OddWay is a road-trip planner for people who would rather see the strange thing than make good time. You give it a start and a finish; it gives you back the museum in a converted storefront, the monument the fire department built, the hill where the car rolls uphill.
The point is not to be spooky about it. Most of these places are run by one enthusiastic person and a donation box, and the reason they are worth the detour is that somebody cared enough to keep them going. We say what a stop actually is, how far off your route it sits, and whether you can get inside.
Where this is up to
7,093 places across every state and the District of Columbia, every one with a description, and route search and the map both working. Type two towns into plan a trip and you get what is actually on the way.
Coverage is uneven and always will be. The northeast is dense because that is where the work started; long drives through the middle of the country are thin, and when a route comes back empty the site says so rather than pretending otherwise.
How the index is built
By hand, entry by entry. Roughly three hundred stops began as a scan of OpenStreetMap and have since been rewritten one at a time; every entry after that was researched a state at a time, because a keyword search finds things whose names contain the keyword and misses the Albatwitch at Chickies Rock entirely.
Every entry cites where its facts came from. Some rest on a secondary source because no primary one exists — for 1,404 entries, another travel guide's write-up is the only thing anybody has ever published about the place. Those are credited by name rather than linked. It is worth saying out loud either way: a citation is not the same as standing there, and the suggestion box exists because somebody standing outside a museum that shut two years ago knows something the index does not.
Access states do real work. Whether a place is open, ticketed, seasonal, on private land, or reachable only by a mile of unmarked trail is the difference between a good afternoon and a wasted one, and in a few cases between a good afternoon and a dangerous one.
What else is here
15 road trips, written as routes rather than lists, and 5 walking trips through towns where everything is on one street. Case studies on why every state has a gravity hill, what happens to a museum built by one person, and how two towns eight miles apart both hold a world’s largest basket record.
A featured artist every week, with links straight to their shop. We take nothing and have no arrangement with anyone listed.
Some slots on the site are paid for and say Sponsor on them. Nothing in the index is there because somebody paid. Not a stop, not an event, not a trip, not an artist. If that ever changes it will be said here first.
And photographs from people who went.
An account does two things and no others: it lets you post a photo, and it keeps a bucket list of places you mean to get to. The list is private — there is no sharing, no public view, and nobody else can see it. Everything else here works signed out.