Ooooo!

Sometimes mountain sunsets are missed because all the glory goes on behind the mountain, leaving a funny twilight in the valley. And sometimes the mountain sunsets are surprisingly gorgeous, rare and precious.  This was one of the rare and precious ones, after a rain....

Go Big!

I dig kitsch. 

Not necessarily to live with (although I seem to have gathered up plenty as I look around the room), but just...

It always amazes me that you can walk into nearly any old gift shop in the U.S. and find plastic tourist junk that ordinarily practical people wouldn't buy in a million years but after spending half a day at Mount Rushmore suddenly HAVE to have the refrigerator magnet/thermometer with George Washington's badly done rubber countenance leering away at them. Truly! There's just something in humans that compels us to take home awful, useless mementos of our experiences. And lest you start feeling all self-righteous about "those people", dig deep into your heart of hearts and admit to yourself that, yes, there was that ONE time you bought the rattlesnake egg envelope in a moment of insanity at Wall Drug. You were tired from driving, the kids were whining....whatever!...you did, and you're one of US.  

That's just the little stuff. 

Recently, I decided that when I get old(er) and find a couple kindred travel spirits to join me, I'm going to take a tour around the continent and see the big kitsch. BIG-BIG, I'm telling you. Like....the World's Largest Armadillo (located in Buffalo Gap, TX, south of Abilene) 

and the World's Largest Garden Gnome in Kerhonkson, NY. 

(Side note: Who wouldn't want to send a postcard from a town with the name "Kerhonkson", giant gnome excluded. Isn't that just the greatest moniker?)

I'm telling you! 

The Grand Canyon tours have been done, Niagara Falls is stuffy and old, the cable cars in San Francisco...blah, blah, blah. But the World's Largest Concrete Prairie Dog? Not many vacation albums with the family crabbily standing in front of THAT. (It's in Cactus Flats, SD. Totally do-able)

Besides the sheer absurdity of humongous forks and ducks and teacups and badgers is how (and I'm not making this up) once something becomes the world's largest anything, its title must be capitalized in reverence of the achievement. It's not the world's largest cowboy hat; it's the World's Largest Cowboy Hat!

 (Which is curiously located in Seattle, WA. Not Texas. Texas has the World's Largest Cowboy in the town of Canyon. Apparently he lost his hat while on looking for the World's Largest Cow.)

Isn't that awfully great?! Or greatly awful?!?

Either way.

I have already been to the World's Largest Radio Flyer Wagon in Spokane, WA with my sister and our kids, as well as a huge milk bottle cafe downtown there. It was great! 

 And then there was the stunning red shoe in the mall that I wanted to bring home and put in the backyard next to the fence so I could take pictures of it with cows in the distance...

When I was in Abilene with my Aunt Bert and Grandma this winter, I found a giant flamingo, 

(Be still, my beating heart...)

 a dinosaur with a VW on top of a building, (Angus calls them VFWs and we don't correct him.)

 and a huge deer skull/antlers! 

It's a start! 

Next winter, when the walls start closing in on me (as they inevitably do), I'm going to get out a Rand McNally atlas and start planning a road trip. 

I know the important things in life are the little things, but sometimes the big things are pretty cool too, don't you think?

And now, it's a gorgeous spring morning so I'm off to pull weeds and soak up the blessed sunshine! 

 *The photos prior to the Radio Flyer picture were borrowed from Pinterest. The photos after that are all mine.*