Categories
Horse Happenings Travel

Twenty-Five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Gardens of Eden (Lucas, Kansas)

The Garden of Eden is located on a pleasant, tree-lines residential street, but it isn’t nearly as peaceful as you’d expect Eden to be.

Categories
Horse Happenings Travel

Twenty-Five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Farmer John Mural (Tucson, Arizona)

Leslie Grimes painted three murals for the Farmer John Meats Company in the West, and although the one he did in Vernon, California, is probably the widest known- because it was featured in the background of a scene in Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970) – the one on Grant Street in Tucson is the one we like most.

Categories
Horse Happenings Travel

Twenty-Five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: El Vado Motel (Albuquerque, New Mexico)

The quintessential Route 66 motel, with the prettiest sign in Albuquerque (the city with the best roadside signs in the West):  an Indian chief with a headdress in rainbow neon colors.

Categories
Horse Happenings Travel United States

Twenty-Five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Silver Queen Of Nevada (Virginia City, Nevada, In the Silver Queen City)

Lee and Ruby Carel, proprietors of the Silver Queen , wanted to honor the Comstock Lode, which yielded more than a billion dollars; worth of silver and made Virginia City one of the most prosperous places in America in the 1870s.

Categories
Horse Happenings Travel

Twenty-Five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Chisholm Trail Mural (Yukon, Oklahoma)

A handsome painted mural showing cowboys and cows passing through Oklahoma (which was then Indian Territory) on their way from Texas into Kansas in the late 1860s.

Categories
Horse Happenings Travel

Twenty-Five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Dinosaur Gardens (Vernal, Utah)

There are dinosaurs by the side of the road from coast to coast in America- some of them are so bug that you can climb a staircase and visit religious shrines inside their bodies- and there are dinosaur parks with dozens of fanciful specimens, some we have seen with Day-Glo tennis balls for eyes.

Categories
Horse Happenings Travel United States

Twenty-Five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Corn Palace (Mitchell, South Dakota)

September is the best time to come see the Corn Palace, when the exterior wall space on this Byzantine edifice is freshly covered with multicolored corn cobs, oats, barley, sorghum grain, and assorted grasses- all precisely arranges to form immense murals.

Categories
Horse Happenings Travel United States

Twenty-five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Chief Yellow Horse Trading Post (Lupton, Arizona)

Nestled against a red-rock butte near the New Mexico border along Route 40, Chief Yellow Horse Trading Post has everything… and everything MUST GO!

Categories
Horse Happenings Travel United States

Twenty-five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Cadillac Ranch (Amarillo, Texas)

Alongside interstate 40, formally Route 66, five miles west of Amarillo, ten Cadillac’s were half-buried in the ground, nose down, in 1974.

Categories
Horse Happenings Travel United States

Twenty-five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Big Pile of Bones (North of Dixon, New Mexico)

If you are in the market for a set of longhorns to mount on your car or in your den, or if you need some cattle skulls to decorate your porch or patio, or if you’ve just got a hankering to surround yourselves with jawbones, rib cages, and vertebrae- all picked up clean and gleaming white- this is the boneyard for you.