Motorcycle Men
Motorcycle Men
Episode 473 - Talking with Doug Kirby of Roadside America
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Hello boys and girls,
Today on the show, we’re sitting down with Doug Kirby — one of the minds behind Roadside America, the legendary guide to the strange, the wonderful, the historic, the gigantic, the tiny, and the downright bizarre attractions scattered across the American landscape.
Doug and the Roadside America team have spent decades documenting the unusual corners of the country — from giant fiberglass animals to mysterious monuments, from folk‑art masterpieces to the kind of oddball stops that make every road trip unforgettable. We’re going to talk about the history of Roadside America, how it all began, how they gather information, some of the most memorable attractions, and what’s coming next for the website, the app, and the future of roadside exploration.
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Hello, boys and girls, and welcome to episode 473 of the Morse Local Man Podcast. I am Ted, your host, and I'm here as always in the corner booth at the B Twin Cafe. Today we have uh a wonderful guest. We're sitting down with Doug Kirby, one of the minds behind Roadside America, the legendary guide to the strange, the wonderful, the historic, the gigantic, the tiny, and the downright bizarre attractions scattered across the American landscape. Doug and the Roadside America team have spent decades documenting the unusual corners of the country, from giant fiberglass animals to mysterious monuments, from folk art masterpieces to the kind of oddball stops that makes every road trip unforgettable. We're going to talk about the history of Roadside America, how it all began, how they gather information, some of the most memorable attractions, and what's coming next for the website, the app, and the future of Roadside Exploration. But before we get into that, I want to tell you about the amazing companies that help make this show possible. Scorpion helmets, keeping your head safe and stylish. Wild ass seats, saving your butt one mile at a time. Make sure you tell real quick Johnson your ass hurts and he'll take care of you. Viking Bags, makers of tough, functional luggage for every ride, and of course, tobacco motorware for the best in casual riding wear for men and women, the best gear you'll ever own, you gotta get in Dave's pants. That's tobacco motorware.com. Alright, time now for that wonderful interview with Doug Kirby. All right, boys and girls, and we're back and joining me right now, all the way from where are you located at right now?
SPEAKER_02North of San Francisco.
SPEAKER_00Just north of San Francisco, Mr. Doug Kirby with Roadside America. Doug, welcome back to the show.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's great to be back.
SPEAKER_00It's been a number of years. It's like seven years now since you've been on the show, and I'm sure things have changed in that time. So but before we begin to get any further, I want you to tell everybody who you are and what you do.
SPEAKER_02I'm the uh publisher and co-creator of RoadsideAmerica.com, which is a guide to off-beat and unusual roadside attractions. Um, and you know, rideers and other road trip travelers use our website. We have mobile apps. If you go back far enough, we our books started uh at all 40 years ago. So and before Roadside was a business, it was a side hustle. So my career has been a mix of you know doing things creative director, RD designer, writer, editor, multimedia producer, and all those uh come together on uh a later project, which is still an old project, the website, it's been around for now 30 years this year. Wow. And uh and the Roadside America apps that we do. So those are fun because it combines all my skills.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah. Hey, uh so now Roadside America uh has become uh basically the definitive guide to oddball Americana, right? So how did the whole project first come together and what was the original spark that made you and your team want to document all of these you know quirky roadside attractions?
SPEAKER_02Well, they'll give you a little history. Um there's a lot of history, I'll try to truncate a bit, but um, there were four guys, uh, Ken Smith, Mike Wilkins, me, and Jack Farth, who left after the first book. But we met in New York City in the uh early 1980s. Uh and we knew of each other's work uh uh from college humor magazines because there was sort of a mail exchange that was going on back then. And uh we'd all lived in various parts of the country uh and had our own experiences with family vacations and things like that. But in in Manhattan, we were all there to do creative things. We uh, you know, we were looking for careers in books and magazines, performing a comedy, you know, SNL was was pretty big then, uh, and New York was the place to go for all that. So we we had a lot of different projects going on, and uh Roadside America was an idea for a project that clicked with a few of us, and uh you know, we decided we should start pitching it to uh publishers.
SPEAKER_00Oh, wow! So that was what in what year was that?
SPEAKER_02That was uh we pitched it in '84 and did uh the principal research in '85, and the book was published in '86. And it was actually, it seemed like a bad idea for a book because even if they gave us an advance, we'd end up spending the entire advance just doing the research and travel. Yeah. And uh, and it turned out it was hard to find a publisher. We've eventually got Simon and Schuster. They did give us an advance, and we spent the entire thing doing the research. Yeah. Um, and then at some point in there, my wife, uh Susan, joined the team and designed the first book. Um, and she, I always think of her, she's the most responsible person on the team because she don't forget that it's a business, it's not all fun. You know, we have to do some of these other things, and she is very creative, so she's a writer and editor as well.
SPEAKER_00You know about these roadside attractions. I wonder though, before your book, before the website, what did people do? How did they find these things?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think part of it was there was a little bit of a different attitude about it. If I look at uh my my dad's planning in the 60s of family trips, he would be working his uh his job uh and then writing away to all the tourism bureaus and the states to get brochures.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_02And no, I don't even think he he would buy a a book in a store or something, it was just all get the free guides. The states wanted to promote stuff. So it would mostly be the national parks, the state parks, the you know, those kind of well-funded things. Uh, where you would find the oddball things is when you were going there, and especially if you had a station wagon or a car full of kids. Like, oh my god, they're driving me crazy. Where can we stop that doesn't cost much to like wear them out? So it'd be like, Look, there's a giant cow. Look, there's a some kind of wild west town that charges a dollar to enter, you know, and and so I I got an early taste of that. And um, you know, of course, enjoyed the national beauty of the country, but you know, later on in life I'm thinking like, nobody's ever really done a guide on on these things.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, so so we did it. That's awesome. Now, when you look back at the early days, what were some of the first attractions you you personally visited or documented, and how did those early experiences shape the the I don't know, the tone and the personality of Roadside America?
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, there's a few, um, one that really sticks out, and we ended up making it one of our uh seven wonders was South of the Border. Oh, yeah. Uh just south south of the border in North Carolina and South Carolina. We had it listed as in Dillon, but it's I think it's Hamer as the town now. And that's an over-the-top Mexican theme world. Uh politically incorrect, even back, you know, when we went there, uh it had the mascot Pedro, hundreds of billboards up and down I-95 for escape funds, the sombrero observation tower, uh, you know, the place to go for fireworks, their motel was haunted, they had a dirty old man's shop. You know, so it's like like I wish we could have put uh that in amber and just preserved it exactly as it was back, you know, in like 1985. Yeah. Um, and but but that was one like, oh, gee, and they're really that turned out to be rare. There aren't that many places that have so many of those things converging.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh another place that uh inspired me personally was Secret Caverns, and that's up in New York State.
