Indianapolis' muffler man: Bendo there, done that

You can get a great view of the stands of the Indianapolis Speedway
just by driving down the main drag. Cool!

Jim Gaffigan: "I'm from Indiana.
I know what you're thinking: Indiana...Mafia."

On our last roadtrip, we passed through the great city of Indianapolis on our way from Illinois to Louisville and, due to time constraints, could not spend as much time there as we had hoped. Indiana seems to be underappreciated as a travel destination and this reminds me of what Hoosier comedian Jim Gaffigan said about his home state:

A guy came up to me after a show and said, 'Indiana? I drove through Indiana once.' I said, 'Yeah, I remember you. It was on the front page of the newspaper: Guy drives through Indiana.'

Maybe Indiana is just on the way to somewhere else for most people but we like it a lot and what we saw of Indianapolis in a just few short hours was great, especially if you like eccentric roadside attractions like muffler men and formula racing-themed pizza parlors. Ralph's Muffler Shop is home to Mr. Bendo, a bearded, red-shirted specimen of muffler manhood with arms in a weird "Heil, Fuhrer"-type pose. It's funny to see a muffler man in front of a muffler shop without him holding, oh, I don't know... a muffler, but muffler men are rugged individualists and prefer to go their own way. Ralph's is only three miles from the Indianapolis Speedway but I didn't know that until we were right in front of the track waiting for a red light to change and could hear a race in progress from the street. Quite a thrill. I'm always amazed when some famous landmark you've never been to winds up being smack dab in the middle of town. This was also true at Churchill Downs in Louisville.

According to roadsideamerica.com, there are several muffler men with the Mr. Bendo moniker, but I haven't been able to find out where the Bendo name comes from. If any muffler man aficionados out there in blogosphereland could solve this mystery, please chime in. I'll Bendo-ver backwards to give you credit (that joke took a long time to come up with and it still stinks).

Our cup runneth over: Lexington, Kentucky's Dixie Cup water tower

I love looking at water towers while driving around the country. They come in all shapes, sizes and styles and every one is a gem, especially the ones that proudly announce the name of their community in big letters for all to see or ones that have a bit of whimsy painted on them. A particularly awesome tower is in Lexington, Kentucky, a town with a few other great eccentric roadside attractions (see previous posts). On the property of the Georgia-Pacific plant is a water tower in the shape of a giant Dixie cup. In 1958, the Dixie Cup Company decided to have their tower function as a giant beacon of corporate branding and the cup water tower was erected. I've read that the current owners, Georgia-Pacific, wanted to take the tower down but the city wouldn't let them because the tower serves as a navigation device for the nearby airport. I'd love to hear a tape of the air traffic control booth in this area: "Roger, niner, you're cleared for landing. Bring her in just past the Dixie cup." If Georgia-Pacific was upset about this you wouldn't know it because they do a nice job of maintaining the tower and it really does look like a Dixie cup. Corporate America should be commended for maintaining classic roadside attractions like these, and I ain't just whistling Dixie.

And they're off: Horsing around at Louisville, Kentucky's Churchill Downs

We happened to visit on Mother's Day.
Nothing says "I love you Mom" like a $2 bet on Glow Worm in the fifth.

Our horse came in last.

You can't visit Churchill Downs without having a Mint Julep
(unless you don't drink or you don't like Mint Juleps).

This is the Winner's Circle, where the horses get that big bunch of roses put around their necks on Kentucky Derby day. This picture also reminds me of a gag from The Benny Hill Show.

"Hello, Central Casting? Send up a guy who looks likes
he spends a lot of time at the race track."

Here's a picture of me and a guy with a big rear end.
(That's me on the left.)

These seats go for $500 on Kentucky Derby day.
They were $2 when we were there.

They really do play that little horseracing fanfare tune
before each race.

