Hey Americans! We are leaving soon to squeeze in a road trip we always wanted to do before Tara starts her new swanky job. I’ve always had this idea to drive around your country and see all the tourist attractions of the atomic age — the kind of stuff you’d see on restaurant placemats in a highway diner. We have made a list (see below) but we’d love to hear about anything that fits the bill that we might have missed from the big to the small stuff like the restaurant next to Lincoln’s head at Mount Rushmore that has awesome hamburgers.
A few of these things don’t quite match the atomic age but I’m sure you get the gist:
- Mount Rushmore
- Black Hills
- Redwood National Park
- Yellowstone National Park
- The Alamo
- Arizona Meteor Crater
- Hoover Dam
- Grand Canyon
- Alcatraz
- Golden Gate Bridge
- Roswell
- Four Corners
- Texas Book Depository
- Graceland
- Carlsbad Caverns
Please note Niagara Falls is not on the list as I used to live right next door to Niagara Falls. So, what should we add to this list?
{ 39 comments… read them below or add one }
http://www.historic66.com/
This is the website I was suggesting — you could hook up in St. Louis after doing any East Coast travel. There are also some links to books.
http://www.clusterflock.org/2008/04/most-photographed.html
The Most Photographed Barn, perhaps? Although the DeLillo connection may make it more postmodern than atomic.
Grand Ole Opry, Nashville! http://www.opry.com/
(…with a special stop at the Wild Horse Saloon http://www.wildhorsesaloon.com/ )
Tombstone! http://www.cityoftombstone.com/
Gateway Arch, St. Lous! http://www.gatewayarch.com/Arch/
Sears Tower, Chicago! http://www.searstower.org/home.html
And just for fun:
Carhenge! http://www.carhenge.com/
The Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa! http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2079
(…which is unintentionally hilarious, as the field is now owned by two separate [warring] farmers, and there is one gift shop for left and center field, and one gift shop for the infield and the house)
I have never been here, but I have always wanted to check out the Cabazon Dinosaurs which were the giant dinosaurs featured in “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” and “The Wizard”.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2031
Well you’re missing like the whole east coast, but I guess since you’re in NY there’s not a whole lot of good olde time touristy stuff that you haven’t done there… You’ve been to DC right? If you’re at all interested in driving through some of the stranger parts of West Virginia I must reccomend going to The Mystery Hole (which is not dirty like it sounds… at least not in that way) http://www.mysteryhole.com/ it’s a classic roadside attraction type place…
If you’re going to be in Texas you MUST eat at Chuy’s (the original one on Barton Springs)I’m sure you’ve been there but it does fit in with your theme sort of, what with the tacky decor and all. If you’re in the mood for a bit fancier Tex-Mex and hoping to see Mr. McConaughey and his crew I have it on good authority that when they are in town they tend to head out to the Hula Hut which is on Lake Austin Blvd. (and on the lake) Excellent Texas Martini’s that will kick your butt. If you’re at the Alamo head on over to San Antonio and get a Puffy Taco somewhere.
Since I live in South Dakota and it appears you’ll be visiting the “Heads”, you’ll definitely want to check out the fudge at Mount Rushmore. As you might suppose there are tons of tourist-y things to do on the way across SD. Here are a few of the typical highlights:
The World’s Only Corn Palace http://www.cornpalace.org/newpages/palace.html
Wall Drug http://www.walldrug.com/t-history.aspx
Reptile Gardens http://www.reptilegardens.com/
The Real Little Town on the Prairie (not quite on the way to Rushmore) http://www.desmetsd.com/
And don’t forget the Crazy Horse memorial http://www.crazyhorse.org/
Most of these are good for pit stops or at most, half day adventures.
If I were doing a cross country trip, I’d probably do a combination literary/movie/food journey. :P Have fun!
While you’re in San Antonion seeing the Alamo, check out the Natural Bridge Caverns–they’re beautiful & the tour is really well done. There’s a wildlife ranch there, too.
http://www.naturalbridgecaverns.com
Texan here…skip the Alamo (completely underwhelming and unimpressive, not to mention overblown in terms of actual importance to Texas history) and do Big Bend instead.
Since you’re going to be in South Dakota anyway - you will have access to some of the finest attractions America has to offer, from the ridiculous, to the sublime.
