72: Brain Junk Road Trip

Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm trace Kerr and I'm a Barton and today I'd like to talk to you about the largest ball of twine you always hear about that. Like on road trips you're going to go stop and see the largest ball of twine. I thought that was sort of a myth. It's a thing. It's in Cocker Kansas and at this point it looks more like an inverted bowl. I would argue it as no longer the largest ball of twine. But we're going to tell you everything else you need to know about brain junk, road trip, shotgun. I think that yeah, we Speaker 1 00:37 need to start, we need some boundaries and guidelines. So let's talk first. We didn't discuss this in our phone. Oh I need to know Twizzlers or red vines. Red Vines. Perfect cause I'm Twizzlers. Everybody gets so we can road trip together. Trace and I have not yet road trip together at this juncture. And so these are important things to establish. Are you, I'm a pre planner. Do you bring lots of junk food or do you fly by the seat of your pants and then stop at the first I a, I mix it up so I bring like whatever's left in the fridge. So there's carrot sticks and there's apples and there's this and that. But then I mean you have to stop at the gas station and get, you know, really expensive junk. You have to get wrinkles or you have to get, you know, you have to get something so that you never ever buy Funyuns in your life until you're on the road. Speaker 1 01:22 Yeah, absolutely. And then you're like why does my car smell like armpits and feet and Funyuns I'm more like I buy a bag of licorice. I buy two bags cause my house is divided on the grid stew. Um, and I think we're just going to eat two or three pieces. We demolished the whole bag. We stopped somewhere. Okay. Next question. Okay. Are we stopping for pit stops and seeing sites or are we in it to win it? Race against that semi. That depends on what, so like road trip where you're going to see stuff like what we're doing today. If I'm in that frame of mind, I stop everywhere. Okay. I'm like, well that was interesting. And then we stop. But if you go into Portland, we're going to Portland, you're going to get like four chances to pee. That's it for fields generous. I don't think Chris Barton would give you four and then we're just going to keep going because we've got some place to be and that red car is a jerk and we're not passing him again. Speaker 1 02:16 No, it's Chris Control is set. Exactly as mine. Ah. I always like to find a car to draft behind. Well that's always a good idea. They'll get the ticket, I hope. Oh yeah. And my final question to see if we're on a road trip. Compatible music, audio book, podcasts, surf the local stations. No Way. You can't surf local stations cause out here you use nothing. You, you leave town in 15 minutes. It's just static. I'm, I think we tend to go audio book most or Podcast, you know, I will load up a whole bunch. Brain junk is an excellent podcast. Listen to when you're in the car. I agree. Yep. So while we're driving, where are we going to go? Well, we've already the twine ball. That's true in Kansas. I'm going to see the Cabazon dinosaurs in California. These things are 150 feet long. Brontosaurus named Denny and Mr Rhexis 65 feet tall. Speaker 1 03:11 Oh, I dunno if that's where you're going in your notes, but that's the one that I'm kind of most excited about because it's like I'm visiting the Flintstones. That's what they look like. They're that big, but they're concrete and you can climb up on them. And I'm headed there to see them. Okay. So if we're going to just skip around and we're talking about big animals, then uh, we also need to stop at the dog bark in. Yes, please. Okay, so it's in Cottonwood, Idaho. And it was, it's owned by Francis Caughlin and Dennis J. Sullivan. It's a 30 foot tall beagle shaped two bedroom bed and breakfast. What it really is a dog shaped. Yeah, it looks like a Beagle. And what's funny is, is it's been there since it opened in August of 2003 driving down to Boise, Idaho. And it's right on the road and you're like, wait, that was a big dog. Speaker 1 03:57 I'm awesome. It's super cool. It's also known to the locals is sweet Willie and you can, uh, you can stay there full bath, microwave, fridge, the whole thing. You, you climb up a staircase that goes underneath his tail and then hooks around to a deck on the other side. I was open. You'd say you had to climb up underneath this detail. I know. It's just, it just makes it, there's also a gift shop, a visitor center, and a gallery of chainsaw art. Sheetz art. Awesome. Which is quintessentially Pacific northwest. It is, it's very, if you go ahead and go anywhere out in the sticks, you're going to find a chainsaw bear. They have chainsaw dogs. Um, and they are remarkably artful to watch them do these. Oh yeah. They're detailed. And it's crazy to watch a guy do change the art. It's lady. Yeah. It's Kinda terrifying too cause you're like God, if that guy slips there goes is like after we stay at the dog bark. Speaker 1 04:50 And where are we going to go next? We're just skipping all over the United States to get me to surprise you or do you have something in mind? Surprise me. Okay. I want to go see Paul Bunyan and babe the Blue Ox. I adored the Disney cartoon about Paul Bunyan. These are all things I thought I would like to see as a child. Pretty much. This is my nine year old. Amy would just go nuts for this trip. So Paul Bunyan and babe the blue ox are in Bemidji, Minnesota and they've actually been around for quite a long time since 1937 and they were a kind of a tourist attraction carnival opened and they had babe and Paul were the carnival mascots and so they were brought into town on a grindle's implement and fuel company truck. And it was arranged so that the exhaust from the truck exited through Babes nostrils. Speaker 1 05:37 So he was snorting. Wow. So great. How tall are they? How big are they? Cause Paul Bunyan was a big old guy. Paul Bunyan is 18 feet tall and five feet across at as base. Oh from toe to heel. And Babe is 10 feet tall and eight feet across. So and from nose to tail he's 23 feet. So these are big. That's a big blue ox. Yeah. I feel like 18 feet is um, two stories. Yeah. And almost two giraffes somewhere. I think 22 feet is like two drafts. I looked it up for something the other day. I love that. That's your, your s your measurement. There's a teacher with my name in the district and her kids had been doing research papers and then emailing them to her. And 99% of them have gotten it right. But a couple have sent them my way. And so I started reading them and so one of them said, and play ball was 440 feet tall. And so I replied back saying, did you know that's as tall as blah, blah. You also haven't arrived at your teacher, but I enjoyed your work. Very much. Child trauma. Yeah. Speaker 1 06:42 But they knew they got, didn't get their assignment where they wanted it. Well, no, that's important. You know, because you just don't know if it's floating out there. <inaudible> you know what would, uh, okay, so I'm just going to have two different directions. Let's talk about the pike place. Gum Wall. Yes. The back of the market theater, 50 feet long. Stretch of brick wall, 15 feet high, covered with pre chewed gum. We've seen it. I think one of my children has touched it. Oh No. Oh, it is considered the germiest thing in Washington. I would have to agree to chop a handoff. The tradition started in 1993 they tried scraping it off and they gave up as it became a tourist attraction. People just come, they chew gum, they stick it. They also can sometimes stick notes or they shape their gums so it has words and things like that. Speaker 1 07:29 On a hot summer day, it reeks. Yeah. What is this smell? It smells like bad and bad breath. Yeah. It's like the winds of bat is just, Oh, brush your teeth, you know? That's what it smells like. I would like scientists to study that bacteria. Like are these their super bacteria now? They're probably, well, okay. So there, there were probably, uh, on November 10th of 2015 they steam clean the wall because it was so thick and getting so heavy. They were concerned that it would bring the wall down that it was stuck on. Yeah. I mean there were places where it was inches thick of chewed gum. I feel like if you sent a prison crew out to do that work, they'd be like, I'll go straight man. Never again. Yeah. No recidivism. 130 hours, they removed 2000, 350 pounds of gum. Oh my goodness. A car's worth of gum. Speaker 1 08:15 It's Ah, by 2017, I was looking at pictures. It was back to it's former germy glory. Yeah, completely covered. We were there a couple of years ago and it was gross. It well, but here's the thing that's really funny. It's so colorful that it's often used as a background for photos senior. Oh. And also wedding photos cause it's just kind of blurred out and colorful in the background. Yeah. Gum Wall. Awesome. I think a good segue from gum is Carlsbad caverns some place where you should not stick your gum. That's right. The Carlsbad caverns are in New Mexico and they are one of the largest cave systems in the u s the particular largest Speaker 0 08:56 cave is called the big room, aptly named, Oh, that's very imaginative. A teenager, long time ago discovered these caves prowled around and so many of the names are teenager names and so the big room is the big room. It's almost 4,000 feet long, 625 feet wide and 255 feet high at it's highest plow. It's the fifth largest chamber in North America and 28th in the whole world. That has been discovered. 