This week, my family and I are taking the trip of a lifetime.
We’re taking 24 days to drive across the United States. From Rochester to the Pacific Ocean and back. My wife has been planning this trip since 2018. It was originally planned for 2020, but we had to push it back two years due to the pandemic.
So for the next three weeks, I’ll be taking a break from watching the sports media world and will be watching more than 20 states.
We’re hitting all the big stops along the way. Yellowstone National Park. Alcatraz. Las Vegas. The Gateway Arch. The Grand Canyon.
But we are also seeing the Troll Capital of the World, Cadillac Ranch, the World’s Shortest Covered Bridge and the World’s Largest Thermometer.
Why?
Because our family’s mission to Find Mor Weird.
It started, as all good things in life do, with Foamhenge.
We were driving to North Carolina for a family wedding. Our daughter was, at the time, in kindergarten. It was a long, long drive down I-81, through the entire state of Virginia diagonal way. At one point, to kill the time and to make the drive a little more fun and adventurous for us, my wife looked up weird roadside attractions on her phone. What she found, was Foamhenge.
It was … an exact replica of Stonehenge, made out of large pieces of styrofoam instead of rocks. There was a statue of Merlin.
It was awesome.
Since then, we’ve found the World’s Largest Filing Cabinet, a grave in Vermont from the 19th century with a window looking down, the world’s largest Duncan Phyfe Chair and the world’s largest Chest of Drawers, the grave of the arm of Stonewall Jackson. We’ve also seen a medium-sized inflatable duck in a random Jacksonville strip mall.
As a society, we’re obsessed with making good time.
You take a road trip, and you have to make good time. It’s a very Dad thing to say - Hey, we made good time! Traffic is the enemy, stops are limited and short. Gotta make good time.
And certainly yeah there are times when you have to make good time. When you’ve got to be a specific place at a specific time, it doesn’t do to dilly daddle. The highest-stakes most stressful drive of our family’s life was when we were fighting Orlando rush hour traffic, complete with an honest-to-god brush fire along I-4, to make a reservation at Cinderella’s table at Disney world (my daughter had to change into her princess dress in the parking lot … and then we still had to wait like a half hour to get seated).
But be honest - how many times is this really the case? How many times are you rushing to get somewhere just to get there and … sit. Hurry up and wait and all that.
When this is the case, the road is the enemy. Everything you come across is an obstacle. The drive is just a means to an end, a path from A to B, straightest possible line, shortest amount of time. It’s something you endure, nothing more or less.
Nah. That ain’t for us.
Give me a trip that goes from A to orange. Give me a route that makes your GPS crash.
Give me medium sized inflatable ducks, foam replicas of Druid religious sites, the tallest filing cabinet, graves you can look into.
Give me a back road that’s kind of on the way but also far enough off the interstate, the Avett Brothers on the stereo, the promise of a piece of comically oversized furniture a mile down the road, all three of us scanning the shoulder and the horizon, eager to be the first one to see it.
Give me more weird.
Find Mor Weird is our manifesto against making good time.
You can follow our shenanigans over the next three weeks on Instagram at Find Mor Weird. There’s a contest and everything.