Roadside Attractions

When I saw the AOL article today - America's Quirkiest Roadside Attractions - I was reminded again of my youth and of our cross-country car camping trips.

Wouldn't I have loved to stop at some of these places! The only spot on this list that my mother deemed worthy was the Royal Gorge bridge. And "stop" is a misnomer, given that we sped right over it.

We couldn't just stop for any old thing. A stop had to have a good and rational reason, i.e.:

>Potty Breaks;

>Gas fill-ups, which would be lumped in with the Potty Break category. And forget stopping for food at a gas station. Gas stations were for gas and for bathrooms and for having a gas station employee clean the entomological gold mine off the windshield. And back in that day, the only food that gas stations sold anyway were small bags of stale peanuts that hung on black wire frames by the till or came from stippled green dispensing machines with big mirrors on them.

>Something historical, which often meant places with "State Park" or "National Park" in the name. Huge timber lodges and mountain roads built by the Civilian Conservation Corp were always stop-worthy because there were lessons to be taught there: What was the CCC? Why did it exist? Who was Roosevelt? 

This Stopping Phylum also included historical markers on the highway - all two-laners back then - that noted some special local occasion, like the brutal massacre of everyone in a wagon train or the massive loss of life in a flash flood or fire, always great things for small children to read and consider before settling down for the night in a flimsy canvas tent.

>Something visually stunning. (See Royal Gorge, above.) This folded in nicely with the State and National Park stop, and included Garden of the Gods and Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park. If you were lucky, you could kill both two birds with one stone. Mesa Verde: visually stunning and historical.

But the Wall Drugs and two-headed snakes and mystery houses were not on our stopping list. In my mother's mind(and although she did not usually drive during these trips - my father did - she held the Stop or Go trump cards) these were tourist traps, a waste of time and good money.

Well of course they were! That's what made them so appealing!

So across the countryside we sped, passing UFO landing sites and giant ant farms, wistfully watching their signs recede behind us as we ate our homemade sandwiches and apples (kept you regular on the road, Mother reminded us) and soaking up the perpetual history lessons coming from the front seat.

And to this day, I've yet to see a two-headed snake.