside someone else’s subconscious.
Anyway, these places exist outside normal tourism logic, and that’s precisely why they matter.