SPEAKER_00I know exactly where that is. Yeah, I've been there.
SPEAKER_02I don't know how they're doing now, but but uh back then uh they were the scrappy rival of Halcow. Yeah, ten times more than the uh the visitors, they were very like conservative and proper, and secret caverns were just these like trippy guys doing the tours, and the and the billboards all look like grateful dead or psychedelics.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's right. Oh my god, yes.
SPEAKER_02Uh and they were great. So when we met them, we thought, oh, this is they're on the same wavelength we are. And then again, we get out onto the landscape, we find there were some other places like that, but not many, you know. And um, and this was a moving target because some things had just gone out of business, some things were just starting, uh, some things, you know, a dinosaur park may have been handed down through generations of the family, and then that was still doing pretty well. Um, so those things were going on. And then things like the Santa Cruz mystery spot in California, uh, you know, we we went to that and then realized wait, this these mystery spots where war runs up hill and gravity goes haywire, they're all over the country. What what's the deal with these? Are these like you know, like UFO or Bigfoot where why isn't government reporting in these mystery spots? So and then once you see a few of them, you get what's going on. Yeah, and uh and then and then we had to derate them. It's sort of like who's doing it right? Who's you know, there was a guy in West Virginia who was very secretive about how the mystery spot worked, and uh, you know, you've got a litigious guy, like he wouldn't let you take photos.
SPEAKER_00No now, in that first year of doing all this research and compiling your list, how many uh roadside attractions did you accumulate in that first year? And more so, how did you get them?
SPEAKER_02Well well, the first it was tough because pre-internet uh it was all uh we we started to find that um uh working with uh first of all old postcards because uh Mike Wilkins was a collector of old postcards.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And I had some and and Ken had some. And we uh we sifted through those, and basically part of one of the big trips was which of these places still exist? And you as we traveled, we would uh go to a place and let's say, oh, an Elvis Museum we didn't know about. We'd stop, and then the Elvis Museum owner would tell us about three other cool things in the area. Like once they got what we were doing, they're like, Have you seen this? Have you seen that? And uh so it was all this sort of whisper network of weirdness uh that that allowed us to put that together. And you know, a lot of times we would chase down things that was like, this is totally wrong. You know, there's not a 1200-foot-tall pile of sawdust in Michigan, typo, you know.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god. Now when you started, did you at what point did you realize how how daunting of a task this was going to be?
SPEAKER_02Well, okay, so when we first started, if you if anybody has our first book, they'll they'll say there are no directions in this book, no hours, no useful information about any of these attractions other than why they're cool and like our writer descriptions of why you should go out and see them. Um and so we took that that attitude of um now, you know, we're not we're not writing the phone book here, right? Like you just if you go to the town that was accidentally bombed in World War II, uh, you know, then then just drive to the drive to the center of town. If you don't see the little crater with the monument next to it, stop a policeman, stop a uh the postal employee, and just say, hey, where's that crater? You know, and and that's what we did. It was a lot of that a lot of that way to find things. In a way, that's all lost now because you can just go online, yeah, uh, and chat bots will basically do all the thinking for you and uh, you know, it's send you to exactly where you need to go. And so a lot of that sort of discovery and uh the thrill of not finding something because it's just a thrilling, like this, you know, Ken has a story. He he was looking for the the uh grave of old Ephraim, the the grizzly bear, and he he just didn't know that you would need like a four-wheel drive car and you know a supply of water and to get to it, you know. So he he got, I think he got to a mountain peak where he could almost see the next mountain where it might be, and then he just gave up. So that was always like his his Moby Dick, the white whale, the old Ephraim grade.
SPEAKER_00But your database is massive. Now, can you walk us through how information is gathered, verified, and how often you update it?
SPEAKER_02Yes. Um, so we've got our own research that we've uh done. We're constantly doing that, uh almost daily, and then the trips. And we we've never been people to you know sell the house and get in an RV for a year or anything like that. Um but what we do is we we just sort of strategically plan a trip and then go out and uh this like hyper, we call them hyper tours, we'll hit 50 places in a week and we'll do interviews, photos, you know, everything. And it's just anything we find in between, we'll we'll grab some of that. Um, and then we'll also we've got a community of website and app users, and they contribute so much to the to what we have. Uh at the start, we were very tight with the material, very strict. The website opened it up. Uh, we had a flood of suggestions, but two-thirds of them we really ended up rejecting because it was like, first of all, some people didn't get the concept, right? You know, oh, we have a delightful bed and breakfast which has a you know mashed potatoes to die for. No, no. That's a little no, that's not more about things. Yeah, and then we we had to set up some rules. Like, we don't want things where people will get caught in barbed wire or get shot, you know, like so it had to be through public, family, you know, almost all family uh safe kind of things. Yeah, uh, but you know, very edgy kind of uh attitude on this stuff. I mean, we we have um massacre sites, sites of famous murders, place where a ghost was a uh witness in a trial for a murder, you know, like like things like that. So it's all and it's pretty common now. Other websites have no problem covering all this stuff.
SPEAKER_00But what's the process like when, say, for example, a new attraction is submitted by somebody who's traveling, or maybe by somebody from your team. What's the process from discovery to publication?
SPEAKER_02Uh okay, so for our team, it's it's easy because we all share the same brain. So I can trust that Ken says this is pretty good. You know, I did, I don't, I'm not worried about that. Um, for something coming in uh from a seasoned tipster who we know has got you know the right beat on this stuff, uh, those are also pretty easy because they're like, yeah, they're a good photographer, they get some facts. The ones where we have problems is uh somebody will send something and it looks like they shot it out the window without even rolling the glass down. Uh and uh they're they they're writing with emojis or something, and we're like, uh is there enough here that we should now spend our you know our short lifespan right you know verifying what they did? Like sometimes when you feel like, wait, I just spent an hour on something that this person spent 15 seconds. Is that really a good trade-off? So uh yeah, like if I look now, we have a backlog of um several hundred tips that we're no kidding, several hundred. Yeah, yeah. And some of them are um the ones we prioritize is if somebody says, This is closed, this burnt down, this muffler man uh got hit by a drunk and the head fell off. Those we we want to get up right away because of course, yeah. Affect somebody's uh ability to enjoy it, you know, in the aftermath. Um, other things are a little slower. We're like, well, okay, this is a curiosity museum, but uh when we look at it online, it looks like it's just another curiosity shop, and there's like 5,000 of them now in the country.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh so it's like, oh wait, but they have uh, you know, albino squirrels, a whole shelf of them, you know. So it's sort of like, okay, that's the curiosity shop where you need to see a shelf of albino squirrels and action poses, then you know that'll that'll sort of fast track that tip.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then what we do is so we do our research, um, we we try to make sure that it's uh this has gotten tricky because people either cut and paste from other copyrighted sources, or worse now, is they're using chat to just do all their thinking. So really, so we can almost detect like this is written a little too good to be like coming from a regular person who's not a professional writer, you know.
