Roadside attractions.

We've left New York. We went to pick up the car at Newark Airport. It's a red Dodge Avenger. It has a drink cooler above the glove box, several cup holders and hidden compartments.

We got out of the car hire and had a look in an excellent book for ideas on where to go. We decided to head to Roadside America. Here's what the website says:

ROADSIDE AMERICA is an unforgettable panorama of life in rural United States. The exhibit spans more than two hundred years in time and lets you see, in exquisite miniature, how people lived and worked in pioneer days … through the years since then … right up to the present.

In newspapers and magazines, ROADSIDE AMERICA has been acclaimed as the
greatest known miniature village—the most unique and detailed masterpiece of its kind in the world. Actually, it is not one village, but many—really the American countryside as it might be seen by a giant so huge that he could see from coast to coast.

It's one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. You pay for your ticket in a roadside gift shop, an old lady shows you to a tiny door, you push the door and enter a gym-sized room entirely filled with models of American villages throughout the ages. There are buttons to push (we chuckled at the inuendos) and a show every half hour. For the show, a man in a box dims the lights. A slide show about America and Jesus Christ plays and "God Bless America" comes out of the speakers. It is magical and Roadtrip USA weren't wrong when they said we'd find it hard not to shed a tear (well, I did).








This morning, we visited Dinosaur Land. Another roadside wonder. It's again, hidden behind a door in a souvenir shop. The whole backyard if filled with very old and tatty paper-maché dinosaurs. The epic battle was the best bit.