Hail to the chiefs: Some Indian imagery seen along the way

Wall Drug, Wall, South Dakota

The Red Feather Lodge, Tusayan, Arizona, one mile from the Grand Canyon

The Wigwam Motel, Rialto, California

The Shawmut Diner, New Bedford, Massachusetts

I shot this back in 2002 in Colorado Springs. Not sure if it's still there.

Indian Motorcycles were manufactured in Springfield, Massachusetts. The Lyman and Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History has a great permanent exhibit about them...

...including this awesome photo of the great Jane Russell taking one out for a spin.

Little Big Horn, North Dakota

Tuba City, Arizona

Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, California

The kitsch-o-tastic Fort Cody Trading Post in North Platte, Nebraska has some great "exhibits", including this diorama of the old Sioux Trading Post...

...this brave playing checkers...

...and a fabulous Muffler Man Indian out back.

This fellow is known as the Big F Indian and he stands in front of the Conundrum Wine Bistro in Freeport, Maine.

This fellow beckons all to the Toh-Atin Gallery of Durango, Colorado's parking lot

A fine item from the Ohio Turnpike Rest Area gift shop

Outside the truly wonderful Plains Hotel, Cheyenne, Wyoming

The Big Chief Drive-In, Glencoe, Alabama

Whether or not you agree it's cool to objectify a race of great people, you see a lot of it while traveling across the USA. Native Americans, in particular. So here, without reservation, we bring you a few sights that may or may not 'wam the cockles of your heart. More pow wow to you, and how.

Eccentric street name of the week

I'll meet you on the corner of Sodom Road and Gomorrah Avenue.

Meet the beetles: Colorado Springs' May Museum of Natural History of The Tropics

I've always been a big beetle fan.

The May Museum sits on the property of the Golden Eagle Ranch Campground and RV Park.

An Acrophylla Titan from Australia (that's my finger there for scale)

A giant centipede from Venzuela

A Goliathus Giganticus from the Belgian Congo

A Megalodon moth from New Guinea

A tarantula from South America

I can't read the label on this one...let's just call it Biggus Stickus.

Nine miles southwest of Colorado Springs, Colorado in a campground about a mile off of Route 115 sits something totally unexpected and decidedly eccentric: a Smithsonian-worthy natural history collection of 8,000 exotic insects from the far reaches of the planet. James F.W. May was an adventurer and travelled the world at the turn of the century. He passed along the "bug" for bug collecting to his son John, who was only eight when his father died of yellow fever. John amassed a collection of over 100,000 invertebrates and in 1952, he built a museum to house the collection on the family's ranch in Colorado. Today, the museum looks like it hasn't been modernized since opening: labels written by hand and old-fashioned typewriter accompany the vast selection of wild and weird creepy-crawlies encased under glass and craning lamps. The rustic Colorado locale belies the alien origins of these arachnids: there are moths from Madagascar, beetles from Borneo, cockroaches from the Congo and tarantulas from, er, somewhere beginning with a T. And, as if that wasn't already enough, they also have what eccentric roadside attraction fans pine for: a world's biggest something-or-other...in this case, a giant, Godzilla-sized Hercules Beetle next to their sign on the highway. A couple of very nice ladies that work there told me they get a lot of school groups coming through and who can blame them...there are more insects than you can shake a stick bug at and it's a place where you'll really get the most bang for your bug.

Salty and sweet: Salty the giant seahorse of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts

Salty the Seahorse greets all who drive down Route 6 in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts.

He was wearing a jolly Santa hat when we stopped by the other day.

A Mr. Henry Dunseith had a home and gift shop on 3 and a half acres in Mattapoisett and he left the land to the Mattapoisett Land Trust in 1988.

The park features what look like remnants of a former mini-golf course...

...including this cheery fellow.