SPEAKER_00Now, have you ever had somebody like uh like just email you and say, hey, uh at this location, uh there's uh a big rock that looks like uh a potato, you know, and then you guys do you guys investigate that to see if it's valid, or do you just put that at the back of the pile?
SPEAKER_02We uh it it there's sort of a fliding scale. It's funny because we've made sort of some joke tools to measure this, yeah. And um, and one of them is the um sort of size versus weirdness. So like um a 60-foot-tall statue of a an accountant is the accountant itself is boring, but it's 60 feet tall, right?
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but a um but let's take like a uh then a four-foot-tall statue of a turtle is too small, but what if there's a backstory that the turtle saved the life of a child? Right, okay, like by dragging them out of floodwaters or something. Um, so we've got this sort of weirdness versus size um uh metric. It's had to be calculated.
SPEAKER_00It's a moving scale.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and this stuff is dynamic, like these uh uh Thomas Dambo trolls. I don't know if you're familiar with these are um uh wooden trolls. They're they're immense, they're very funny. Uh almost like a cart uh cartoonist designed them. The sculptor figured out a way to make them with uh slats of wood. These things are all over the country, and um originally we were only getting reports of a few of them, so we thought, oh, that's cool.
SPEAKER_00Is that the thing with the really big nose?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were and and they were like all cute. There's one that's like pulling uh street light poles out of a park, and you know, they're they're all but what's what's going on is um the artist has become so successful that cities are are paying for these to be installed.
SPEAKER_00Oh, really?
SPEAKER_02So and for us, that's sort of like uh oh, everybody knows about punk rock now, so it's not cool, you know.
SPEAKER_00Like yeah, so it goes from being an oddity to being something you can expect, you know, anticipate.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a couple exceptions, like the Muffler men. We've always, even though those are mostly identical, the very fact that they exist is is the phenomenon that's interesting. That they are all out there and they're like these creepy presences in towns, and yeah.
SPEAKER_00They are sometimes they can be creepy, but we'll get into that in a moment. Now, it's uh speaking of some of these attractions, some of them are pretty much legendary, and other one other of them are are just really super obscure. Now, is there a criteria that you use to decide whether something gets listed or have there been any submissions that surprised you and your staff?
SPEAKER_02Um yeah, I I guess there are I was trying to think of some that are um are things that I felt like wait, that is you know, sometimes we believe that we're being punked, right? Like, wait, there's that's too good. Um one was the um the pregnancy mini ball, and that the Civil War. The the story is that um uh I guess what a Confederate soldier and a and a woman were in uh in a bat, you know, there was a battle going on, and a stray miniball went through the man into the woman and uh impregnated her because of the the entry point of the wound and and how it passed her to them. And that miniball was on display in a museum down uh down in the south. Um, so that's like a crazy story, yeah. Right. And and even if you just say, well, that's just a myth, but the fact that a museum has made like a glass case with the mini ball and you know and all that, that's the that's the appealing part of that.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_02So those kind of things are are are just crazy. We anything that's sort of uh odd and not reproduced all over the country, uh yeah. I mean, like if if a museum um says you know, we include our county museum. Uh we have a great collection of um you know old furniture and farm equipment. It's like, nah, we're not gonna really do that.
SPEAKER_00Right. I get I get it. Um now as you know, you because this is a motorcycle podcast, motorcyclists love to stop at goofy places. Um what are are there any like rider friendly attractions or or Or maybe even regions of the country that stand out consistently.
SPEAKER_02And you know what makes them perfect for the well I'm sure I'm sure a lot of your riders know about this, but Oatman, Arizona, uh it's it's got the most dangerous stretch of Route 66. Uh it's called the Arizona Sidewinder, Sight Greaves Pass. There's 190 twists and herpin turns along cliffs with no guardrails. Oh. But but so that's for the motorcycle riders, like, oh, you know, this is cool and dangerous. Uh the payoff for the roadside, the cowardly roadsiders in their, you know, with their families in their cars who don't want to go off the cliff, is that when you get to Oatman, it's a hundred percent tourist trap town. They at night nobody lives there, they all go home. Oh, live burrows wandering the streets, uh, and um, you know, photo opportunities, there's a mine tour, there's you know, so that's like a great place to uh you know get some souvenirs and things. Yeah, another one, you know, the Pacific Coast Highway.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that's of course but is that considered a roadside attraction, though?
SPEAKER_02Uh it's it's not uh, except if you string together things that are you know along the highway. So if you are hitting things up in Santa Cruz, you need to see the mystery spot there, you can um, you know, some of these things are uh it's like a Route 66 trip uh tri uh trip. If you stick to Route 66, uh you're gonna miss a lot of the things that are a couple miles off. So if you're going down the Pacific Coast Highway, there's plenty of interesting things that are, you know, the uh the Hearst Mansion, you know, I mean that's a very mainstream attraction, but that's something you might want to stop at. Um and and then the the other one I I was thinking about was uh Colorado Springs area has many great odd attractions, but the the you know the rides are up in the mountains. So um, you know, you can you can start something like the um Air Force Academy, which is you know, if you're into seeing the all the military hardware and jets that they have on display, you can uh go across town to Dragon Man's Military Museum, and that's like a guy who runs a shooting range who's got the largest collection of World War II memorabilia I've ever seen. Perfect. He's got so many uniforms and mannequins. Uh and it's such a nightmare for him to get it dusted that he keeps everything in dry cleaning bags. So when you go in, there's hundreds of these figures covered with dry cleaning bags, and it's like some weird wow, you know, it's some weird house or something. Yeah, and then from there you go up into the uh the hills or into the mountains to see Bishop Castle, and that's a uh a castle built by one man up in the uh up in the mountains there uh near Pueblo.
SPEAKER_00So some of the greatest uh roadside attractions that I have seen, and I think probably the favorites of many travelers, is well, obviously the the mufflermen. And anything that's giant, regardless of what it is, the giant stuff seems to be like Do you know how many giant things and mufflermen there are in a country?
