Category Archives: American Road Trips

There are two things we are passionate about on this site. Alcohol, and America. We try not to mix the two too much as we go on road trips through this great land.

America’s Largest Roadside Attractions in the World

“…Wait we drove all the way just for this?”

~Disappointed children everywhere

 largest cherry pie

America likes things big, and while normally that would be our cue to raise our eyebrows and euphemistically write out “laaaadies” we’re being serious.

Okay, well we’re not being serious at all, we’re just not making genital jokes.  We are, however, talking about America’s wonderful, adorably ridiculous obsession with having the world’s largest ____.  It doesn’t really matter what it is, hundreds of small towns, and even some not-so-small ones, like to find something on this planet that doesn’t exist in a comically large form, just so they can make the world’s largest version of that item and stick it prominently in their town for people taking road trip breaks to gawk at.

It’s a delightfully quaint bit of Americana that truly couldn’t occur in a lot of places outside of America—we have so much vast space that it’d just feel a little bit empty if it didn’t have a World’s Largest Paul Bunyan Statue here, or a World’s Largest Ball of Twine there.  What other country could be willing and able to welcome that?

Europe might appreciate the charm, but they’re far crowded and cramped together. China’s too busy trying to buy all our currency in a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to continue their economic growth indefinitely. That last sentence was way too heady for an article about silly large version of everyday items, so for our third example we will just say that Russians are too cold and drunk to try to top us in the field of making giant yo-yos.

We want to embrace America in all of its quirks, which is why our newest feature on this site will present, for you…

America’s Largest Roadside Attractions in the World

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Carhendge Is Up For Sale: AFFotD’s Pledge Drive

“Liquefy all our assets NOW!  Shit, shit, wait, no I don’t mean MELT them, I mean…forget it, I’ll do it myself.”

~AFFotD’s Accountants

If we’ve learned anything from those Chrysler commercials with Eminem, it’s that cars are, uh, important to America?  Something about Detroit?  Robed opera singers?  Anyway, the automobile industry helped America experience both one of its greatest financial booms (what up, Henry Ford) and the stubbornness of our automobile industry helped America experience one of its greatest financial recessions (what up, Henry Ford).

Yes, America loves cars, and many of our finest moments have centered on road trips through the vast empty areas of our fair nation.  And it was during one of our more recent road trips that we encountered a beautiful, if…confusing place in Nebraska called…Carhendge.

If you walk within 15 feet of this, the trunk of your car magically fills with Four Lokos.

And we assumed that would be the end of it- we’d take a few pictures, maybe upgrade our trailer to a double-wide, and leave with the satisfaction of knowing that we had seen a giant Stonehenge replica.  Anytime we got into an argument with someone saying, “That’s not proper grammar” or “Sir, you’re clearly drunk” followed by “Sir, if you do not leave the bouncy castle we will have to call the police” we can at least take smug satisfaction in the knowledge that at least we’ve been to Carhendge, and besides, what kind of asshole pays for a bouncy castle at a block party and doesn’t let their neighbors use it?

But everything’s changed now.  Carhendge is for sale.   For just $300,000 dollars we can buy Carhendge and then have our smile slowly fade as we realize that we don’t know how to move the damn thing.

We don’t have that much money just lying around, as evident by our desperate and ill-advised sponsorship deal with Wendy’s, but we do have you, the loyal readers.  So give us some fucking money, already.

FUCKING GIVE IT!

Carhendge Is Up For Sale:  AFFotD’s Pledge Drive

 

Oh God, there’s blood EVERYWHERE

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Eastward Bound: A Road Trip Through America’s Heartland

“Mister, who are you?  Where’s our mommy?  We’re scared.”

~Oh shit, this isn’t our car

A while back, we showed you the Midwest of America through a drunken Road Trip filled with giant, oversized objects that were made by small towns for reasons that we can’t explain without having high concentrations of pesticides in our lungs.  So when we decided that we should focus on some other states in the nation, since apparently this nation’s pretty fucking huge.  So, we decided to start things off in Tennessee.  If you read that last sentence and thought, “Huh, I wonder where in Tennessee they would start off?” we guess we haven’t properly introduced ourselves.  Hello, we’re AFFotD, if you came here because you googled the phrase “How to Tie a bowtie” we have some bad news for you.  For the rest of you, we’re sure you’ve already shouted, “Knock it off with the fluff exposition, we know goddamn well you went to the Jack Daniels distillery.”

Of course we did.  Of course we did.  So how we woke up in Powell, Tennessee with a stolen car and a taste in our mouth that reminds us that it’s still legal to smoke in the bars down here, which is as good of a time as any to begin…

Eastward Bound:  A Road Trip Through America’s Heartland

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Four Loko on Guitars, Fallout Shelters, and Masonic Decals: [REDACTED] Goes on a Road Trip (Part 2 of 2)

“Actually…this is kind of my speed.”

