Recently, I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on a shoot with Dee Briggs, and we happened by Rock City on top of Lookout Mountain, the granddaddy of Southern tourism icons. “See Rock City”, the barns, Ruby Falls — it made me think about Southern vacations. The South was a brutally poor place after the Civil War and before Disney. There was a time down here when people drove long distances to see some pretty weird things.
Monument Avenue in Richmond, a tree-lined, dead Civil War general-ized monument-strewn boulevard, pulled in tourists by the thousands along with Hollywood Cemetery, created as both burial ground and tourist attraction. It was a different time.
Across the South, as in the rest of America, there are some interesting things to go see. Below is a scratching of the Southern surface:
- The Pest Control Museum in Decatur, Alabama
- World’s First Stuckey’s Monument in Eastman, Georgia
- Petrified Forest in Flora, Mississippi
- Britney Spears Museum in Kentwood, Louisiana
- Birthplace of WalMart in Bentonville, Arkansas
- Flipper’s Grave in Grassy Key, Florida
- World’s Largest Bottle of Booze in Louisville, Kentucky
- Taxidermy Hall of Fame of North Carolina Creation Museum in Southern Pines, North Carolina
- UFO Welcome Center in Bowman, South Carolina
- The Grave of Stonewall Jackson’s Arm near Fredricksburg, Virginia
- White Squirrel Capital of the world in Kenton, Tennessee
- Mummies of The West Virginia Hospital for the Insane in Philippi, West Virginia
- Toilet Seat Museum in San Antonio; Cockroach Hall of Fame in Plano, Texas; Jesus in Cowboy Boots in Paris, Texas; The Beer Can House in Houston, Texas (Texas has more than its share)
Of course, South of the Border off I-95 in Dillon, South Carolina, is worth at least a pee stop on any travel agenda. Built in 1949 as a massive monument to concrete and Mexican iconography, a huge, revolving sombrero lures you off the freeway (if the hundreds of cheesy billboards didn’t do the trick) to walk between Pedro’s legs and stroll among $40 million of concrete kitsch. See the giant concrete gorilla! See the giant concrete golf ball! See the giant concrete rhino, the giant concrete sea captains, the giant concrete – well, you get the picture. It’s downright scary what humans can do when they have some extra time, money and a lot of concrete. There are two gas stations, a motel, a big fireworks stand (apparently a requirement on I-95 or I-85 through the South), 20 stores and eateries, an amusement park and a convention center. Companies have conventions here, yup, and people get married here too – a lot of them.
After South of the Border, the butt-like Peachoid (a water tower), off I-85 in Gaffney, South Carolina, is just a fuzzy punctuation on the endless Southern roads to caverns, world’s largest whatevers, natural bridges, enchanted something-or-others, museums to every strange thing you can imagine and the best one of all: The World’s Only Ass Kicking Machine (I kid you not) in Burnt Chimney, Virginia, near Wirtz. The word is, it can kick 100 butts an hour. Check it out:
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips
