This is simply the most amazing, wonderful thing I’ve seen on the Web in an age: Roadside America, "your online guide to offbeat tourist attractions". It is stuff like this that sends me into rapturous squeals of delight. Stuff like "mystery spots", shrines to miracle tortillas, replicas of Stonehenge and giant balls of string - all to be found on the highways and byways of America.

I live for this kind of stuff. I’ve already mentioned my love for the "Family Fun World" near Tucson (which is now apparently for sale - oh, if I only I had the dough…!) - but that is really just the tip of the iceberg. There are countless odd attractions to be found in the States, and if someplace is wacky and tacky and completely pointless, then I want to go there.

I was delighted to find some of my own favorite attractions on the Roadside America site. After being tormented by gigantic "Mystery of the Desert" billboards for ages, I finally had the pleasure of seeing The Thing in southern Arizona several years ago. Yes, the whole experience does leave you asking yourself, "But…why?" And no, I’m not going to say what The Thing is either.

Shenandoah Caverns was an exciting stopover on a Massachusetts to New Orleans road trip one year. I have pictures of that strange elf and the "bacon formation" rocks mentioned on the site. I was, however, unable to capture any sort of image of the special display to which we were treated at the end of our tour through the caverns: a "light show" on a big stalagmite, accompanied by the tinny strains of "America the Beautiful". I also didn’t get any pictures of the dusty attic full of old costumes and stage sets which the owner of the giftshop was proud to reveal to us in a private showing after the tour. Pity.

But most of all, I was absolutely thrilled to see a review of Nash Dino Land. For the three years I was at Mount Holyoke, I passed by the sign to Nash Dino Land a million times on the bus and always wondered what on earth it could be. In my last year at college the mystery was finally solved. Some friends and I went there and got to experience the rather amusing, somewhat sad, thoroughly puzzling attraction that is Dino Land. In all of the pictures taken on that day, the expressions on our faces - a mix of bemused uncertainty bordering on hysterical laughter - are priceless.

Ah, God bless America - land of the freaky, home of the bizarre.

Incidentally, thanks go to Jeremy for pointing out the Roadside America site (which has made it impossible for me to do anything at all productive today…).