Americans are known to have an entrepreneural spirit, and they're very clever at advertising for their businesses. Nowhere is this more apparent than when are on the road. I'll illustrate with an anecdote.
When we went to Orlando or Tampa to theme parks, we had to take the Florida Turnpike, as we lived on the south of the state. On the way, there would be these billboards for this thing called 'Yeehaw'. It would beckon us for many kilometres, signaling the exit you had to take to get there. There were hundreds of signs, saying things like :
ORLANDO ATTRACTION TICKETS AT YEEHAW
GAS AND FOOD AT YEEHAW
QUIET THE CHILDREN DOWN... STOP AT YEEHAW
VAMOS A YEEHAW! SALIDA 193
Those signs were so promising, my sister and I would think: 'Wow, this must be some place' and beg our parents to stop there. When we got there, there was a wonderful welcoming sign, as you can see on the picture above, and Yeehaw is right there....next to it. Yeah....it's smaller than the sign. I remember being like....that's it? It was just a rest-stop where you could buy Disney tickets. Yeehaw Junction is this place that's not even a town because it's so small, like something out of a Western film. But it's something that became a tradition, following the Yeehaw signs and pretending to be fooled by them.
Anyway, this is a curious part of traveling not only in Florida, but in the whole country. These odd 'tourist traps' that just live in your heart, like 'World's Biggest Lincoln Statue' (ou mean there are other statues of this American President out of the country???) and a headless dinosaur sculpture, Mount Rushmore (the pride of North Dakota but come on, dead presidents' faces carved on mountains, can you say environmental impact???) and Stone Mountain, the Confederate version of Mount Rushmore, in Georgia (my dad went there hahahaha). They even have become a cult phenomenon, with websites and books dedicated to them, and people make it a point to stop and visit these places, just for a feeling of truly american freaky entrepreneural spirit.
Some sites dedicated to weird tourist attractions:
LOL imagining the look on your little faces when you saw it. Great effect making us stroll back upwards to take a good second look at the pic to find the place. Couldn't believe my eyes. I had pictured something like the 'Oasis' when you're going to Campos dos Goytacazes or now the 'Graal', like the one in Resende, only bigger and full of fun stuff for kids.
ReplyDeletehahahah yeah, it was nothing like the graal, no fun at all!
ReplyDeleteThe US HWY 60 signs were a hoot! We saw something like it on the way to San Diego the other day but couldn't get a photo because of the fatal traffic.
ReplyDeleteTravel sure IS broadening.
Good work. Tomasito