Highway Summer ’25, We Hardly Knew Ye

September 1, 2025

Another summer vacation season draws to a close for millions of offbeat attraction lovers. Seemed quick. Did Time’s foot fall asleep on the acceleration pedal?

We’re several mutations past losing whole seasons to the COVID era (when communities fashioned N95 masks for giant statues or sent home at-risk docents). America’s nutty policies and politics supposedly thwart some overseas visitors. Road snacks are expensive, gas fluctuates (the kind in your car, not your intestines), EV charge stations slowly spread, like an itchy butt rash.

In many ways, 2025 feels like a Rebuilding Year. The towns along U.S. Route 66 — anticipating 100th anniversary surges in 2026 — are on a frenzied tear to refurbish old places, fix neon signs, build more sights celebrating Route 66, and stock plenty of Mother Road merchandise. Warmer Rt. 66 states expect child-free pilgrims to continue this fall.

Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, preeminent collection of anatomical specimens, announced plans after years of debate to “de-anonymize” body parts by IDing donors by name. Henrietta Lacks probably deserves some credit; her immortal “HeLa” cells were used anonymously for decades of cancer research without her permission. Lacks’ statues, belatedly, now stand in South Boston, MA and Roanoke, VA (replacing a vanquished Robert E. Lee monument in the same spot).

Meanwhile, back at the Mütter Museum, we finally know the full name of the original owner of the Mega-Colon.

The Evil Knievel Museum, formerly in Topeka, Kansas, claims it will reopen in Las Vegas by the end of the year.

Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum has been packed up and plans to reopen soon in a more spacious location in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Trump tariffs had the Historical Rubber Duck Museum threatening to move to Canada this summer, but tempers appear to have cooled, bathwater has warmed, and the ducks are still in the USA.

The replica Space Shuttle formerly at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was bought and moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota. Then the buyer went bankrupt and the Shuttle currently sits, disassembled, in a Minnesota warehouse.

The World’s Largest Statue of the Beatles, built by the recently deceased David Adickes (he was still sculpting at 98), is on the move to a car dealership in Texas.

Two “Big John” statues should be back from the repair shop by year’s end: a former grocery clerk destroyed in a 2024 hurricane in Cape Coral, Florida; and an Indian giant that collapsed in Kingsport, Tennessee, being prepared for a new life as a mini-golf mascot.

And, believe it or not, the forever-delayed RoboCop Statue (for 14 years now) is said to finally — no, really, finally — be unveiled in Detroit by the end of the year

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Muffler Man of Metal (And Neon)

May 10, 2024

When the permanent “Route 66 Experience” opened on the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield in July 2023, one of its attractions was a Muffler Man unlike any seen before.

Conceived and built by Springfield’s Ace Sign Co., the metal Goliath holds an American flag like the nearby Lauterbach Muffler Man, but the flag is made of neon tubes and the Man is built of rings of steel.

Scott Bringuet, co-owner of the Ace Sign Co., told us that while the Route 66 Experience otherwise reproduces old signs and sights along the Mother Road, his company didn’t want to make another fiberglass Muffler Man, or even a composite of various Men (which would have assuredly looked strange). “Our thought was to create something artistic that represented them, something that was not literal,” he said.

How to do that? The goal seemed out of reach until someone at Ace remembered the giant neon-lit stacked-ring soda bottle outside of Pops on Oklahoma Route 66 — not a traditional art form, but a style that seemed appropriate. “Metal bars and neon,” said Scott, “are things that we work with every day.”

The Man, 25 feet tall, stands behind 11 small plaques that pay tribute to various colossi that are along (or pretty close to) Illinois Route 66. “A lot of people think this is real weird, and I get why,” said Scott. “And there were people who said, ‘Just get an old one and restore it.’ But we said no. There are museums for that.”