SPEAKER_02Wait, that's a tough question. Uh we have a big category, but I we use that pretty uh pretty well. Let me just take a look on our thing of what we we're running for big right now. Um so for big for big things, things that we consider big, 2,569 attractions are in our our iPhone.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_02Uh and you know, that's something that's larger than life. Um, back to the equation. If it's a cockroach and it's 10 feet tall, that's pretty big for a cockroach.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I do do you know how many muffler men you have in the country? Yeah. Now that includes the ones I would include the ones that they I think they call the uh the what do they call them the uh the dimwit ones?
SPEAKER_02The half, we the half wits or whatever hats wits. We're actually we we actually um other people who are who really love the muffler men are pursuing them even more than us now, I think they're not using that term anymore because it's you know it's not a it's not a correct term. Um he's the country bumpkin or the Alfred E new.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. Those, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And um uh one thing about the Muffler men is when we first started looking at them, they didn't we didn't know where they came from at all. Um, and they didn't have names as a group, they had usually local names like Mac, the repairmen, or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So we uh I came up with categories for them all and wanted some fun ones. So we came up with the Uniroyal Gal and the you know, the Bunyan and and the Half Wit. And um and those are names that kind of stuck for probably uh 15 years. And then when people in the last there's been sort of a big resurgence with the mufflermen, they're very valuable now. Yeah, but there's also more people diving into the deep research about them, yeah. You know, tell us telling us what we got wrong. So, you know, now there's much more history out there, and um, you know, who the artist is actually, you know. I interviewed a guy in 1998 who ran the company, but he wasn't the artist. So now the artists are are much more well documented of who came up with the design.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Do you know how many there are though?
SPEAKER_02Oh, um there's uh under 300 still out there.
SPEAKER_00That's still quite a bit.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. There were famously there's um there were 300 of those big friend ones, the Texaco Giants. Yeah, they were bigger than any of the other ones. Um, they were part of a campaign uh in the mid-60s by Texaco, wanted to put them in all the stations, and it was just too much of a nightmare to move them. They were giant, and you know, the the owners of the stations were getting stuck with maintaining them. So at some point, um, Texaco just said destroy them all. So it was like a mass Holocaust of these things, and only a few survived. So those are very rare and and very treasured. Oh wow.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Now some of the well, we went we went to talk about some of those tractions. I uh now behind every traction there is somewhat of a story. Now uh what what's some of the most memorable, unexpected stories you've uncovered while researching or visiting these places?
SPEAKER_02Um well the uh a lot of times when we go to a place, we're going there because we know that there's a story and we're gonna get the details. Um and you know, there's just things like uh there's a statue in Boulder City, Nevada. It's a it's named Alabama, and it's a guy. Um he's like a worker, sort of a skinny sculpture, and he's got um a plunger in one hand and a bandolier of toilet paper across his chest. And so, you know, I I gave him a name. I called him the toilet paper hero of Hoover Dam because what he was was he was the guy who's in charge of uh cleaning up and refilling the toilet paper and all the outhouses when the dam was being built. So um what amuses me now is that seems to have become the official name of the statue. Like no way, really other apps, Google Maps. That's what it gets called. Um, and so it's fun when I see names uh, you know, in the uh LA um uh science museum, it was the uh 50-foot-tall woman with visible organs, right? So that's the name I gave their anatomical thing. And and you know, within a few years, that was that was that became the official name. I I don't know, it not not by the museum itself, but just by anybody who's what we try to do with with the way we name things is to hook people in where they might might otherwise just miss something.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02So here's another example. Um uh Niederland, uh Colorado had a festival every year. Uh it was the Frozen Dead Guy Days. And this is a festival to celebrate uh a guy who was in a backyard uh tough shed uh on ice. Uh uh, a man's grandfather had been put on ice after he died with the hope that he could be revived in the future when medical technology, you know, allowed that. The guy moved uh to Europe and uh but he left money so that the ice could keep being replenished. And so this turned into a festival. Uh every year people go and have you know good frozen dead guy days. Well, then uh that started to uh wind down. Uh too many people were going to it, really, is what happened. So um the uh Stanley Hotel in nearby Estes Park uh got involved and they got grandpa out of the shed, and then they somehow wedded it up with a company in Scottsdale, Arizona named Alcor. Alcor, never heard of them. They freeze people, they freeze either whole bodies or heads. And you can you can take your you can take all your life insurance and you know go meet with them and they'll sign a contract with them that when you die, they're gonna have a team come in and they're gonna get you, you know, filled up some fluids, put in the bag, uh the cooling bag or whatever, and shipped on over to be put in an aluminum cylinder, and then they're gonna keep you there until a future generation decides they need you to come back, right? Um that's the you know, of course, the bizarre thing is and they also figured out well, any um future technology that will bring you back, it could also grow you a new body. So all they need is your head. So it's cheaper, it's cheaper if you only have your head preserved because that's less maintenance.
SPEAKER_00So bizarre. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_02So these there's there'd been a few of these. I think Alcor is one of the more successful ones. But okay, so they said, hey, we we want to get in on this. So the Stanley Hotel now has a museum um converted from their old ice house, and it it's pretty much a promotion for this idea of freezing.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's so funny. Now, have you ever stumbled upon something that completely unplanned that turned into a favorite?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah. The um uh since we hadn't know so much about these places, it that has become more rare, but of course, when it happens, it's so rewarding. So years ago, one of them was the um we were doing going to various places we had on our list, and we saw a billboard for Precious Moments Chapel. And if you remember the precious precious moments little porcelain figurines, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Um, we thought, what trap chapel? What is that? What could that be? And uh so we detoured to that, and it turned out to be like an amazing attraction, um, funded by the cartoonists who had made millions of dollars uh from this, and uh it was uh all the cartoon baby angels uh were painted in into like a cistine chapel uh sort of an arrangement, and there was uh gift shops and tour groups and you know a light show with the precious moments fountain with all the little little uh baby angels. So that was really cool. And then another billboard discovery was um uh more recently was uh driving uh I think it was I-90 uh in South Dakota, and uh it was called 1880 Cowboy Town. And we would have just passed right by it because you know a lot of Wild West things out there, but it said something about robots, like you know, animated robots or electrical robots. Okay. So we got off and detoured, and and when we did do these detours, it sort of ruins our schedule for the rest of the day, if it's a a good place. We get in there and it was it was great uh because it was one guy, and it a retired English teacher who had built an entire Wild West town and populated it with animatronics. So really you remember the um the movie in the series Westworld, yeah, yeah, yeah. So try to imagine that, except you know, shabbier and most of the robots are broken, so they're either like not moving at all or the arm is just twitching. Uh and the one we thought was was really funny is he had he had an animatronic Abe Lincoln, and when we saw it, the head, the uh hat was pulled down over the eyes, the stove pipe hat. Uh we went when we walked back down the hill to um to the gift shop, and I we said, Hey, what's going on with Abe Lincoln? And he said, Oh, his eyes went wonky, and uh, you know, the kids were getting scared and crying, so he pulled the hat down, and I and we were like, Well, is that gonna get repaired? He says, and he said, you know, that robot repair guy was supposed to be here last month and he hasn't shown up. And and that opened up a whole universe to us because he's like, robot repair guy, did they wander? You know, they're like what driving a truck or a wagon and hitting all the attractions and fixing their broken robots. And so actually, that inspired me. I just recently had done a video and a and a song called um waiting for the robot repair guy. So that's on our YouTube site.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's funny. Yeah, uh now you guys have thousands of photos, descriptions, and also user reports. Now, how do you balance that accuracy and but still maintain the fun that the site is known for?