We're always delighted here at Eccentric Roadside when a community goes to great pains to save a classic roadside icon that could have just as easily been dumped in the eccentric roadside boneyard. Such is the case with Salty the Seahorse, who for years was much loved by the good folks of the pleasant south Massachusetts coast town of Mattapoisett. In the mid-1950s, a Mr. Henry Dunseith had his home and a gift shop on a plot of land on busy Route 6. To bring some attention to his business, he had a 38-foot seahorse erected on his land by a Mr. Theodore Tetreault. The seahorse became a beloved landmark of locals and tourists alike and when Mr. Dunseith passed away in 1988, he willed his 3 and a half acres of land, his buildings and the seahorse to the Mattapoisett Land Trust. The buildings were too dilapidated to restore and they were razed. The notion of doing away with the seahorse was considered, too, but local fans intervened and instead it got a makeover, to go along with the efforts of local garden club members, arborists and Boy Scouts who turned Mr. Dunseith's land into a beautiful playground, picnic area and nature area. The land is on the busiest intersection in town and a fortune could have been made by selling the land to a fast food chain or muffler shop, but the Land Trust stuck to Mr. Dunseith's wishes and a beautiful, quirky and unique park sits there today, reminding passers by of Mattapoisett's nostalgic tourist past (good on you, Land Trust). The park was dedicated in 2000 and a contest was held to name the seahorse-with-no-name (I think I've been through the desert on one of those). Salty was chosen and that's how he's known today (thank you, Gerry Rosser). An especially cool feature of the park are the remains of what must have been a mini-golf course, including a star-spangled buoy, wooden bridge and other loony-link hazards, now overtaken with grass, making it a nice, quirky homage to its retro road attraction past. Of course, you may want to take that with a grain of Salty.

Eccentric street name of the week

Not sure if it's the duck or the hole that's old here, but it's a heck of an address. And remember, say no to quack.

The envelope, please: The Concrete Potato Awards for 2011

As 2011 comes to a close, it's time for our annual Concrete Potato Awards, given for excellence in eccentric roadside attractions we've been to in the last year. Named after the Idaho Potato Expo, seen in the masthead of this blog, it been a tradition here at Eccentric Roadside for over a 33rd of a century. It was tough to whittle the nominees down to 10, but whittle we did and now, without further ado and in no particular order we present this year's Concreteys (and remember, it's an honor just to be nominated...)

The World's Biggest Ball of Twine, Cawker City, Kansas

The American Gothic House, Eldon, Iowa

Bodega and Bodega Bay, California, location of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds"

Three Mile Island, near Middletown, Pennsylvania

Alcatraz, near San Francisco, California

The Desert of Maine, Freeport, Maine

The World's Biggest Easel, Goodland, Kansas

The Banned Toy Museum, part of the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia, Burlingame, California

Roy's Motel and Cafe, Amboy, California

Wendover Will, West Wendover, Nevada

I'll take that as a condiment: The World's Largest Catsup Bottle of Collinsville, Illinois

Collinsville is a cute little town...

...and they've got another nice, albeit more traditional, water tower.

They know how to put on a nice sunset, too.

We're big fans of water towers here at Eccentric Roadside and there's a Grade A Fancy one in the pleasant St. Louis suburb of Collinsville, Illinois. In 1949, the bottlers of Brooks Old Original Rich and Tangy Catsup commissioned the W.E. Caldwell Company to build a 100,000-gallon water tower next to their Collinsville plant. Not ones to miss a marketing opportunity, they designed their tower to closely resemble their slender, tapered catsup bottle, making it a giant condiment in the sky. The Brooks brand had great success and in 1959 the company merged with another. Bottling operations were moved to Indiana but the bottle tower remained in Collinsville. By 1993, the current owners wanted to sell the property and the bottle's future looked doomed. This is when a group of Collinsville's bottle-lovers formed the Catsup Bottle Preservation Group. The catsup company agreed to deed the tower to the town of Collinsville, but the town balked at the cost of painting and maintaining the tower, so the preservation group began a two-year fund raising drive (complete with a visit by the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile) that resulted in the eventual designation of the tower on the National Register of Historic Places. They've had a yearly catsup festival for the last 13 years, complete with a hot dog eating contest, musical chairs, a please pass the catsup tournament, and the crowning of Little Princess Tomato and Little Sir Catsup. Next year's event is scheduled for July 8, so mark your calendars.

You mayo may not realize it but it's great to see how, when in a pickle, a local group can mustard the strength to overcome adversity and relish their victory, if you catsup my drift.

Merry Christmas

...and an Eccentric New Year!