Roadside oddities29.6454° N, 82.3457° W
Gainesville, FL
Two enormous bat houses that can hold hundreds of thousands of bats and produce dramatic evening emergences.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
Roadside oddities
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Roadside oddities2,517
Suggest a stopGiant objects, odd monuments and things built for no clear reason.
- Roadside oddities33.4019° N, 104.5224° W
Roswell, NM
Roswell's downtown McDonald's is shaped and decorated to resemble a flying saucer, complete with space-themed exterior details. It is a functioning restaurant, but the building itself has become part of the city's alien-roadside landscape.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Roadside oddities46.8789° N, 102.8037° W
Dickinson, ND
Traditional embroidery, decorated eggs, textiles and folk art document the Ukrainian immigrant communities of western North Dakota. The collection gives a concentrated look at cultural practices that remain visually distinct from the surrounding Plains landscape.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Roadside oddities38.9319° N, 77.0524° W
Washington, DC
A large fiberglass Triceratops created for the 1960s children's television production The Enormous Egg survives at the National Zoo.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Roadside oddities33.3436° N, 83.3881° W
Eatonton, GA
A small museum in a former slave cabin interprets Joel Chandler Harris, the Uncle Remus stories and the complicated cultural history surrounding the tales. Modern visitors should approach the material with the museum's historical context in mind rather than treating the fictional tradition as straightforward folklore.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Roadside oddities48.2374° N, 101.2873° W
Minot, ND
Working grain silos became an enormous mural complex in Minot, turning utilitarian agricultural infrastructure into public art. The scale is best understood from the surrounding public areas where the full painted cylinders can be seen together.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Roadside oddities40.6933° N, 74.2621° W
Union Township, NJ
A spherical water tank perched on an exceptionally tall narrow column rises more than 200 feet beside major highways in Union. Long promoted as the world's tallest watersphere, the peculiar tower looks like a giant white ball balanced on a stick.
- Access
- Roadside, no entry
- Roadside oddities42.2705° N, 83.2090° W
Allen Park, MI
The Giant Uniroyal Tire began life as a 96-passenger Ferris wheel at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair. It was moved to Allen Park in 1966 and converted into the stationary 80-foot tire landmark that still towers beside I-94; it is best viewed from public roads and nearby legal stopping points rather than approached directly.
- Access
- Roadside, no entry
- Roadside oddities29.9510° N, 90.0705° W
New Orleans, LA
Fruit motifs carved into the facade reveal this building's former connection to the United Fruit Company and the banana trade. The exterior is the attraction; do not treat the interior as a public museum.
- Access
- Roadside, no entry
- Roadside oddities36.1431° N, 86.7699° W
Nashville, TN
One of the world's best-known vinyl pressing plants has produced records for generations of major artists. Tours and public access vary, making this a check-ahead stop tied to the physical machinery behind Nashville's music business.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Roadside oddities40.0072° N, 105.2728° W
Boulder, CO
A university museum with paleontology, geology and anthropology collections used for research as well as public exhibits. Fossils and Southwest cultural material give it a stronger OddWay fit than a general campus museum.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Roadside oddities37.5687° N, 84.2961° W
Berea, KY
Berea's 2003 Show of Hands public-art project scattered a dozen roughly six-foot fiberglass hands around town, each decorated differently by an artist. Several still survive in the Old Town area, and the visitor center at 3 Artist Circle is the best starting point for finding them.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Roadside oddities38.3207° N, 85.7469° W
Clarksville, IN
A vintage Cadillac is buried nose-first into the pavement outside the former Couch's Body Shop location on Blackiston Mill Road. A mannequin once sat dramatically on the exposed rear of the car and later reports described it being replaced by other props, but the half-buried automobile itself remains the core attraction.
- Access
- Roadside, no entry
- Roadside oddities38.4265° N, 109.9256° W
Moab, UT
A circular structure in Canyonlands exposes dramatically tilted rocks, long debated as a salt dome before evidence favored a meteorite impact origin. Trails lead to overlooks above the crater-like formation.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Roadside oddities36.8619° N, 111.3743° W
Page, AZ
Narrow sandstone walls twist into wave-like passages shaped by flash floods and wind. The canyon is on Navajo Nation land and may only be visited through authorized Navajo-guided tours.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Roadside oddities35.0624° N, 80.9026° W
Fort Mill, SC
This chapel survives from the enormous Heritage USA televangelist complex once operated by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Modeled after the traditional Upper Room in Jerusalem, it continues to host worship services even though most of the surrounding Christian theme-park empire disappeared. Current services: https://www.btbab.net/about-1
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Roadside oddities40.0615° N, 85.7010° W
Anderson, IN
Indiana's first Uranus Fudge Factory opened in Anderson in 2022 and commits completely to its deliberately ridiculous name through signs, jokes, photo opportunities and a general store built around fudge. The active business also includes ice cream and seasonal mini golf, making it a modern roadside attraction rather than merely a novelty sign.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Roadside oddities37.8287° N, 92.1054° W
St. Robert, MO
The intentionally absurd Uranus complex combines Route 66 humor with a real sideshow museum containing two-headed animals, circus artifacts, oddities and live performers. The attraction is operating year-round and is one of Missouri's clearest modern examples of deliberately weird roadside tourism.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Roadside oddities43.0823° N, 70.7670° W
Portsmouth, NH
USS Albacore was an experimental submarine whose streamlined hull helped shape later generations of U.S. Navy submarines. The vessel now sits permanently on land, allowing visitors to climb inside its cramped compartments and control spaces. The museum operates most of the year but closes during part of the winter.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Roadside oddities47.2694° N, 88.4201° W
Kearsarge, MI
Workers built this ship-shaped stone veterans memorial during the 1930s, naming it for the Civil War-era USS Kearsarge. A mining drill stands in for a naval gun on the unusual landlocked vessel, tying Copper Country industry to naval and military remembrance.
- Access
- Open to visitors
- Roadside oddities32.7919° N, 79.9094° W
Mount Pleasant, SC
The enormous Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Yorktown is permanently docked at Patriots Point and open for exploration. Visitors can walk through crew spaces, hangar areas, the flight deck, and exhibits filled with historic aircraft.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Roadside oddities40.4555° N, 109.5288° W
Vernal, UT
Full-size dinosaur replicas surround the state museum, including a towering Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus. Inside, fossils and a working laboratory connect the outdoor roadside spectacle to regional paleontology.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Roadside oddities35.9168° N, 106.5196° W
Jemez Springs, NM
A vast volcanic caldera more than a dozen miles across holds grasslands, elk herds and volcanic domes inside the Jemez Mountains. Vehicle access beyond the entrance area can be seasonal or reservation-dependent.
- Access
- Seasonal or ticketed
- Roadside oddities33.6848° N, 105.9200° W
Carrizozo, NM
A black lava flow cuts across the Tularosa Basin like a frozen river of rock. The Malpais Nature Trail lets visitors walk directly over a flow created roughly 5,000 years ago, an unusually young landscape by geologic standards.
- Access
- Open to visitors