Wall Drug - world’s largest drug store. World’s LARGEST DRUGSTORE! Cannot be missed, just trust me. (In fact, they have a cut out of Rushmore that I think you can stick your own heads in, so you could bypass Mount Rushmore altogether).
Around Mitchell, (Home of the Corn Palace, which, for my money is overrated) there is an amazing prehistoric Indian site, complete with an ongoing archaeological dig, a great museum, and an opportunity to try your hand at an atlatl.
In Chamberlin there is a private school, the student body of which is from nearby reservations. They have set up an Indian museum that I loved, complete with an exhibit of different regional grasses, with the English name, Indian name and translation, and hoity toity scientific name.
Between Chamberlin and Wall Drug is the Badlands park. The Badlands are gorgeous.
While you’re up in the Black Hills, check out the Cosmos Mystery Area. Tourist trappy as hell, but spoooooooky.
My Parents are in Montana. I’m on the East Coast. I’ve driven this a billion times. LOVE South Dakota.
What, no giant ball of twine? http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2128
As you can see from several suggestions made, you should check out the Roadside America site, http://www.roadsideamerica.com.
Stay in a concrete wigwam on Route 66 in Holbrook, Arizona - a vanishing bit of Americana. You can also send a letter from Holbrook that gets delivered by the Hashknife Pony Express (once a year delivery).
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/10294
If you like kitschy lodgings (and what’s not to like?) there is also the Shady Dell (stay in vintage travel trailers) in Bisbee, AZ. I haven’t been but I hear good things:
http://www.theshadydell.com/about.html
I can’t recommend Zion and the hike/climb to Angel’s Landing highly enough. Other people go nutty for Bryce Canyon, which I admit is also spectacular in a completely different way.
OH! I almost forgot - Monument Valley! Do not miss.
If you think it would be helpful I’d be happy to point you to my CA-TX road trip log from 2000 which has more details on lodging, national parks, etc.
Yosemite National Park. Hands down the most beautiful place on the planet, once you mentally block out the other tourists. And don’t miss the view from Glacier Point!
Arches National Park in Utah. Pike’s Peak in Colorado. Also, driving west down the highway across the plains in Colorado or Wyoming at sunset. Manifest Destiny Concentrate, right there. You’ll be itchin’ to kill an Injun and push a buffalo off a cliff by the time you park your car.
A Buckeye Here :-)
Linesville, PA - “where the ducks walk on the fish”
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2204
Also, if you pass through Youngstown, Ohio on your way west make a stop at Mill Creek Park (It’s the second largest city park in the country). http://www.millcreekpark.com Fellows Riverside Gardens is the crown jewel.
Have Fun!!
Two suggestions:
1. Since you’re already heading to San Francisco, drive down the California Coast on Route 1. That is, without question, the most beautiful car trip I’ve ever been on.
2. Yellowstone National Park. It will probably be crowded as a NY subway car at rush hour, but well worth the hassle. There’s no other place like it in the world, and you could see Old Faithful, which I’m sure has been featured on plenty o’placemats.
I also second the recommandation of The Badlands - make sure you’re there at dusk or dawn, when the shadows take over.
If you’re going to Roswell (which, in all honesty is kind of a let-down) you should visit White Sands National Monument (not to be confused with White Sands Missile Range which is across the highway and a little more difficult to get into): http://www.nps.gov/whsa/planyourvisit/index.htm . Sure, it’s only a giant pile of white sand but it’s the largest pile of white sand in the world and pretty fascinating in a geological kind of way. It also pairs nicely with Carlsbad Caverns (both of which are places we always took out-of-state family/friends when they visited).
Also, in Central New Mexico, if you have any interest in the Old West, the town of Lincoln is worth a visit (a big Billy the Kid Mecca) http://www.nmmonuments.org/inst.php?inst=7. It’s less tourist-trap-y than Tombstone (which is also a classic road trip destination) but no less historical. And a nice place to stay in Lincoln is the Wortley Hotel (http://www.wortleyhotel.com/index.html). A new owner has taken over since the last time I was there but it should still be a nice, quiet, sit-in-a-rocking-chair-on-the-front-porch kinda place (but fair warning, it is also a no-frills kinda place–no phones, no tvs…). (The old owner was a local historian who gave nighttime tours of the town…not sure about the new owners though.)
