More Tourist Traps I’ve Been To

“IT’S A TRAP!”

Last week I talked about the House on the Rock for quite a while, and keeping with that theme of things that are designed to take your money, I wanted to talk about a few other places that took my money and gave me little in return. The biggest culprit is, of course, former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who robbed the state of Illinois and spent it all on cheap booze and cocaine, presumably. But I don’t want to get all political today, so I’m going to instead focus on actual places instead. More tourist traps, if you will.

There’s a ton of them all over the country, sprouting up everywhere that there’s a flow of people and a flow of cash. They don’t have to be good at making money to exist, but they do have to be good at making money to survive. Or at least financially shrewd and potentially a front for money laundering. So, through a sort of survival of the fittest, as tourist traps pop up, their either evolve into genuine attractions, national memes, sleazy places that somehow make enough money to keep the lights on, or they just disappear entirely. Or they never change at all and exist in a weird sort of limbo where time is frozen and all that exists is The Trap. That last one is what House on the Rock is, I think.

That isn’t to say that tourist traps can’t be fun, or interesting. Like I said last week, tourist traps can be a great time and a fun diversion for a few hours, but at the end of the day, they’re still designed to make money or capitalize on some sort of public attention. Check out this list for examples, because I can’t make a list for all fifty states. They succeed by advertising as much as possible while spending as little as possible on everything. And I’ve seen a few places around Chicago that do stuff like this, and end up closing down. I’m mainly thinking of Kiddieland, which was a knockoff Six Flags in the Chicago suburbs. It lasted for a while but eventually shut down, and maybe that’s for the best since it was kind of gross. My family knows it as the place where my brother grabbed a urinal cake in the women’s restroom. It was that kind of attraction.

But there are also a few other places I’ve been to that don’t make a whole lot of sense to me, even as concepts. I don’t really get what they are, or why they exist, or how they even make money at all. There’s a few of those on this list, and a few of other ones that I know of that are just kind of bizarre. But, anyway, here’s a couple other tourist traps that I’d recommend keeping an eye out for on your next trip. Whether that’s an eye out to visit them or avoid them at all costs, that’s up to you.

Wall Drug, South Dakota

Let’s start with an easy one. You’ve probably seen one of the many bumper stickers proclaiming this place at some point in your life, especially if you ever get out to South Dakota. “Wall Drug, home of the free ice water.” “Where the heck is Wall Drug?” “Have you Dug Wall Drug?” All of these, and more as free advertising on the back of someone’s private vehicle. But I just don’t get it. What is it?

The best way I can describe, Wall Drug is a glorified shopping mall. It’s kind of the like the gift shop at a Cracker Barrel, except instead of having a southern flair, it’s a western one. They sell western clothes, western books, western food, western knick-knacks, and more western nonsense than you can shake a stick at. It’s a huge, indoor shopping center with restaurants and excessive decoration, but they also have a big dinosaur so that’s kind of cool. But I still don’t get the appeal. Sure, maybe it’s cool to people who haven’t been out west before, and maybe it’s cool because it’s become such a meme, but why? What is the fascination with the exotic west? It’s almost a kind of fetishization, honestly, and the more I think about it, the weirder it becomes.

Wall Drug exists to make money. It’s a roadside attraction, and it’s one of the most American things I can think of. Take that how you will. But it’s straight up bizarre. I’ve been there twice, and I’ve never spent more than half an hour in there. And I really don’t feel like I need to spend any more time there.

Polar Caves, New Hampshire

The Polar Caves aren’t particularly well-known outside of their little region in New Hampshire, mainly because they aren’t particularly impressive, but I have been to them. And they’re kind of cool. It’s a short, self-guided walking tour around some cool rock formations, with a mining museum, a thing about making maple syrup (because maple syrup is the primary currency in New Hampshire), and a petting zoo. It’s fun for a few hours, and mostly I just wanted to include it on this list because it was one of the first things that came to mind when I thought “tourist trap.” And also when we went there, part of their advertising material asked us to “chuckle in wonderment” at their dancing bears. No, I’m not making that up.

It reminds me a little bit of the various other living history locales around the country, or other private natural parks and/or private animal preserves that tend to be a bit sketchy in how well they actually preserve anything. Like Donley’s Wild West Town, which I can find little proof of ever existing beyond what may be a rebranded website. But I remember the jingle from the commercials so clearly. I even went there once. Did it ever really exist?

I guess apple orchards and pumpkin patches are the Midwest tourist trap equivalent of wild west town and mining camps, of places like these polar caves. Since the Midwest has no special ecology or history, we get agriculture. At least that’s something. But it could be worse. We could have the O.K. Corral.

The O.K. Corral, Arizona

I’m kind of lumping two things together here. There’s the O.K. Corral, which is this weird sort of fabricated town in Tombstone, Arizona, and there’s the Old Tucson film lot in who-knows-where Arizona. I’ve been to both, and I’ve lumped them together in my mind because, at the time, I didn’t know why we were there. And I still don’t know why we were there.

