Hit the open road for fun and wackiness as the Butkos visit offbeat attractions from coast to coast--dinosaur parks, miniature golf courses, populuxe motels, vintage amusement arcades, classic diners illuminated in neon, and even the world's largest ball of twine. More than fifty fellow authors and artists offer stories about their favorite attractions or recall memorable trips. Visitor information is included to help plan quick visits or an entire road trip.

Going on a road trip? See the silly side of travel as you explore the wackiest landmarks from around the world -- a place where you can walk in real dinosaur tracks, a hotel where you sleep in an igloo, a crazy beard festival, a UFO museum, and so much more. You won't believe our world is full of so many bizarre and wonderful places!

If you're in Nashville or Austin or Mobile and you have the urge to see something strange, connoisseur of the offbeat Kelly Kazek has you covered. Cruise the South, from Louisville's enormous collection of the world's largest things to Miami's Burger Museum to Odessa's Stonehenge replica. If you're around Hot Springs, Arkansas, you might want to bop into the Alligator Farm and Petting Zoo to see where Babe Ruth's first five-hundred-foot homer came crashing down. And if you're looking to make contact with the unusual, why not visit the UFO Welcome Center in Bowman, South Carolina? Wherever you are in the South, there's something strange or stupendous nearby, and this catalogue of noteworthy curiosities and significant landmarks makes sure you don't miss a thing.

Fascinating stories and roadside stops from Nevada to Colorado on Highway 50 and 70. Petroglyphs, hot springs, outlaw hideouts, U.F.O. crashes, ghost towns, massacres, native legends, hauntings, and more. Learn where to spot wildlife, find fossils and gems along the way. Discover hidden hot springs in the desert or see dinosaur footprints embedded in rock. Learn which breed of dogs you cannot bring with you and how liquor laws affect you as you travel through Utah. Find out about marijuana tourism in Colorado and gun prohibitions on reservation lands. This guide does not list all the sites you drive past, only the best and most interesting.

The use of cars and trucks over the past century has remade American geography—pushing big cities ever outward toward suburbanization, spurring the growth of some small towns while hastening the decline of others, and spawning a new kind of commercial landscape marked by gas stations, drive-in restaurants, motels, tourist attractions, and countless other retail entities that express our national love affair with the open road. By its very nature, this landscape is ever changing, indeed ephemeral. What is new quickly becomes old and is soon forgotten. In this absorbing book, John Jakle and Keith Sculle ponder how “Roadside America” might be remembered, especially since so little physical evidence of its earliest years survives. In straightforward and lively prose, supplemented by copious illustrations—historic and modern photographs, advertising postcards, cartoons, roadmaps—they survey the ways in which automobility has transformed life in the United States. Asking how we might best commemorate and preserve this part of our past—which has been so vital economically and politically, so significant to the cultural aspirations of ordinary Americans, yet so often ignored by scholars who dismiss it as kitsch—they propose the development of an actual outdoor museum that would treat seriously the themes of our roadside history. Certainly, museums have been created for frontier pioneering, the rise of commercial agriculture, and the coming of water- and steam-powered industrialization and transportation, especially the railroad. Is now not the time, the authors ask, for a museum forcefully exploring the automobile’s emergence and the changes it has brought to place and landscape? Such a museum need not deny the nostalgic appeal of roadsides past, but if done properly, it could also tell us much about what the authors describe as “the most important kind of place yet devised in the American experience.” John A. Jakle is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Keith A. Sculle is the former head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. They have coauthored such books as America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Automobile Age; Motoring: The Highway Experience in America; Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age; and The Gas Station in America.