And if you pass through Southern New Mexico on I-10 you definitely have to get off in Mesilla and go to La Posta (http://www.laposta-de-mesilla.com/index.html). They’ve got awesome chile con queso…and flautas…and sopaipillas…and chile rellenos…yum.
I have two words for you.
Deadwood, cocksuckers.
Say howdy-fuckin’-do to Al for me when you get there.
If you are planning on hitting more than one national park, you may want to look into the “America the Beautiful” pass - http://www.nps.gov/fees_passes.htm. My husband and I had one awhile back, and it saved us some moolah when we visited more than one park in a year.
Mesa Verde. http://www.nps.gov/meve/ Site of Indian Ruins & cliff dwellings. (And close to Four Corners.)
Petrified Forest. http://www.nps.gov/pefo/ (while looking for that one, I also found this one located just 90 minutes outside San Fran: http://www.petrifiedforest.org/ - can’t vouch for how entertaining it is, though.)
Lastly, you probably already know that the NY Times recently did a piece entitled “The 31 Places to Go This Summer.” (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/travel/20080601_SUMMER.html?ref=travel ) At #5 is a “Western Road Trip.” in which they give suggestions for alternatives to the crowds of The Grand Canyon. (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/travel/20080601_SUMMER.html?ref=travel#goto5)
What hasn’t been said yet…
*Cape Canaveral fits the bill nicely.
*Football came into its own in that era, so I give Green Bay, Wisconsin a nod due to the Packers being the dominant team of the 60’s. (Canton, Ohio? The Football Hall of Fame is overrated.)
*Cooperstown, New York, though? Worth it if you haven’t been.
If you do hit Hoover Dam, be sure to take the tour. At one point — and I’m remembering this from, what, THIRTY-EIGHT years ago — you’re on a platform with a jaw-droppingly ginormous set of pipes above and below you. And those pipes would be the entire, mighty Colorado River.
I had nightmares about, you know, what might happen if there was an accident with that platform and those pipes, for at least twenty years after that.
So, yeah, go on that tour.
Flintstones Bedrock City, near the Grand Canyon.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/112
Tragic and awesome at the same time.
Holy moley! THanks for all the suggestions so far — definitely going to visit some of these. I also discovered there’s a Sign Museum in Indiana or Illinois. Sc-ore!
Holy shit, Flintstones Town!!!!!1!!!1! I totally forgot about that! My mom and her siblings went when they were kids, and when I first saw the snaps in my grandma’s photo album when I was a wee child, they BLEW MY MIND and I wanted to go SO BAD! This trip is totally going to remedy all the lost dreams of my youth if I also get a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine!
Just remembered another one. Words simply cannot express the magic that is … South of the Border. So fabulously awful and tacky, that if you’re ever on the border of North and South Carolina, you simply *must* visit. http://www.pedroland.com
P.S. Hey, you kids, we expect a fully detailed, geotagged, photo-rific report of this trip afterwards! ;)
Shouldn’t you be going to White Sands? Birthplace of the atomic bomb?
Might I suggest Sedona, Arizona. http://www.visitsedona.com/ My sister just got back from a trip out there and the pictures she brought back were absolutely beautiful.
Tara, you must go. It’s only, like, 4 bucks to get in. The only word I can use to describe it is desolate.
http://flickr.com/photos/freakgirl/544415404/in/set-72157600349543013/
We loved it.
If you’re on your way through, Hershey, PA is cute.
http://www.hersheypa.com will have all of the information on everything there is to do in the area.
In lieu of an actual tour of the chocolate factory (which they haven’t allowed tourists into since the the late 70s, I believe), there’s an attraction called Chocolate World which is, like, the “It’s a Small World” of faux chocolate factory tours. It’s free and air conditioned, so the kids and I go approximately once every two weeks or so. Also, there’s a HUGE factory store. The prices are about what you’d pay anywhere else, but you can get nearly any American Hershey product you’re looking for there.
Oh my god I forgot about South of the Boarder!! Even if you don’t feel like stopping the billboards that start advertising it from like 200 miles away will FORCE you to! They have this mascot named Pedro and he says things like “Hey Kids! Keep screaming! Mom and Dad will stop” and then it tells you just how many miles you are away from teh awesomeness. It rules.
