Most people have a pretty sterile vision of museums. They have institutional white walls and satin ropes. There may be a security guard perched by the entry way to the gallery. The J.Spencer Watkins Memorial Museum is not that museum.
So many oddities come hand-in-hand with a ghost town. They are sieve for oddity: anything normal comes and goes but the strange curiosities lodge in the town to stay. In the case of Virginia City, that means a Nickelodeon that still charges a nickel to watch Bawdy films of scandalous women show their ankles and get your fortune told.
There is an intense density of remarkable geology in Giant Springs State Park. The park hosts the largest spring in the country fueling the shortest river and merging with the largest river in North America.
Oasis Bordello Museum in Wallace, Idaho is the opposite of what I anticipated. Positioned on yet another brick lined block of shops, one might expect something playing up old west iconography. Yet, while it traces its origins to early mining clientele, it continued operation into the late 1980s. Instead of corsets and feather boas, the closets are filled with polyester bathing suites and sequin dresses.
They did it for the toilets. They did it for the tides. After a fire decimated Seattle in 1889, the city planners saw an opportunity to correct a massive and pungent civic challenge: sewage.
The Mary D. Hume was the longest operating service boat on the Pacific Coast and can still be seen, half sunk, one hundred feet from where it was built over a century ago.
While there isn't much left to see at Hobbiton, USA, there is more than just a defunct roadside attraction to access from the same parking lot. The Living Chimney Tree gained its titular characteristic in 1914 when a fire hollowed out this 78 foot tall tree without actually killing it. The resulting charred inner room is about 12 feet in diameter and stretches so high that it is difficult to see where the chamber ends. I wouldn't have been against setting up camp inside for a night. There certainly was plenty of room. When it comes to burnt out trees, this one is pretty remarkable. It makes for a pretty short stop: walk in, turn around, sing a song to test the acoustics, then exit.
We are programmers. We've copped to that. So, I suppose it goes without saying that Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films were not our first exposure to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. When I discovered that there was the remnants of an old hobbit themed roadside attraction in the redwoods, we were going there.
We do try to keep our journeys rational and high brow. Yet, every once and a while, we can't help but be pulled in by a pseudoscientific tourist trap:
Last night, the temperatures plummeted but this morning we woke up hot. The sun beat down on our truck shell giving us the extra spur to get up and head out early. The tide tables indicated that low tide would be at 8am. I must have read them wrong because it was high tide when we arrived at the shore. All the same, we trotted out to glass beach, an accidental oddity on the California coast.