Wonderfully Weird Architectural Oddities to Add to Your Vacation Destination Plans
America is home to a number of truly breathtaking architectural wonders and the most famous of them are always crowded with tourists looking to add one more notch to their list of great places to visit. If you are looking to avoid the larger crowds or you just prefer your architectural wonders to be a bit more on the odd side, then the news is just as good. America has many terrifically oddball buildings to put on your vacation map.
The Sod House Museum: Aline, Oklahoma
The Homestead Act of 1862 opened the floodgates to the settling of the West. Thousands took advantage of the opportunity to stake a claim to property in Great Plains without quite understanding just how barren that land was. Without the robust access to trees and rocks that made building homes much easier back home, many of these families were forced to burrow into the ground and live in what came to be known as sod houses. These sod houses at one time dominated the landscape from Oklahoma to the Dakotas. The centerpiece of the Sod House Museum is the only sod house actually built by a homesteader that is still standing in Oklahoma. If you want to get an authentic glimpse into what life was really like for the pioneers who transformed the western frontier in the late 1800s, you can’t get a much more tactile history lesson than by visiting the Sod House Museum.
The Parthenon: Nashville, Tennessee
Okay, so the Parthenon is hardly off the beaten track when it comes to tourism. It is Nashville’s official museum of art, after all. Even so, the Parthenon just doesn’t seem to have the must-see quality that comes with a typical trip to Nashville as the center of Country Music. Nashville’s full-scale recreation of the ancient wonder crumbling in Greece is a good 15 miles from the Grand Old Opry so it is entirely reasonable to expect that many people who come to Nashville for the music never even realize that one of America’s most impressive displays of architectural simulation is even there. If you can’t make it to Greece to see the original, then the replica of the Parthenon is the next best thing. Actually, it may be even better than the original since Nashville’s Parthenon is complete and fully constructed. America’s version even offers a 42-foot high recreation of the statue of Athena.
The Big Chicken: Marietta, Georgia
It is actually just one more in the long line of franchises of Kentucky Fried Chicken–I mean KFC–but if you ask for it by that name, you will get a quizzical look from locals. I lived in this Atlanta suburb for four years and I never once heard anyone refer to it as Kentucky Fried Chicken. (This was before the company tried to distance itself from health-related issues over fried foods.) It’s the Big Chicken. Ask any local in Marietta, Smyrna, Woodstock or anywhere to the north of Atlanta proper in the general direction of Marietta and they will know what you mean and where to send you. And, frankly, once you are on the road that runs past this particular outlet for KFC, you will know, too. That is because they sell the Colonel’s specially seasoned chicken inside a store with a great big red chicken on the outside. It’s not Chicken Boo; it really is a big chicken, I tell you.