I second and third sdpfeiffy’s suggestion of the Corn Palace. It’s so completely awesome that there are no words. I actually loved it more than Mount Rushmore. Also, I didn’t read all the other entries, but the House on the Rock is pretty cool (and worth the $20 admission) if you are near Madison, Wisconsin. Not sure it’s worth going too out of the way for, but I thought it was ultra cool (partly because American Gods by Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite books).
If you head south, Colonial Williamsburg and also Gatlinburg, Tennessee - plus Pigeon Forge/Dollywood.
On a high school trip once, I fell asleep on the bus and woke up when the bus was stopped at South of the Border. It was dark and all the neon was blinking, and there was…like, a plastic cow thing advertising some form of beef, I think? I just remember that I opened my eyes and looked out the window, and my first thought was genuinely “Ohhhhh man, the bus crashed, and we’re in hell.”
You do realize that makes it sound even awesomer.
Thinking “Atomic Age,” the Space Needle (and the pleasant enough park area beneath it) struck me as an appropriate suggestion… and then I read the next blog entry. Alrighty then. So how about… Devil’s Tower (dwee-dee-dee-doo-doo)? Several posters mentioned Wall Drug — the Plains answer to “South of the Border” — and it’s a full day’s drive from there to Yellowstone, with Devil’s Tower and rustic Cody, WY, on the way in between.
For many of the places on your list, you may very well get your fill within an hour or two after you’ve reached them. But I’ll second or third the tip that Yellowstone cries out for more than a day.
Old Faithful may be obligatory, but try Norris Geyser Basin as a followup. Mammoth is pretty surreal, Grand Canyon (of the Yellowstone) Village has some retro charm as a place to stay, and the canyon view from the Lower Falls was more dynamic and more — digestible? — for me than that other Grand Canyon. Speaking of digestion, breakfast would be a good excuse to drop by the Lake Yellowstone Hotel dining room.
On the way in or out of Yellowstone, it’s definitely worth stopping (and looking up) if you can pass through Jackson Hole, an hour to two from the south entrance of Yellowstone. Closer to Mount Rushmore — not even an hour away — is Crazy Horse. As perennial national tourist traps go, it sort of hovers on that fine line of “so bad it’s good” status.
The San Fran picks on your list are sensible, and perhaps you’ll stumble across some Starfleet wannabe with her own opinions, but I’d remind you to 1) try the sourdough, 2) drop some coin at the Musee Mecanique, 3) ride a cable car, 4) meander down Lombard Street between Hyde and Leavenworth, and 5) try to find a few hours to wander about the Exploratorium and the Palace of Fine Arts.
I’m gonna have to jump on the South Dakota bandwagon. Not only is Mt. Rushmore there, but there are fun, atomic-y things all along I-90. There’s the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD (A palace built of corn). There’s Wall Drug in Wall, SD (hard to explain) and of course the Pioneer Auto Museum and Antique Town in Murdo, SD. Easily the most kitchy state in the Union. All in all, South Dakota is much better than you’d think.
Atomic Tour = Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, which is actually a really, really fascinating and jam-packed little museum. Plan to spend at least 3 hours there. Really. It’s a lot of “Why We Had To” and is the flip side of Hiroshima’s Peace Park and “Why This Should Never Happen Again”.
http://www.atomictestingmuseum.org/
As a bonus, it’s across the street from an INCREDIBLE Himalayan/Nepalese/Indian restaurant (that’s cheap and well stocked with beers of many countries).
http://www.usmenuguide.com/himalayancuisine.html
After museum and food, you can top it off with a coffee from Sexxpresso next door, “Las Vegas’ hottest coffee”. Coffee served by baristas in lingerie (I know - ouch”). I haven’t actually had coffee there, but the little Airstream trailer re-covered to look like a giant coffee cup is awfully cute.
http://sexxyespresso.com/
There’s also a ton of stuff like where all the old Vegas neon goes to die:
http://www.neonmuseum.org/boneyard.html
A lot of the old neon is also down on Freemont Street (downtown Las Vegas, which is NOT the Strip)
http://www.vegasexperience.com/
And Hoover Dam really is cool.
~Ann
OMG yeah, Neon Sign Graveyard! I always wanted to go there. THanks for the reminder!
Hey Tara, you can totally get a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine:
http://fredflare.com/customer/product.php?productid=2859&cat=316
Wooo! We have a draft plan but there’s a big hole we need to fill. If you have any ideas for between Memphis-ish and New York please see http://glark.org/atomic-tour-draft-plan/
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