You catch a glimpse of them from roads and highways all across the country. They're usually tacky and tasteless and worst of all, you just can't drive by. You are compelled to check them out. I'm talking about roadside attractions. The kind of stuff you couldn't sit around and conjure up unless you saw it with your own eyes. Oddities such as the house made entirely out of embalming fluid bottles just across the Idaho border, in British Columbia. Or the world's largest revolving globe, Eartha, measuring 41 feet in diameter, in Yarmouth, Maine. These are the unnatural wonders of the world.
Author Jan Friedman has written a new book called Eccentric America that is a compilation of almost a thousand roadside attractions and oddball festivals that you can explore around the country. I recently sat down with Jan and asked her what it was about America that makes it the land of the home, the free and the utterly weird.