~[REDACTED]

It was just yesterday

Where you no doubt read

Of a Midwestern trip

Made by [REDACTED]

As he drove ‘cross the plains

He trembled with feer

He’d made it to Iowa

But had run out of beer.

And as he drove in his Mini

Wishing he was driving truck

He found himself in

The World’s Largest Truck Stop

So we’ll leave you know

To see what [REDACTED] saw

So we’ll finish the tale

Of how he got to…Omaha.

[REDACTED] Visits Omaha (Nebraska)  (Like the Cornhuskers) (It’s in the Midwest, Alright?)  (…Part 2)

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Four Loko on Guitars, Fallout Shelters, and Masonic Decals: [REDACTED] Goes on a Road Trip (Part 1 of 2)

“…This…seems like it’s a trap.”

~[REDACTED]

Listen, intrepid readers,

To a story of woe and fears

Of our brave soul, [REDACTED]

Who has suffered all these years.

Once a journalist

Of an investigative nature,

He one day found himself…

In quite a Vegan nightmare.

And as the months went on,

He put up with lots of shit…

So AFFotD rewarded him

With a kindly road trip.

Too bad for [REDACTED]

We don’t want him having too much fun

So that’s why we made him

Drive all the way…to Omaha.

[REDACTED] Visits Omaha (Nebraska)  (Like the Cornhuskers) (It’s in the Midwest, Alright?)

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A Road Trip of Roadside Attractions Through America’s Midwest: Part 3

“Daddy, mom said that we’re supposed to call the police if you start drinking behind the wheel again.”

~How many times does daddy have to tell you kids to shut the hell up?

America is a glorious, sprawling land, with a lot of weird shit out there.  As we’ve established in our first and second road trips through Midwestern America, the best part of driving through America is being able to stop and waste time at a whole variety of strange, exotic places.  Except for that spider-car.  That was terrifying as all shit.

AGHHHHHH FLASHBACK

After our last trip, which ended with several AFFotD staffers getting wasted at Mount Rushmore, we don’t really know what happened.  When we eventually woke up, we all were missing one shoe, one sock, and the sleeves of our shirts had been cut off.  Oh, also, our car was scattered around us in dozens of pieces.  Or so we thought.  Actually, our car was nowhere to be found.  Turns out we’re in Alliance, Nebraska, where we were greeted with this sight.

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A Road Trip of Roadside Attractions Through America’s Midwest: Part 2

“NOW are we there yet?  NOW are we there yet?”

~GODDAMN IT KIDS THIS IS WHY YOUR MOTHER LEFT

AFFotD took you on a magical journey through America’s Heartland in the first leg of our Road Trip through Roadside Attractions.  We saw a whole slew of things that America decided to make giant for little or no discernable reason, and after checking in on our Chicago offices for a chance to make fun of Vince Vaughn for doing that shit film, The Dilemma, we decided we should continue to see what this fine nation has lying ahead of us.  But the last thing we wanted was to be driving sober, and cheese curds sounded pretty fucking delicious, so we headed north to the home state of the Super Bowl Exellvee champions, Wisconsin.

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A Road Trip of Roadside Attractions Through America’s Midwest: Part 1

“Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?  Are we there yet?”

~Those fucking kids.  I swear to God, I will drive this van into a ravine.


America is a land of roads.  More than any other nation, the highways and interstates of this great land speak of a legacy.  You can drive to any state you want, assuming you had enough time, gas money, and activated charcoal to fool the breathalyzers.   Except for Hawaii, but Hawaii the 51st most American state in the World.  Guam is ahead of it, and Guam isn’t even a goddamn state.

But if it is the roads of America that serve as this nation’s heart, roadside attractions serve as our soul.  America can take something like twine, try to make the world’s biggest ball of it, and center it as the primary reason for people to visit their town.  And people will stop and see that big ass ball of twine because hey, that’s sorta cool, besides, we all need a piss stop anyway.  Hell, this is a country that not only has a “world’s largest cherry pie tin,” they have a contending giant pie tin forty-five minutes away.

No other place in the world comes close to the glory of a roadside attraction during a lengthy road trip.  In Europe, you have to deal with Smart Cars getting all up on your grill.  In South America, the closest thing they have to a “Roadside attraction” is the fact that they carve murder roads into cliffs as a way to battle population growth.

“Hola?”  “ADIOS!”

Every state in America has something just off the highway in some small town that is gloriously pointless.  What is more American than the World’s Largest Toilet ?  Why, the World’s Largest American Flag, obviously, and that’s just two towns over.  Fuck yes!

America’s Midwest is often known as “America’s Heartland,” and Indiana even admits in its state motto of “The Crossroads of America” that “You basically go through our state to get where you want to go.”  For this reason, today’s America Fun Fact of the Day will be about…

Landmark Attractions of the American Midwest (or, like, 3 states)

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