Another bone of contention for some traditionalists was that, unlike other Route 66 titans such as Buck Atom and the Gemini Giant, this one has no name. “I got a lot of pressure to name it,” Scott said, “but it’s gotta be nameless. It’s a big picture representation. A symbol.”

All hail you Nameless Man of Steel, Mother Road leviathan!!

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Conspiracy Thinking and Bathroom Convenience

March 4, 2024

The official name of an attraction can make all the difference in our decision to detour, or even stop to investigate. We sometimes refer to a point-of-interest by a nickname we’ve coined, to clarify its oddity-appeal, while improving the chance our readers may visit in person. The dull-sounding County Historical Museum of Prairie Quilts may camouflage its true treasure: a petrified organ grinder’s monkey rolled in a cursed rug (We made that one up, but you get the idea).

In the world of real attractions, some people allow a name to nourish their fantasies a bit too much.

Take for example, Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC. Tourists sometimes think that it’s an official government graveyard — and it isn’t, assured Cemetery president Jackie Spainhour. “‘Congressional Cemetery’ is a nickname that just stuck,” Jackie said. A few congresspeople are buried there, but they’re tiny fraction of its 67,000+ burials. Congressional Cemetery is just easier to say than its real name: Washington Parish Burial Ground.

But that simple — perhaps too simple — explanation doesn’t cut it with one group of overly alert outsiders. “We’re near the DC jail where the January 6 insurrectionists are being held,” Jackie said, “and the protestors outside the jail think we’re a government cemetery.” This is a key misunderstanding, Jackie said, because some protestors had a theory that “[President] Biden was conspiring with us so that we could kill the prisoners and bury them here in secret.”

Jackie added, dryly, “We’re not doing that.”

Would it, we asked, be enough of a reason to change the cemetery’s name? Jackie said no, and added that despite the protestors’ mistrust, they don’t perceive the cemetery as so evil that they can’t occasionally pop in for a visit. “Every once in a while,” Jackie said, “they’ll come by to use our bathroom.”

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The Cave Doctor

January 23, 2024

Explorers and tourists in the past have abused caves, snapping off stalactites and other formations for souvenirs, leaving only stumps. That isn’t tolerated any more, but the damage had been done and was irreversible.

Until now! Fantastic Caverns in Springfield, Missouri, is having its past mutilations repaired — by Jonathan Beard, a Cave Doctor.

Jon worked at a 3M adhesive plant, where he became familiar with epoxy. He was also very familiar with caves (Missouri has over 7,500). Jon told us that he’d spent decades as an amateur caver, photographing and mapping subterranean passages beneath the Ozarks.

Combining these two areas of expertise, Jon found that epoxy putty could not only be used to glue a broken piece of cave back into place — in the rare instances when the original could be found — but could also be shaped to create entirely new, replacement formations: prosthetic stalagmites, stalactites, columns, canopies, draperies.

With the help of an apprentice, Sarah Peterson, Jon went to work in Fantastic Caverns in late 2022. When we spoke to him in January 2024, he and Sarah had already fashioned and attached over 1,250 one-of-a-kind replicas.

Cave formations don’t just happen: they’re formed over centuries by dripping water. So, after sculpting and attaching an epoxy stalactite or drapery (the larger ones are made hollow to save weight) Jon will spray it with water to see how it drips, then adjust the shape so that the water falls in the precise spot it did when the formation was whole. Jon’s replica stalactites are positioned so accurately that they can resume their interrupted drip-drip job of forming the stalactites beneath them.

Jon also understands what a speleothem — the generic word for a cave formation — should look like. After individually sculpting each prosthetic in place — making it the right size and shape to the eye — and waiting for the epoxy to cure, he then blends various paint colors onto the replacement formation to match the already existing parts as closely as possible.

One benefit to Jon’s approach, he said, is that given enough time the water dripping down and over his prosthetics will encase them in real minerals, making them indistinguishable from genuine speleothems. Of course, that won’t happen for several hundred years, but it’s something nice to think about.

