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223 Offbeat Festivals & Events

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There's hardly a dull moment in America when it comes time to celebrate or play. In this category you'll find events like cardboard boat races, mashed potato wrestling, a pillow fighting championship, SPAM carving competitions, bed races, several testicle festivals, a rotten sneaker contest, and a downhill furniture ski race. You'll also discover festivals with names like Frozen Dead Guy Day and Mike the Headless Chicken Days.

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55 Eccentric Environments

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From castles to Holy Lands, from futuristic visions to gardens filled with bizarre art, this category encompasses the strangest living environments you'll ever encounter. Built by eccentrics with fascinating, if odd, stories to tell, these utterly unique living spaces are usually located in quite remote locales.

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174 Oddball Museums and Curious Collections

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These museums, halls of fame and collections exhibit an astounding range of collectibles from vacuum cleaners, umbrella covers, and drain tiles to squished pennies, bananas, and celebrity lingerie. If there's more than three of something, someone in America is probably collecting it.

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48 Quirky Cuisine

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Decidedly curious places, these restaurants aren't rated for quality or price but rather for their entertainment value. From dining in B.E.D. to body parts molded in chocolate, from rolls whizzing by in the air to artists painting for their supper, these dining establishments are memorable for their quirky character. They're mostly run by highly individualistic people or by corporations who know how to make eccentricity pay.

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76 Rooms With a Skew

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Quirky quarters include an underwater scuba diving hotel, an Indian Hogan, a primitive cave, former schools and jails, a sod house, and a drive in movie motel where you watch the movie through "picture" windows. These dozens of uncommon places to rest your head usually have some very entertaining and out-of-the-ordinary individuals manning the front desks.

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47 Eccentric Tours

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The distinctive character of America's major cities can best be appreciated by taking tours, especially of-and by-the offbeat. You'll find tours led by guides who are knowledgeable, quirky characters themselves or by those who are more conventional but who lead tours that fit the guide's eccentric theme.

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86 Just Plain Weird

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If it is just too weird to classify, or if it has a multiple personality, it qualifies for this section, although that could be said of most of the thousand entries in this book. Here you'll find people, places, or things that defy labeling such as an alley filled with bubble gum, a toilet paper tree, a building with furniture hung on the outside, funeral home miniature golf, eccentric grave memorials and a woman known as Mother Goose who invented duck diapers.

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62 Peculiar Attractions

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These offbeat or wacky attractions and activities include monuments, Holy Lands, dinosaur parks, strange buildings, unconventional entertainment, and the kind of kitsch roadside attractions for which America is famous.

ECCENTRIC AMERICA is published by Bradt Guides, at $19.95 USD retail