American snapshot: Road trip

One of my favorite things about taking off with my mom during summer vacation for a road trip is her willingness to stop at all the random odd sights that I've dug up while researching our route. Often these little breaks end up being the highlight of our trip, which can only be the case when I am with someone who is willing to humor my sense of the absurd and doesn't sigh too much when we only make it a couple of hundred miles in a day (instead of a more normal 600 or so when we are actually trying to get somewhere). Together we're discovering that the journey is definitely part of the fun. A brief highlight of some of my favorites from this summer (thanks in good part to my go to guide: Roadside America "Your online guide to offbeat tourist attractions"):

There was the skeleton boy leading a skeleton dinosaur
somewhere off of I-90 in South Dakota

The graffiti art alley in Rapid City, South Dakota
"My people will sleep for 100 years and when they wake 
it will be the artists who give them back their spirit."

Where we also stopped at a Storybook Island,
the children's section of the city park which had fabulous photo opportunities
with over sized cartoon and movie characters.

A giant spider made out of a VW bug in a field of Lexington, Oklahoma

Oversized metal water lilies in Riverside Park in Wichita, Kansas

Which also had a troll hidden under a grate on one of the sidewalks by the river

The world's largest ball of Sisal Twine in Cawker City, Kansas

Where we also walked the twine trail (no matter how many times we tried to say this out loud it always came out as the twine twail...) which took us by store fronts containing replicas of art masterpieces with a addition of a ball of twine somewhere in the painting.

And my favorite roadside stop of the trip: Carhenge (Alliance, Nebraska)

With stops like these, who cares what the purpose of the trip was?