Jon told us that when he and Sarah complete their work in Fantastic Caverns, which should be some time this Spring, they will have replicated around 1,500 formations. They’re also doing similar work in nearby Bridal Cave, but after that Jon hopes that someone like Sarah can take over. Jon is in his seventies, and his subterranean work is wet, dark, and contorts him into awkward positions. He loves caves, but he told us that he would also “love to act like a retired person” and spend at least part of his remaining years in a place that’s warm and above ground.

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Memories of a Seventies Punk Rock Tourist

December 3, 2023

The Punk Rock Museum opened in 2023 in Las Vegas. We visited in June, a few months later. The collection is crammed with artifacts from 50 years of punk culture, filling every space with huge blow ups of concert photos, and thousands of images, art, posters, and zines.

The museum’s inaugural special exhibit features concert images by photographer Rikki Ercoli. We know Rikki from our college days on Venue Magazine (he was then called “Spacerick.”). In the 1970s he jumped into the Philadelphia and New York club scene with his 35mm camera and b/w film, following Patti Smith, Sex Pistols and the Ramones.

Now living in San Francisco, he recently talked about the exhibit, and how he “loved the sarcasm of the punk bands.” Fanatical in his desire to see every act that came to town, Rikki captured images of the early luminaries, such as Debbie Harry and Sid Vicious (framed prints are available for purchase in The Punk Rock Museum gift shop).

Rikki went to South London for a college semester via a student exchange program. “I wanted to see Generation X and X-Ray Specs. That’s why I went — not for school.”

Ercoli’s work documents the excitement of that early era and freezes moments, from a music fan’s point of view, in small clubs and larger venues. “I was trying to capture the history of that time,” he said.

He was blown away when he made the connection with the Vegas museum and their enthusiasm for sharing his work (an earlier showing in a Washington DC gallery had been cancelled during the pandemic). Rikki joked, “They had to build a museum just to show my friggin stuff!”

Rikki was in Las Vegas for the exhibit opening — and thrilled to see the breadth of punk across the years on display. “It is funny they have Joe Strummer’s last bag of weed.”

The Ercoli photographs are exhibited at The Punk Rock Museum until the end of 2023.

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Is Taxidermy Dead?

October 28, 2023

Several recent news stories suggest that displays of animal taxidermy are becoming extinct at mainstream establishment museums. They are viewed by the academically trained — those in charge — as controversial embarrassments and, worse, old. After all, the thinking goes, wouldn’t everyone be happier strapping on a VR headset and stumble-frolicking with digital wildlife?

And let’s not ignore the effects of climate change. In October 2023, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh removed its diorama of lions attacking a camel, on display for over a century, because it was judged to be emotionally “harmful” to modern visitors. In August the Delbridge Museum of Natural History in Sioux Falls simply closed its doors forever — because its outgassing animals, dead for over 40 years, were now feared to be a menace to human health.

Yes, there is a measure of revenge-beyond-the-grave in that latter story, but it still seems like an air scrubbing overreach.

Yodeling bar life of Hayward, Wisconsin.

Yet even while mainstream museums are mothballing their taxidermy, smaller attractions are keeping our stuffed animal pals in the public eye. Taverns and saloons, for example, have always been safe houses for taxidermy that might be shunned elsewhere. And while there has always been an appreciation for the well-preserved fur-bearing trout or a crusty merman, new taxidermists are now reimagining earthly fauna (mostly using creatures that were already deceased) into fantastical forms.

The future of taxidermy may be on the fringes of tourism, but it seems nonetheless bright in a place such as the Wacky Taxidermy and Miniatures Museum. Its displays are created by a couple of 30-somethings, and they craft a kind of stuffed animal art that you would never see in the stiff-necked Smithsonian, not even in a 5-D simulation.

Wacky Taxidermy and Miniatures Museum, Mackinaw City, Michigan

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