SPEAKER_02Uh well, uh one of the tasks I wish we didn't have it is is uh yeah, uh fact checking the accuracy or if something's up to date. We get all the uh false positive reports that people will say something's gone. And then when we check, it's like it's not gone. They were just in the wrong place. It's like people don't necessarily religiously use us for the directions, they'll trust Google Maps or some other, you know, some other list. Um, and a lot of you know, we we notice, I don't know if it's still true, but a lot of the people who are doing sort of knockoffs of what we do didn't actually go to places or even look at maps, they would just take the addresses and have a you know computer program that would would assume the address is where the attraction is.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02So if a um, you know, if a ghost attraction had a downtown address, but it was really a mile out of town, it would give you a wrong map pin. And you know, we're pretty careful about that stuff. We're like, no, we want to get you there. Uh cemeteries are tricky because cemeteries, it's sometimes very hard to find the exact uh tombstone you're looking for. Yeah. Uh but we found also if we if we drop the pin there, then a lot of times it confuses the GPS of how to find the right entrance to get to it, you know. So there's yeah, there's some of those things. Um, sometimes on the uh reservation, Native American reservation land, you know, that's a little different system. If you have somebody finding a drive across there, you know, that there's a little different handling of that.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, but we we update the content all the time. We try to uh look for opportunities to make it more fun or to surface the thing. Somebody will send us a tip and it'll have four details, and we'll say, Well, these three things, we don't really care if your sandwich was late to the lunch or you know, what we care about is the this one item, this one detail. And so we'll edit the tips. We don't actually don't publish anything else before.
SPEAKER_00Now, as far as goes for the updating and editing, have you ever had to update or correct an attraction because either it changed or closed or got removed or anything weirder than that?
SPEAKER_02Um every so often we run into an area where an attraction that used to be public and welcoming is all of a sudden not. And uh this can happen for reasons where uh people reported it like, oh, there's a house shaped like a flying saucer, and everybody goes there and takes pictures in front of it. And then we'll hear from the owner and like, hey, this is private property. Why are you publicizing my private property?
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02And so in those cases, we'll if it's pretty clear, we'll take that down. Um and we again we want to err on the side of uh going to places that are welcoming. Uh, there was one where it was um, I forget what the sculpture is, but it was a cool sculpture, and uh and we had it on the site for years, and then we got a report that said, Oh, there's all this um Trump advertising at the bottom of it, or MAGA advertising. I thought, okay, that's happen, that happens in some places. And then later on, we heard from that owner saying, Um, can you remove me as an attraction? Because I'm getting all kinds of trouble here. People coming in the middle of the night, and I thought, ooh, it's that people are like being triggered by the political stuff that's been in.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And uh, and we're like, we've always tried to be very apolitical, it's very hard these days. We we always like it when um we get hate mail from both ends of the spectrum, you know, like we're we're uh, you know, it's like it's like animal attractions. If we hear uh from you know both the animal rights activists and uh and the hunters, and they both hate what we did, it's sort of like, oh good, we hit the the magical balance, you know. So, you know, it's it's we we just we try to do this uh a lot of things. Um the the statue thing that happened uh what five years ago with the Confederate statues, yeah, it's a little bit of a challenge for us. We we include Confederate statues not because we're hoping the South rises again, it's based mainly because that stuff is funny to us. You know, it's like it's an attraction. That's just something that's it's yes, they were it was like a traitorous uprising and slavery had a big part of it. Uh and but these monuments are out there. Some of the statues are kind of silly looking. Uh, there was a crazy one of um uh Nathan Bedford Forest that looked like it was made from a giant injection mold. It was the ugliest thing. And I I thought, like, hey, if I really hate uh the Confederacy, I'd want that thing to stay up because it makes them look like buffoons. But all that stuff has been taken down, you know, it's all it's all gone, and then it it kind of moved on, it started hitting presidents like oh uh Ulysses Grant's wife owned a slave, and when they got married, it took a year for Grant to uh you know give him freedom or whatever. So his his bust got you know taken down, and you know, it's like it it went a little too far, I think. Some of the stuff you can put up a plaque next to that thing um to explain the part of the story that isn't there. A lot of these things would have been created at political times, yeah, where it's like nobody, nobody cared about this until the 1920s, you know, when the KKK was trying to, I guess, make a case for something. So um, and the to us that's like still part of the history, you know. It's yeah, it's like we don't have to glorify it, it's just come here, we'll learn it, laugh at it.
SPEAKER_00It's a it's a quirky thing. It's it's a quirky, silly thing. People just need to line up, you know. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, some of it, some of it was terrible, but uh, yeah, of course. Some of the animal attractions that used to uh one story I always remember was from the original book when we were planning our trip to Florida, we called in advance to make sure we'd be able to get access to some of the animal things because they had a lot then. And one of the alligator parks said, What day are you coming? Uh they said, because if we know day you're coming, we won't feed the alligators for a few days uh so that they'll perform better. And and and we were like, No, no, don't do that on our behalf, please. Don't just feed your animals so that they perform for us.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's crazy. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_02That was sort of a little insight that uh that we got there.
SPEAKER_00And um, yes, anyway. Uh now let's talk about the Roadside America app. Um, it seems like it's like a go-to. I mean, I've I've used it quite a bit. Now, what went into building it and how does it differ from the website?
