The Food, The Places and The Weird

I just discovered that on Google Maps you can create a map with as many pins in it as you want and store it in your Google account.  I’ve been obsessed with researching all the cool places in the country and pinning them on the map!  I’ve developed a color code to categorize all the places I want to see.  Yellows are food, red stars are people’s houses, grays are museums, and blues are roadside attractions to name a few.  The map is still a work in progress and I suspect we will never finish it but I think that is the exciting part!  We will just keep adding and adding in the hopes that we get to do it all!  This is what the map looks like so far.

As you can see there are quite a few bald areas of the country.  This is the part where we could really use your help filling it up!  I need all you family and friends out there to send me your addresses if you would like a visit!  (a message via Facebook would be fine.)  Also, if you could go anywhere in the country tonight where would you go?  What would you eat?  What would you see?  I would love to add it to my map!

There are so many fun places that I can’t wait to visit!  Especially Melt Bar and Grilled in Lakewood, OH.  They are a restaurant that has been featured on some of the Food Network Shows.  They make the craziest grilled cheese sandwiches that you can imagine and if you have a tattoo of a grilled cheese sandwich you get 25% off for life. (I don’t think we will be taking advantage of the discount though) I’m looking forward to one of their Italian creations with eggplant parmesan, mozzarella sticks and roasted garlic (my mouth is literally watering as I type)! Jen wants to try the potato and onion pirogi with vodka kraut, sauteed onions, and sharp cheddar.  There is also a place that sells something called puffy tacos in San Antonio, TX and it’s called Henry’s Puffy Taco Express. They fry raw masa dough (the dough traditionally used to make tortillas) until it gets puffy and delicious.  Then they fill it with traditional taco fixings!

Although we are big foodies it’s not all about food.  We are hoping that we can get the locals to point us to the coolest spots. When we were picking up our new laptop from the Apple store in Oregon, that’s exactly what happened! The guy helping us told us about this amazing spot in Oregon called the Painted Hills that looks like heaven on earth.  The pictures I found online don’t even look like a real place!

I just discovered something really amazing in Arizona as well.  Apparently the original London Bridge was not structurally sound enough to handle modern traffic.  A man called Robert P. McCulloch stepped in and purchased it for 2.4 million dollars and proceeded to reconstruct it in Lake Havasu City, Arizona!  According to the website “The blocks were then shipped overseas through the Panama Canal to California and trucked from Long Beach to Arizona.” I can’t wait to visit London by way of Arizona!

Last but definitely not least I am super excited about all the weird stuff that you run into and often don’t even see it coming!  There is your average weird, like the largest ball of yarn and and largest ball of stamps (which is also probably the largest collection of dried saliva).  Then there is the even weirder stuff.  One guy decided to paint a baseball with 23,400 layers of paint which, in case you can’t do the math, is 4,00 pounds worth of baseball and paint.  This feat has taken 34 years to accomplish.  Then there is the weirdest and, my personal favorite so far, Foamhenge.  It’s an exact replica of Stonehenge and I bet you can’t guess what its made out of!  Mark Cline got the idea when he visited a factory that made 16 foot tall blocks of Styrofoam.  He went to great lengths to make it authentic consulting with a man who gives tours of the real thing and placing them in their astronomically correct positions.

I can’t wait to post about the things that we actually get to see and post our own pictures of them.  I hope we have so many pictures and places to write about that I can’t even keep up on this blog!  Until then don’t forget to send us your addresses and favorite places to add to our map!

See you soon!

07 Mar This entry was published on March 7, 2014 at 1:59 am. It’s filed under Uncategorized and tagged "a roaming home", "b van", "class b", "free spirit ss", "google maps", "leisure van", "living minimally", "roadside attractions", food, foodies, full timers, full timing, fulltimers, fulltiming, motorhome, rv, rving, travel. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.