People in Kentucky take their horses seriously. After all, they've got the most famous horse event in the world. And as far as big sporting tournaments go, the Kentucky Derby is one of the more eccentric. Run since 1875, it's the oldest continuing sporting event in the USA, and it's been at Louisville, Kentucky's Churchill Downs race track since 1937. Unlike the Super Bowl or the World Series, spectators in the stands wear extremely nice clothes. Women's hats alone are a sport unto themselves, with their own parade that follows the race. And what's the official drink of March Madness? Gatorade? Please. The Kentucky Derby has the genteel Mint Julep, a harsh-until-you've-had-a-few libation of mint, Kentucky bourbon, sugar and water. The race only lasts a couple minutes, "the most exciting two minutes in sports" as it's known, so the event is all about anticipation. TV reporters spew forth facts and figures and heart-tugging stories about plucky horses and their come from behind owners and jockeys for hours before the race, only to have some horse they completely ignored steal the show.

We visited Churchill Downs on a beautiful May Sunday, which also happened to be Mother's Day. Maybe because of that there were a lot of nicely dressed families in attendance. We took a great guided tour which got us right up to the track which was sandier and muddier than expected, reminding me of the Seinfeld horseracing episode with the line "His father was a mudder. His mother was a mudder."

It's nice to see all the racetrack cliches come to life before your eyes. A portly but nattily attired trumpeter plays that familiar horse racing fanfare before each race. He waits in his own special little house until just the right time, comes out, plays the tune, and then goes back inside until the next race. I like that.

We couldn't leave without placing a bet, so we decided to put $2 on the horse with the longest odds. The guy at the betting window said number 4, no wait, number 2, so number 2, Aggressive Adventurer, it was. Let's just say we won't be retiring from our gambling winnings. Aggressive Adventurer came in last. Number 4 won, though. The weed of gambling bears bitter fruit.

Ass good ass it gets: A gallery of horse's patoots from the Kentucky Horse Park

Lexington, Kentucky likes to bill itself as the "Horse Capital of the World" and with good reason, for the Kentucky Horse Park is located here. It's been a working horse farm and an educational theme park since 1978 with museums, lovely grounds, and a daily parade of former champion horses including Cigar and Funny Cide who now call this bucolic place home. It's a beautiful, serene place and even if you're only mildly interested in our equine friends, you can have a nice time here. But what about the eccentric roadside attractions fan? Pretty white fences and thick Kentucky Bluegrass will only take you so far. I've got it...horses' rumps. Derisively calling someone a horse's ass has long been a mainstay in our culture and they've literally got a ton of them here (and by that I mean the animals, not the staff, who are very nice indeed). Why did that term became synonymous with "stupid person" though? The Urban Dictionary puts it this way:

Someone who is not just an ass, but a big ass, indeed, a horse's ass. Someone who really makes an ass of themselves.

And let's face it, we all make horse's asses out of ourselves every once in a while, so why not embrace it? As President John F. Kennedy would say, "Ass not what your country can do for you. Ass what you can do for your country."

Walking in a wiener wonderland: Springfield, Illinois' Cozy Dog Drive-In

Springfield, Illinois has a lot to offer the eccentric roadside attraction fan, not the least of which is a glorious stretch of Route 66 that runs through town. A must-stop, especially around lunchtime, is the Cozy Dog Drive-In, birthplace of the hot dog on a stick. The story goes something like this: While patronizing a Muskogee, Oklahoma eatery in the 1940s, Ed Waldmire Jr. was enjoying the hot dog baked in cornbread he was eating and wanted to come up with a way to modernize it. His friend Don Strand developed a mix that would stick on a wiener while being french-fried. Ed put the battered dogs on cocktail forks and deep fried them with spectacular results, which led to their official launch in 1946. Originally called crusty curs, the more pleasing moniker cozy dogs was developed with Ed's wife's prodding. In 1949, the Cozy Dog Drive In was born, built on Route 66 at South Sixth Street. In 1996, Cozy Dog moved to its current location, where Ed's daughter-in-law and grandsons continue on with the business right next door to the original location.