SPEAKER_02Okay, so the um the app uh we did it in 2009, uh, and that was uh, you know, Google Maps really just suddenly became available to everybody uh with websites in 2006. So we spent a lot of time then mapping everything. Before it was just sort of manual directions, yeah, rough locations. Then but all of a sudden it was like, let's map everything down to, you know, it's the pins would be right there. And we we built all that on the website and then realized ooh, when we looked at the uh measurements of traffic on the website, they were starting to change to where more people were using a mobile device. And when iPhone came out, I think it was late 2007 or 2008, we were like, ooh, okay, we need we probably need to look at that as a platform. And so so we built that uh guy uh who I had worked with at um Bell Labs, uh, was a was a great programmer. So he did all the programming for the initial app. And since then, my brother uh Jay, who's a a very experienced developer, he's does all kinds of stuff for us, and we have uh some other developers um in the mix. Um we we kind of put it together, so it's like we had the editorial and the technical side and figured it all out. And it was like again, I I feel like I'm talking about the pioneering of the crystal radio or whatever. But it's like, what what kind of uh coordinates should we use? Should we use the you know the the uh digital or we should we use this standard and you know and all this stuff and and so we figured all that out and we had to figure out like what when you say nearby what is nearby how many times do we want the app to be hitting our server yeah you know all that had to be tested and worked out and uh and then we released it and uh it caught on pretty fast within like uh a couple weeks of releasing that first one we we got some publicity and all of a sudden boom you know it was yeah it was a success all right uh and then we've released many updates over the years the updates are always just so that it keeps working and that we can add new features of capabilities but all the attractions of course those uh update in real time so if right now if I jump off of here and I add three new attractions anybody using the app instantly is gonna have access that's great that's fantastic so that's good now that the difference between that and the website and you know this is probably more my fault so you can blame me but I was like okay we need a reason why somebody would get the app and and not to say just go to the website that's for free right uh and uh so what we did is in the app we put all the research targets and those are things where we already knew they were probably good things we just didn't have a visit or photos and so we'd say this looks promising here's the map point uh you own the app yeah just check it out and just send us a tip if it works out so that's been a great way to feed the feed the beast yeah um on the website what we said is okay the website is like the historical archive of all the cool stuff so there's probably you know at this point many many many attractions that have gone out of business yet should still be remembered so if it's the Tom Gaskin Cypress Knee Museum in Palmdale Florida that he was a great character but you know he passed away 30 years ago you can go to our website and still read interviews with him see photos but is the is the attraction still there uh no no the attraction is not there and if you go to the website you'll see that it says you know it's uh disappeared in whatever date it'll say the same thing on the app too right no it won't the app does not have that attraction at all oh okay the app is designed so you are never supposed to be disappointed with places that are gone we we always objected to the idea that uh going to Roadside America places is kind of like a walk through the graveyard of the golden age which you know I mean the golden age was cool but it there are still cool new things yeah there's still new new ways to look at this stuff and so even the the original book and and on through there we've always said it's not just the neon signs it's not just the romance of the road of the the 40s and 50s it's these other things it's you know this crazy uh museum that uh that used to be a psychiatric hospital and now they've put all their you know they're they're we got a psychiatric hospital let's turn it into a museum yeah yeah and and then it's sometimes we have to kind of expand like hmm is this really a museum is this you know like I was saying with the Curiosity shops it's it's like what is there permanently that somebody will see we try to avoid things that are uh something happened here but there's no evidence of it right yeah I can see how yeah what was the uh the Dan Rather what's the frequency Kenneth street corner so you're uh if you remember that story Dan Rena the newscaster who was attacked and and the guy who attacked him was screaming what's the frequency Kenneth and it turned into an REM song you think REM did it so so that might be one we're going like is that cool enough that people want to go out of their way to stand there I guess if you were an REM fan you might you might want to do that sort of like a uh Geraldo Rivera let's open up the safe and see what's in there and there's nothing right so so back to the back to the apps so um so we we just released a roadside 66 which is a Route 66 app and uh you know there are a couple other um Route 66 apps out there um you know that I'm sure they do a good job we just looked and said we've got an audience of people who like our kind of places you know they're right our kind of places but if they're you know in a town Seligman or uh Springfield Illinois or whatever they're gonna want to see those other Route 66 attractions that we don't have on Roadside America. Yeah yeah things that we uh think are maybe not funny you know like a historic place um an old diner or something is usually not what we put on roadside America but we do put that stuff in roadside 66 so that's got its own data set of uh places and we we did cool two cool things there um one is there's right at the top every day uh you get uh a feature that makes you smarter about route 66 and it's called the backseat know it all what it is is I kind of envisioned this annoying nerd kid who's like it's like you know dad stop at the dinosaur you know no it's they're not called the you know a Bronnosaurus anymore right so it's somebody who's who knows it all and we thought let's help people who are new to Route 66 or even somebody who who thinks they know it all to to learn little tidbits of those so each day you get a tidbit so it's like did you know that uh they were gonna use atomic bombs to blow open a mountain pass to make it easier to you know put Route 66 through uh so things like that are in there. And then the other feature we have is a zealot layer and this is because we were going to include all the deep dive uh stuff but then in the end uh we were convinced by some of the people who who are experts on this out on Route 66. So it's got several hundred of the really obscure sites we call it the zealot layer and when you turn it on it's like you open the third eye of uh of awareness and it's for true believers and then if you're more like ah I only have you know an hour in this town I'm gonna turn the zealot layer off because it's just putting too many map pins on and and then it like it goes back down to the default of just the recommended places.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02Okay now well speaking of that uh are there any or is there any feature of the app that you find people using more or using most when they're planning their trips well a um yeah we we put in a uh a point to point uh capability in in the Roadside America app we didn't need to do that for six Route 66 because it's just one road right but if you're planning out like you know I'm driving from uh Phoenix to to Los Angeles what's along the way it'll it'll drop pins all along the way and you could say all right now just show me uh uh the best ones or the the three four and five star attractions because if you get you only look at the five star attractions there's not enough of those but those are our the pinnacle if you weave the one star attractions in there's too many of those and those are a lot of those are ones you'd say it I read about it. I don't even need to slow down the car. Let's keep so so that that feature gets used a lot and um you know I think it one thing we made it is the discovery you know whether whether you're coming out of a subway um entrance and you're in a city and you you know in New York you hit it and it's like wow I'm just around the corner from this or that or you're on the road and it's like you know what are what am I near right now?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then uh if you pick something say let's let's detour for that giant you know aluminum uh Mary statue or whatever you just it it'll do routes it'll do through um through Waze or Apple Maps or any of the uh Google maps any of those oh that's great oh so so somebody who wants to go see a specific uh attraction can use the app and tie it into with their Apple maps and get the navigation to it. Yeah and we and what we do too is I've gone on some trips and they're like going down the rabbit hole where you it's like oh there's a uh there's a carpeteria genie a giant genie holding a carpet I'll go to take a picture and then I'll look at the map and it'll say if you go another uh you know half mile there's a giant uh beer barrel at the front of a bar so I'll give a picture of that if you go another half mile and so you end up basically doing a trip you never really planned.
