Roadside America

Dualling Shovels

I feel a little cheated, don’t they fact check over there at the Roadside America HQ? Back in May on the way back from Hammond with Santa Fe Sally I made us stop just outside of Wichita Falls, TX to take a photo of the Largest Shovel in Texas at 15 feet high. In the blog post about it I said, “… someone will take that as a challenge and make one 25′ tall somewhere else in the state.”

I have been pre-planning another jaunt with Sally for later this year. Today I was looking for a different route across the great state of Texas to go between Santa Fe and Hammond. We did it last time with a single overnight stop in Bowie, TX, and we’d would like to do that again, but I’d like a different path to mix it up. So I started dragging the blue line on Google Maps around and came up with something promising that loops south of Dallas.

The next thing I look for is hotels at the overnight spot, some small towns in the middle of nowhere don’t have many places we’d stay in, we have some standards, you know. Off I went to Roadside America to see if there is something weird that would hopefully be near a driver’s change spot. I opened the Texas map and zoomed into an area where I thought we would be and saw something labeled World’s Largest Shovel. Wait a minute, I thought I’d been to the largest shovel in Texas? I had, but it was only the tallest one until this beast was created in 2020.

Miata World ’99 Revisited

Getting the Shot at Miata World ’99 in Dallas


Back in February of this year I took a photo album from 1989 off the shelf and scanned the photos I liked. I then used them to create five separate posts of content out of it.

Today I jumped ahead a decade to 1999 and scanned some images from the photo album of our trip to Dallas to a national Miata event. Most of these photos aren’t nearly as scenic as the 1989 ones. If you are new around here you might assume that all that Roadside America stuff from the recent April-May-June trip was something new, au contraire, I’ve been making road trips “meaningful” that way since the end of the last century. Postcards also played a crucial roll in this trip as well. See the – Slow Miata to Texas Tour

Roadside America States & Corrections II

I have previously mentioned how many states I drove through on the 2025 Jumbo Road Trip (more on this later) and I wanted to really count how many states I took Roadside America photos in. So I went back to the start, April 18th and wrote down the name of every state where I took a RA photo all the way through June 17th. I came up 26 states. Wait a minute, when I did the Power Point presentation to put on Instagram the other day, one slide read: 70 ROADSIDE AMERICA PHOTOS IN 25 STATES?

So, I pulled up an image of a map of the lower 48 states and retraced my route filling in each state outline that I’d driven through. When I was done, I had filled in 31 states. Wait a minute, when I did the Power Point presentation to put on Instagram the other day, one slide read: DROVE THROUGH 31 STATES & 1 CANADIAN PROVINCE? Okay, I got that one right.

I looked at that filled in map. And realized that that when I visited Monument Valley I was in the north east corner of Arizona and although I didn’t count it in the RA photo count, it does have its own pin in the Arizona map on Roadside America. That means in fact that I took 70 Roadside America photos in 27 states. And I probably need to go back and add at least one more to that 70 total to make up for not counting Monument Valley.

I think that seventy figure came from me counting just how many Roadside America photos I posted to Instagram. Of the Roadside America photos I posted on the web page, that total comes to 82. If I count all the photos I took in total it is probably closer to 100, but I can’t give an exact figure because I’ve already gone through and deleted the ones I thought were crap.


 

Fairview, OR – Day 61: Home & Post Offices Again

Umatilla, Oregon Post Office


 
All three of today’s Roadside America photographs happened in my home state of Oregon. Both the first two Metal Men on a Roof and the Large John Wayne Figure, although I see no resemblance, are located in Umatilla. Number three, the Tugboat On Land is grounded in the town Boardman.

Today is Day 61, and like I did on Day 1, I took the opportunity to take a few Post Office photos. I grabbed the first three upon entering the home state. And because I really got to Fairview pretty early I should have stopped at the other two, Rufus & Arlington, that are right off I-84.

Walla Walla, WA – Day 60: 10,000 Miles

I was planning on keeping track of how far I will have gone for the whole trip, but now I’m not so sure. I have two different trip counters, A & B, and I keep resetting A at each fill-up so I can keep track of gas mileage and leaving B alone. Today when I stopped for gas in Coeur d’Alene when I went by A after resetting it, I noticed that B was reading 9999.9. Cool, I’ll reach the 10k mark once I start rolling again, so I left B showing and pulled out of the gas station. After driving for a minute, it never changed. Then I did the Homer Simpson head slap, DOH! That’s as far as that trip counter can go, so I reset trip counter B.

How far had I been driving with it sitting on all nines? I remembered telling the barista at the drive-thru coffee place in Billings yesterday morning that I had just passed the ninety-five hundred mile mark on my way there. So, using Google Maps, I backtracked the mileage between Billings and Coeur d’Alene and came up with 526 miles. This means that I am going to be off around 0.2% or really just an inconsequential amount.

Both of today’s Roadside America photos are from Idaho, first up is the Sunshine Mine Happy Family Statue in Wallace and then there was Tidal Wave of Canoes in Lewiston.

I also visited three more spots that were listed on the Roadside America website. The first one was the World Famous 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar in Haugan, MT, where I bought a couple of postcards and a sticker that said “Montana” on it for the trunk lid.

The second one I did photograph, but I couldn’t really get a decent photo worth anything of the Uniroyal Gal with Tattoo in Pomeroy, WA.

The third one was interesting in that it harkened back to Blue Earth, MN, where there was a 55-foot-tall Green Giant statue. In Dayton, WA, there is a Hillside Jolly Green Giant that is 300′ tall but looks tiny because the hill it is on is so far from the road.

Missoula, MT – Day 59: Blue Car & Blue Horses

Blue Car


 
I looked along my route, and there were a couple of Roadside America places, but none that really excited me until I spotted Bleu Horses in Three Forks, MT. And now that I’ve visited it, it is my favorite one of the whole trip. I have two more travel days until I do get back home, and I’m tempted to stop looking for any others.

From the Roadside America’s website: “Montana sculptor Jim Dolan spent 15 months and his own money to make, move, and install the 39 horses in 2013 as a permanent artwork. They’re designed so that their heads, manes, and tails move in the breeze.”

The path down to the ravine is kind of steep but very doable; the path up from the ravine to the hill where the horses are is very steep. So steep that when I finished walking around and headed back to the car, I had to zigzag down like a sailboat tacking into the wind.

Billings, MT – Day 58: Cowboys & Indians

What happens when you don’t take a drive on the interstate and instead stay far away from that type road, add a detour to avoid dirt road sections of a state highway, toss in a couple small detours for Roadside America photos and then spend an hour at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument? Four and a half hours becomes nine. The park was very interesting, and the Montana backroads are smooth and uncrowded. Oh, and it was a gloriously sunny day, the first in about 5 days.

Last Stand Hill


 
A white marker has been placed on the battlefield wherever a 7th Cavalry soldier died and was initially buried. This is Last Stand Hill, and the officers have their names on the stones. The black hightlighted marker is for General Custer. No one is buried under the markers; 5 years later they were all dug up and buried in a mass grave, which is under a Large Memorial Marker.

Now for what everyone is waiting for: roadside oddities. Yesterday we had a large cowboy statue and a cowboy riding a dinosaur; today we have a Cowboy Riding A Rocket, but someone has stolen his hat. Then a couple hours later it was a Creepy Crawler Giant Baby which I think would be creepier without the animals and the dinosaur. Oh, this morning before leaving Hettinger, I took a picture of Last Marker of the Yellowstone Trail.