Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Giant objects, odd monuments and things built for no clear reason.
Muskegon, MI
Silent-film legend Buster Keaton spent important childhood summers performing with his family in the Muskegon Actors' Colony. A bronze statue installed downtown shows Keaton beside an old motion-picture camera, connecting the city to one of early cinema's strangest physical comedians.
Stratford, OK
A huge fabricated metal hand delicately holds a butterfly outside a welding business south of Stratford. There is little context, which makes the strange contrast between heavy steel and a tiny butterfly the entire attraction.
Gainesville, FL
Living rainforest exhibit with hundreds of free-flying butterflies and tropical birds.
Bishopville, SC
Dalton Stevens, the “Button King,” covered a suit, car, hearse, coffin, piano, toilet, and numerous other objects with thousands of buttons after insomnia led him into an obsessive art project. His family continues to preserve the collection in a small museum that remains free and open to visitors.
Kāneʻohe, HI
A smaller-scale replica of the nearly thousand-year-old Byōdō-in temple in Uji, Japan, stands against the Koʻolau cliffs inside Valley of the Temples Memorial Park. Visitors can ring the large bon-shō bell and enter the temple during posted visitor hours.
Cabazon, CA
Dinny the Dinosaur and Mr. Rex are enormous concrete roadside dinosaurs built to attract freeway travelers and later expanded into a full dinosaur attraction.
Desert Hot Springs, CA
Cabot Yerxa built this sprawling Hopi-inspired pueblo largely from reclaimed materials, filling it with narrow rooms, handmade details and desert history.
Cadiz, KY
A large pink fiberglass pig named Cadi stands beside Hopkinsville Road as a local roadside mascot. The cheerful pig has been repainted and maintained over time and remains an easy drive-up example of Kentucky's oversized fiberglass advertising tradition.
Amarillo, TX
The Ant Farm art collective created Cadillac Ranch in 1974 for Amarillo millionaire Stanley Marsh 3, burying ten Cadillacs nose-first in a field at matching angles. The installation was moved west in 1997 as Amarillo expanded, and today it remains free to visit, with travelers walking out into the field and commonly adding their own spray paint.
Boston, MA
Boston's oldest Italian café doubles as a museum of vintage espresso machines, coffee equipment and old advertising. The dense collection gives a cup of coffee the surroundings of an accidental technology museum.
Maggie Valley, NC
A fenced stone monument near Black Camp Gap contains hundreds of rocks gathered from around the world and cemented together in 1938. Accounts of the collection identify pieces associated with famous locations and events, including an Egyptian pyramid, the Alamo, and other improbably far-flung sources.
Rogers City, MI
Quarry View is a public turnout overlooking the enormous active Calcite limestone quarry outside Rogers City. The quarry began operating in 1911–1912 and a formal visitor overlook was first developed in 1949; today travelers stop at the roadside viewpoint to look into the working mine rather than entering the industrial site itself.
Yermo, CA
A tilted-house attraction inside Calico uses sloping construction and forced perspective to create classic gravity-defying illusions.
Victorville, CA
A volunteer museum fills a former restaurant with Mother Road signs, vehicles, motel artifacts and oversized photo props.
San Francisco, CA
A giant camera obscura projects a live rotating image of Ocean Beach and the surrounding coast inside a small seaside building shaped like a camera.
Cameron, NC
Beginning in 1999, artists from New York and Tokyo covered aging tobacco barns and farm equipment around Cameron with large contemporary murals. Some of the barns have disappeared, but surviving examples turn the rural landscape into a fading open-air graffiti gallery.
Hannibal, MO
Cameron Cave is the less-developed companion to Mark Twain Cave and is toured by lantern rather than permanent electric lighting. Its narrow maze-like passages provide a noticeably different experience from the neighboring commercial tour route.
Bismarck, ND
Bismarck's oldest surviving building began as part of a military supply post and weather station before becoming a church and museum site. Its changing uses compress several early city histories into one small Gothic-looking structure.
Landrum, SC
Built in 1909, Campbell’s Covered Bridge is the only surviving historic covered bridge in South Carolina. Its bright red wooden enclosure spans Beaverdam Creek beside old mill remnants and walking trails.
Watford City, ND
Huge nearly spherical rocks appear to have rolled out of the badlands at this North Unit pullout in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. They formed as minerals cemented sediment around a core, and all rocks and other resources must remain where they are.
Antonito, CO
A towering self-built complex faced with beer cans, hubcaps and scrap metal, created by Vietnam veteran Dominic 'Cano' Espinoza. It is best treated as a public-road viewing stop; the structures are private property and were damaged by a 2022 fire.
Leasburg, MO
More than 100 retired canoes are stacked into a Stonehenge-inspired structure at an Ozark river resort near Onondaga Cave State Park. Because it sits on resort property, travelers should follow current visitor rules rather than treating it as unrestricted public land.
Dennis, MA
A 1930 movie theater hides an enormous Rockwell Kent mural across its curved ceiling, filled with constellations, floating figures and celestial imagery. Moviegoers often find the ceiling as memorable as whatever is playing on the screen.
Yachats, OR
A Civilian Conservation Corps stone shelter crowns Cape Perpetua, blending into the volcanic headland above one of the Oregon Coast's highest road-accessible viewpoints.
