Strange, whimsical, or inexplicable roadside attractions worth the detour.
Two enormous roadside dinosaurs built by a theme park sculptor outside Palm Springs, made famous worldwide by a single scene in Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
A public art installation along old Route 66 in Amarillo, Texas, consisting of ten vintage Cadillacs half-buried nose-down in a field, created in 1974 and continuously repainted by visitors ever since.
A full-scale replica of Stonehenge built from 39 vintage American automobiles, painted gray and arranged in a circle on the Nebraska plains by artist Jim Reinders in 1987.
A giant pink Mexican restaurant with cliff divers and a fake cave system became a cult legend through a South Park episode, then reopened in 2023 after a $40 million rebuild by the show's creators.
Justo Gallego Martínez laid the first stone on October 12, 1961, and worked on the building for 60 years with no drawings, no training as an architect or a builder, and no permit. He died on November 28, 2021, at 96. The building has still never been licensed or consecrated.
A Latvian immigrant spent decades single-handedly carving and moving multi-ton coral limestone blocks in South Florida, then refused to ever fully explain how he did it.
Up an unmarked lane beside Muir Woods sit the decaying hand-built houses of a hidden bohemian colony where Alan Watts lived and died. The Park Service has owned it for decades; the forest is quietly taking it back.
In a museum case in Dearborn sits a sealed test tube labeled as holding Thomas Edison's final breath, captured at his deathbed in 1931 for Henry Ford. Ford is said to have believed the soul leaves the body in the last exhale.
Neutral Ireland laid the word EIRE in whitewashed stone at more than 80 points around its coast between 1939 and 1942. In 1943 the signs were numbered at the request of the American minister in Dublin, and charts matching the numbers to positions were handed to Allied aircrews.