They've got great Route 66 decor inside with their funky hot-dog-boyfriend-and-girlfriend logo and signage. They've also got the standard road food fare like bacon and eggs, cheeseburgers and ice cream. But how can an out of towner not get a Cozy Dog while in the presence of such greatness? I ordered one with a side of fries and, truth be told, it was the best deep fried battered weenie on a stick I ever ate. Frankly, we relished every moment we were at the Cozy Dog Drive In until we mustard up the energy to leave and ketchup on the rest of our journey. Bun voyage!

Lost for words: Greetings from Scrabbletown, Rhode Island

If you're in the right frame of mind, you can't help but see eccentric roadside attractions everywhere you go. This was the case for me and a site just a few miles from our house. There's a road in North Kingstown, Rhode Island I always thought was humorously peculiar: Scrabbletown Road. What a name. Kind of hard to put on airs when your castle is on a street that makes you think of either extremely hard times or a place where the word "jezebel" earns you 75 points.

There really was a village called Scrabbletown back in the early 1800s. Here's some highlights of what historian G. Timothy Cranston has to say about it in a piece "The View from Swamptown":

The story goes that sometime in the early 1800's "Old Man Mawney", one of the elder statesmen of the area, upon realizing that the little cluster of homes centered around a grist mill on a tributary of the Hunt's River was significant enough to warrant a name, decided, after consulting with a jug of rum, that "Scrabbletown" was just about perfect as all the people living there had to scrabble to make a living. His ruminations were obviously held in high esteem as the name stuck and is still used to this day.

(A grist mill was built in the 1820s and Scrabbletown was a mill village until the mill ceased to operate around the early 1900s.)

As is usually the case with a small village such as this, the end of the mill meant the end of the village, and with the closing of the Scrabbletown schoolhouse around 1920, the village, which at its peak consisted of a school, a tavern, a Baptist meetinghouse, the gristmill, and twelve to fifteen houses and farms, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist.

Scrabbletown was largely forgotten and stayed out of the limelight for some fifty years, until 1976 when it was nominated as an archetype for the area's rural past to the National Register of Historic Places.

There's a very nice new office park on Scrabbletown Road and instead of using a corporately bland name like North Kingstown Commons or Pinnacle Point Estates, they went with the proudly earthy Scrabbletown Professional Center. Kudos for sticking to your roots, Scrabbletown businesses. I would gladly patronize anyone who calls Scrabbletown home.

Greetings from Lincoln Lincoln Bo Bincoln Banana Fana Fo Fincoln Fe Fi Mo Mincoln, Lincoln, Illinois

The world's largest covered wagon, although it appears to be more of a convertible here.

The Tropics appeared to have gone out of business when we were in Lincoln. It wasn't for lack of an extra cool sign, though.

The Lord will provide.

You can't have a town named Lincoln in the state of Illinois without a big tribute to Old Abe and Lincoln, Illinois has lulu. It's the world's largest covered wagon, driven by the railsplitter himself. I don't recall if Lincoln ever actually travelling by covered wagon from my high school history classes but what-the-hey, this is pretty awesome. It's also on Route 66 (on the corner of Woodlawn Road), which is nothing but cool, too. We got there early on a foggy morning after spending the night at the Super 8 across the street. Abe is lovingly rendered in a grotesque folk art motif and sits on a prominent plot next door to a lawn mower dealership. The site weighs five tons, is 40 feet long, 12 feet wide and 24 feet tall and is in the Guinness Book of World Records. Abe is seen reading a law book, which seems appropriate since he practiced law in this very town. He was obviously ahead of his time in the reading-while-driving department, too. In the same neighborhood were some pretty cool signs too. Overall, this is a great eccentric roadside attraction, but know what would have been even cooler? A giant Abe Lincoln driving a giant Lincoln Continental. That would be Abe-ove and beyond, but nobody asked me.