They’re essentially the same place, just spread out from each other. They’re both weird fake towns built on top of abandoned real towns that proclaim to be centers of Western history that have small museums, general stores, people dressed in cowboy clothes, historical inaccuracy, casual racism, and staged shootouts, just like the real Old West used to have. They’re weird, and kind of boring, honestly, unless you’re really into that old west stuff. I can’t even remember all that much from when I went to say anything interesting about them, besides that they exist. But why do they exist? I’ll sure as hell never care enough to find out.

Mitchell Corn Palace, South Dakota

Maybe this one boggles my mind the most. Because once you get inside the building, there’s nothing there. It’s just a gym and community center. Hell, you can even rent it for weddings and shit. All that’s special about it is the CORN MURALS. Which, to be fair, it’s pretty damn cool that they can cover this entire building in corn and make designs out of it. But what the fuck? WHY?

Somebody saw this plot of land and thought to themselves, “You know what this place needs? An altar to the Corn God.” And something got lost in translation because instead of summoning He Who Grows the Stalks, they got this goofy-ass corn building. It looks like it should be a meme. It’s literally a kremlin-lookin’ school gym covered in pictures made from corn. It’s the world’s only Corn Palace. And I can respect the time and dedication it takes to put all that corn up, but I still don’t understand why it exists. That seems to be a running theme I’m having here. Why do these places exist, and how the hell do they keep making money?

The Bass Pro Shop Pyramid, Tennessee

This one doesn’t confuse me as much as it makes me kind of sad for some reason that I don’t quite get. It was originally built as a sport stadium, just outside of downtown Memphis, TN. It’s a cool structure, theoretically. A big glass pyramid with a commanding view of both the city and the river? How could it go wrong?

I’ll tell you how: name-brand stores.

Welcome to the Memphis Pyramid, which is now entirely a Bass Pro Shop. It’s a huge space inside that’s supposed to look like it’s outside, and ringed with hotel rooms that you can rent that look out onto the shopping floor. So now you can pay to sleep in a Bass Pro Shop, and your view in the Bass Pro Shop, provided by the Bass Pro Shop. There’s a bowling alley, an archery range, a ton of stores, and weird clockwork steampunk restaurant at the very top which is actually kind of cool but still. It kind of just makes me upset, because this could have been so much more. Now it’s a glorified shopping mall. And also a tourist trap. It’s one of those things you have to see to believe.

Some Alternatives

I like tourist traps, to a certain extent. There’s a weird sort of Americana about them, a place trapped in time and locked into an outdated road-trip economy that’s eventually going to collapse as every highway gets replaced by high-speed magnetic trains. A kind of wanderlust, of finding hidden gems among the big-name attractions, of seeing something unique and pure and simple. For a lot of them, this is all just an illusion that they create on purpose. And every once in a while, it’s fun to play into this and blindly ignore the rampant capitalism that feeds on these places. But usually it just leaves me with a feeling of emptiness.

Tourist traps of the future should be self-aware. I think that they need to embrace the campy nature of their existence, to lean in to it and emphasize it. They can welcome guests with a wink and a nod as they show them around to the World’s Largest Fiberglass Owl Statue or World’s Largest Pig Made out of Canned Spam. And, with the right intentions, they can make these experiences into more than just a cash grab. Like both the guests and the management are in on it. That it’s just plain fun and maybe the whole world isn’t interested in only money.

Sometimes tourist traps start out with these goals of being entertainment, of being for the people, and then they turn into something else entirely. Sometimes they were never meant to be tourist traps and just ended up that way. But regardless, there’s something weird about the ones that survive. Maybe because the only way to make a living in this world is to profit off of the gullible and needy? I’d like to think that isn’t the case. I guess the only way to find out is to explore the world and try.

But, at any rate, there are a few places I can think of that might look like tourist traps, but in my experience are more than that. And there are loads of these across the country, of places that actually mean something to people. And I hope that there will be more to come in the future.

Raven’s Grin Inn: I went to this eerie-ass place as a boy scout maybe six or seven years ago, and I quite liked it. It’s this weird little haunted house that’s run by this old couple, and they build all the props themselves. There’s a slide from the third floor to the basement, there’s secret doorways and magic hatches, and more monsters than you can shake a stick at. We rented the place out for an hour to play hide and seek, and it was great.

Bar Harbor: Maybe you’ve heard of Bah Hahbah as one of those tourist towns, where the entire place is seasonally dependent upon people visited from other parts of the country. And maybe that’s true. But there are a ton of towns like that, all across the country, and for the most part, I don’t think there’s any shame in it. There’s some danger, maybe, since if the tourists stop coming the local economy collapses, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re real towns. People live in them. And Bar Harbor is just a really pretty place overall, and it has great hiking, too.

Biosphere 2: Unlike Bio-Dome with Pauly Shore, Biosphere 2 is a good thing. It isn’t really a tourist attraction, since it was genuinely built to be a scientific lab to study how we could create self-contained, recycling systems that support life autonomously. But it’s also a pretty cool place to look at, since they give tours and have a museum. I don’t know how much science actually goes on there now, but their goals seem pure. More or less. As a fan of space stations, I like it.

Hopefully something on this list piqued your interest, and maybe you’ll take a trip with the family to see something cool/terrible. Or maybe this will inspire you to make the first self-aware tourist trap, as I hope to someday do. All the more power to you. It is your life, and your money. Until you spend it at Wall Drug, at which point money loses all meaning and there is only Wall Drug.