SPEAKER_00Right it's just stringing you along and you you can decide you can say like I'm stopping to this one because it probably is a bathroom oh my God what's next for Roadside America you got like new features any expanded coverage updates to the app or anything new yeah I I guess I I don't want to dwell too much on it but you know of course with AI um it's not all doom but there is something about AI that um I I think we're going into a period now where there's gonna be a lot of people creating things instead of actually going and looking at things I I think this is this is bad.
SPEAKER_02Yeah yeah in in the original roadside we had a chat we were gonna have a chapter of attractions we made up that we thought were funny and we took that out because we thought it really breaks the bubble the bubble of the legitimate uh thing and uh that I think that's part of what's going on with AI there aren't really people doing fake attractions but uh when you start to make it like that anything can be made to look like anything it starts to remove it fractures the reality yeah so um and and I think the attractions are a little vulnerable to that if you go to see an attraction and then add a statue that isn't really there it's going to confuse people and it also kind of cheapens it for the people who really go find that that's a statue. So but but on another note I I personally experiment with AI uh a lot now because of the my skills with cartooning and things I'm not a musician so that's the one that's really fascinated me and that's the one of course that my musician friends are very divided on on that um but I say you know hey I I did a song about a two-story outhouse who was ever gonna write that I wrote the lyrics uh I sourced all the the graphics I rate they got the the the music is created by AI so um so you know I can put that on Roadside America people like it they'll they'll enjoy it um a couple other categories that uh that we have been looking at more now since the last time I talked to you um exclaves do you know what exclave is I've never heard the term okay an exclave is a part of a country that you have to go through another country to get to it oh yeah okay cross border so the angle inlet in Minnesota is a is a part of Minnesota that you actually have to go into Canada it there's like four passport checks to get to that attraction and uh you know there's a couple things to see there's a big pylon down near the the pier that's the the northernmost uh point in the contiguous United States so there's ones like that um and there are other little pockets like that around the country and then so in grouping that that's sort of like a geographical um interest fake towns so uh very interested in towns that either were created for some bizarre reason reason they're not really towns so you remember like the nuclear uh bomb tests in Nevada where they created those fake towns and destroyed some of those towns were destroyed they're not there but you can go to um Fort Irwin California and see I don't know if the tour is still running but they had a thing called in the box and it was basically where uh U.S. military were training for uh Iraqi and uh Afghanistan deployments so they had 12 fake villages created out of uh storage containers with sort of Islamic fronts on them like a like a Islamic and that was so interesting they brought us up on a bus they put you up on a balcony after you walk through the town all the the the performers there are um from those countries they speak the language and you even caution to like not just take a picture without asking permission and all this they put us in this balcony and we're looking down in this street market scene uh and um a a jeep comes or a humbee comes up the street and all of a sudden it blows up right so they've staged an explosion um a couple GIs tumble out they're missing their legs right so these are are returned veterans who are are they're side gig now is they perform in this wow that's crazy okay and a double time the uh the the uh trainees come in to save those guys and another bomb goes off so it was like it was like amazing to see this because you you know you see it in movies yeah you hear about it in the news this was just and the government was paying for this training the government was was paying to allow people to come in uh we made it a fee for the tour but that was really interesting um and then the final category of these sort of uh phantom things is micronations so have you heard of micronations I have heard that yes okay yeah so there there's uh there's more of those now uh one of the oldest ones we saw was the Oyutunji African kingdom in uh near Sheldon South Carolina um there's a bunch of them now they're little one or two acre places along the highway where somebody's declared an unrecognized nation there's usually a dictator or a president if you if you range your advance they'll come out they'll they'll they'll sell you a passport and stamp it for you a lot of times the dignitaries are wearing like uniforms with epaulets on the you know shoulders and medals there's one out here in California called the slow jamistan um there's the the Republic of Melosia the Conch Republic is in Florida yes I I've heard of that yeah now is there like with regard to these things as micronations is there like a welcome to sign or something like that that people can stop at and take a photograph of yeah okay slow jamistan has one we we think some of them are doing it some of them are just uh you know they all get they have a a yearly convention so that seems like that would be fun to go to uh but we like that I mean at one point I was trying to talk the other guys into that we would all chip in and buy like an acre of land down along road 66 and then just you know build roadside a stand or something but um but then none of us really wanted to spend the time out there so and it it's probably one of those things that the neighbors you know would not really like it too much. Probably not um question one more question for you uh before we get we're we're gonna do some uh fun stuff in a minute but uh overall total how many roadside attractions exist on your website and in the app you can bullmark it if if I look at the database it's I think we're track tracking about twenty two thousand no way but but that includes uh ones that are um gone you know so like if if somebody says uh wasn't there a you know taxidermy museum in you know ohio in the 1980s we might have old tips on that that we'd retired but they're still in our system so we've got those and uh I believe in the app we've probably got about 16 000 attractions oh really and but some of the specialty ones like the roadside 66 we added about 1700 uh new ones there and we have uh roadside presidents uh has another 1200 that you know things like um you know the stepfather of Millard Fillmore would be something maybe that we would not put in Roadside America but it might come presidents or something okay wow so that's you guys have a lot oh man and this includes in Canada as well correct yeah Canada is uh Canada is is a small percentage it's like four percent uh and they've got some great big statues there yeah uh they're a little scattered out in fact in the app uh while uh and actually I you know on the in the app we have uh you can unlock a region for all of Canada because there's wasn't enough in Canada uh for us to chop it up into provinces but for uh the states and the app we've got regions we figured out like six regions uh that would allow us to keep the price low somebody could enjoy the region if you're in the northeast or the southwest or whatever and then if they are going to take a bigger trip they can unlock the others. Oh okay gotcha all right so now we're gonna get it to you we're gonna I'm gonna hit you with uh 10 rapid fire questions all right these just require one simple answer or yes or no or whatever um so are you ready for that just sure okay here we go number one biggest roadside attraction you've ever seen that's a that's a tough one um do you mean like tallest like or biggest period uh the United States of America that's a good answer that's a good answer I like that in my in my universe you know that's yes uh any everything is an attraction if I meet somebody they tell me what city they're from or whatever you know whatever I'm thinking about their attractions more than anything else okay number two smallest roadside attraction that still makes you smile what are you thinking uh well uh sorry to give these longer answers but it's all right it's all right um we do have a list of tiny churches that was a uh barrier that we didn't think we'd ever cross because when you start getting into miniature it it gets you know pretty down to nothing there. It can get out of control right little churches are funny because we have a rule that you have to be able to fit in the church they have to have some kind of a service at least once a year.