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Horse Happenings Travel

Twenty-Five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: May’s Exotic World of Tropical Insects (Colorado Springs, Colorado)

There are grander things to see in Colorado, but we couldn’t help falling in love with this museum/campground/ souvenir shop with its colossal goggle-eyed plaster bug-big as a horse and named Hercules-above Route 115 south of Colorado Springs.

Hercules’s limbs have been chewed away by wildlife, or possible stolen by vandals, so he hovers about the earth on unseen prosthetic legs, but all the real insects in the museum are shipshape and under glass, Mrs. May collected them around the world; and what impressed us even more than the weird beetles was the vintage inventory of souvenir merchandise for sale in the room just outside the gallery- keepsake pens and pencils, ViewMaster discs, and excellent postcards of glamour girls in bathing suits surrounding Hercules when Hercules was whole. May’s is at the end of a long, wooded road: a trip back in time to a lost style of roadside charm.