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So the small church small churches are it uh all right number three weirdest thing someone ever submitted to the site so yeah I don't know if you've got any of that it was just the tiny churches because they're you know they're tiny and uh they're they're sort of funny and people but yet people get some spiritual comfort from them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah good number three the weirdest thing someone ever submitted to the site um I I don't know if I'd say uh what somebody submitted but my go-to of weirdest place I I ended up going to which probably originally came in as a tip was the museum of menstruation what and uh that was a crazy thing it was uh outside of Washington DC and it was a uh a museum in a the basement of a home the guy was a graphic designer and he just got fascinated with the packaging of uh sanitary napkin products and uh made a museum about it oh that is too funny that was weird he he was uh we tried I tried to get my wife and uh Ken tried to get uh you know some women to go with us and we couldn't align our schedule so Ken and I went down yeah so it was kind of weird because it was just me and Ken down in the basement with this guy who collects the stuff he had mannequins hanging from the ceiling with all the apparatus of the Victorian air we had the Hannibal Lecter moment we had that like is this where he hits us with the hammer and you know buries us under the floor he was a really nice guy though uh number four favorite state for roadside oddities okay my my current favorite is the state I live in California okay the uh but I'd I'd also um include Ohio as being very rich or you know just a Midwestern state very rich in in oddball attractions uh have the sentimental attachment to New Jersey my old stomping ground and then Florida for the really the historic aspect of tourism there. Wow really I I didn't ask you this question before but which state has the most roadside attractions you know I thought I think it might be California now uh followed by uh you know Texas and Ohio Really I would have never imagined that okay number five most underrated attraction category um most underrated attraction category uh meaning underrated like that uh it doesn't get visited very very often well let me let me Take a higher level on that, we have noticed uh less people seem to want to go indoors uh to museums, to little museums. They're they're really just taking selfies and pictures of things that are outside. So that that's that's a change. It was that was sort of surprising um that uh people just enjoy the you know the sort of selfie documentation and and not you know dipping into the the actual museums, which which they're usually very rewarding.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Uh one attraction this is number six, one attraction that everyone should visit at least once.
SPEAKER_02Uh let's see. House on the rock.
SPEAKER_00Really?
SPEAKER_02House House uh House on the Rock, yeah. Not rock in the house, that's a different attraction.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Uh number seven, funniest user-submitted photo you've come across.
SPEAKER_02Um, yeah. Let's see. I I'm trying to think what's funny because we we find uh things funny for for different reasons. So that is that's hard to answer uh to pin down one. Nothing is I'm just thinking somebody sent us very inappropriate photos once standing for it.
SPEAKER_00I guess you would get those, right?
SPEAKER_02We didn't post those, and maybe they're on on you know on file somewhere, um, or maybe I deleted them.
SPEAKER_00Uh number eight, attraction you wish still existed.
SPEAKER_02Uh well I uh I really gosh there's so many of them that uh that have disappeared that I it's more it's more that I wish the people that created them were immortal. So I wish some of these characters that build these things just were granted uh you know a life of a thousand years and they you know their their uh house made of hubcaps is now you know the size of the Empire State Building. You know, so it's it's more that um you know when we lose these people, uh those things are now fixed in the size, they may get demolished. Yeah, and you know that that is really you know my view on that.
SPEAKER_00Attraction you'd go out of your way to see again.
SPEAKER_02Number nine. Uh so these days the attractions uh that we see because people so immediately share them or want to make a pot, you know, a webcast of their own or a uh a video, um it's it's a moving target. There's a um monument to the flying paper boy of the Guadalupe's, and that is in uh Arizona, uh a long drive to get to it. Actually, it was in New Mexico, but we went over into Arizona to get to it, and we couldn't find anything online about it. We had found it on an old paper map and went out and tracked it down. And uh that kind of thing is really cool because it's so obscure and so hard to find. And so I tend to like things like that. We did the angle inlet trip uh finally, you know, because we thought we had to experience that uh, you know, being grilled by the border patrol from two countries to get to an attraction.
SPEAKER_00Uh number 10. Last one. If Roadside America had a mascot, what would it be?
SPEAKER_02Uh well, we do have a mascot called Roger. Okay, and Roger is uh the name of our search engine. Are you still there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay, sorry. It's the name of our search engine. It's it's after Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. And uh it's because, not because of the work he did founding Rhode Island, but after he was buried an apple tree over his grave, the roots went down into his coffin and consumed his corpse. And uh at some point they had to exhibit and they found this apple tree root in the shape of Roger Williams. And that's actually in a museum uh in Rhode Island that it can be visited. Uh, and we thought that's a great name for our search engine because it's sort of like we, you know, we follow the roots, the apple tree of all the the tips, you know, leads down into the ground, and you know, you can follow all these paths.
SPEAKER_00That's funny. That's creepy too, but it's funny.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, and we have and Roger has a uh a dim younger brother named Rudy, and he's he's not he's not as good. And that's actually where we put in our uh system on the database when we reject the tip or decide it isn't good enough, we classify it as a Rudy tip.
SPEAKER_00By the way, that's funny.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we always talked about like launching a rival website, a lot a rival website with the Rudy tip. Pretend it is an odd. You know, we'd always say, like, look, these tips are terrible over at you know rooty.com.
SPEAKER_00I love it. All right, Doug, listen, thank you very much for being on the podcast. It's always a pleasure to talk to you about these kooky things. Uh, really appreciate taking the time out to talk to us.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and you know, let's do it again soon. If there's other topics that we could do, we instead of trying to do the whole spam, we can narrow it down a bit.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Hey, don't go to anywhere. I want to talk to you when we're done, but thank you very much for being on the show. Thank you for joining me and Doug Kirby from Roadside America here in the B Twin Cafe, where he told us about the history of Roadside America, how they gather information on attractions, some of the most memorable oddities across the country, and what's coming next for the website and the app. Now you can learn more about all of that by getting on over to RoadsideAmerica.com. Links will be in the show notes and of course on the Motorcycle Men website at motomenpc.com. And don't forget to get over to the Ride with Deb YouTube channel and watch some of the many videos I have there. And if you'd please also like and subscribe. That would be a tremendous help to the channel and of course to the podcast. Hey, get your copy of my book, The Road Most Traveled, direct from me on the Motorcycle Men website, and save nearly$8. Of course, you can still get it on Amazon and get the audiobook on Audible, but you can still get it for me if you want, and I'll even sign it for you. Alright, for the rest of the Motorcycle Men team, thanks for listening. And remember, boys and girls, we say stupid crap, so you don't have to.
SPEAKER_01That's it, you kids, you know.