119 caves in the Carlsbad caverns, but only three are open to the public in general. You could just go there during open tour hours and see them. The rest of the caves you would have to have a permit or a scientific permit. There's some, I went poking around to see what would it take to get into these caves and the general permit paperwork are really funny pictures. It's like the bathroom people, the little round stick figures. Speaker 0 09:48 Oh yeah. It shows the guy repelling and they're still lagged tights above him and he's repelling down those. You have to have a tour guide and some of them are open three times a month. Some of them three times a week. They have limits based on what it can handle. There are 17 species of bats and thousands of pounds of Bat Guano in there, in the caves in general. Maybe not in the main case, but you okay with bats. But if there were spiders, I don't need to go. I'm not sure that there's a ton of food beyond the bats because you get into these, um, that is actually one of my favorite, most interesting things about the caves. I read a book called blind descent by Nevada bar and she, it's a mystery, but she talks about what it's like to be in the caves cause the park ranger goes with a scientific team to rescue a murder victim. Speaker 0 10:33 And that's why I want to see them because her descriptions were really interesting. But you get into the caves and there's no wind. There's no outside biological life to eat stuff. So whatever you bring down there stays down there. It's not like it's going to blow away or desiccate or decay. It's going to be there for. So if there's fecal matter, the next people 20 years from now are going to see it just like it was my dry out a little bit. It's going to be there. So that's something you hadn't thought of. The only thing that does occur can be water changes in water levels but, but the Carlsbad caverns, I don't want to be there for a murder. I just want to go there and see the rest of it's Dave actually. So fun things about this. I see. I really get excited. Speaker 0 11:17 I want to show you are just cave cave that's just do it and I'm cutting stuff out cause we're going long already. But in the big room it's tall and you can, you know if there's stuff below you, there's probably stuff above you. You haven't found like we're starting at the top and going down. So they figured out there were caves, but you also don't always have an environment where you can just stick a ladder down or build a ladder up. Uh, because there is a big pit in this area. So there they could see a chamber above, but they couldn't access it. And so after multiple tries over a period of months or years, they were able to send up a light cord with a balloon and Speaker 1 11:54 Balsa wood rig up in over a rock formation and they were able to use that and like, so you can imagine these guys go, go, Oh man, oh you missed. Oh I've got to pull it back. Oh my gosh. Year. Oh in our permit renews. And so these scientists, they were able to secure and thus investigate what they call the spirit world and the balloon ballroom cause it's way up above the big main cavern. Wow. Did you want to go now? I kind of do. Yeah. Wow. I was excited about that one. That is pretty exciting. I'm going to tell you about something that is not created by nature. This was created by man. It is the ultimate ultimate tourist trap. Okay. While drug, I have heard of this and never been, and I don't really know about it. I just see bumper stickers and I had heard of it too. Speaker 1 12:42 And then a couple of years ago zoned and I drove to Kansas and driving to Kansas, we went down through Nebraska. So we missed it because wall drug is in South Dakota. It's in wall, South Dakota. Gosh. So when we went home, we drove all the way up and we were crossing South Dakota. And the minute, I mean like the very second you cross into South Dakota, there are giant signs, visit wall, drug free ice water, you know, and then another mile. There's another thing about wall drug home of the jackalope and the, I mean, you're driving. Okay. So most of their advertising is along a 650 miles stretch of I 90 from Minnesota to billings, Montana. And I'm gonna tell you that South Dakota along that I 90 there's not a lot out there. Pretty much the only thing you're looking at is those signs. And so we saw those signs across the entire state because wall drug is at the far west side of uh, South Dakota. Speaker 1 13:36 And it began in 1931 is a 231 person town pit stop. Okay. Little, Yep. Business was slow. Um, it was really slow until they started catering to people heading to mount Rushmore, which it just, yeah, about 60 miles away. And they were like, Hey, you can come here and get ice water. And that's one of the things they do is they give away a water. They've got water fountains, and then these cones for cups, they look like the paper. Go Shave ice cones. Yeah. There's water fountains all over. They gave away 20,000 cups of water a day during peak season. Wow. Oh, but that's not all. It's there. You know, you're like, wow, that's a long way to go for a glass of water. No, no, no, no, no. You have no idea. Over 2 million people visited every year. Wow. It's a cowboy themed shopping mall and that doesn't really describe it. Speaker 1 14:23 It's blocks of warrens of shops, museums. There's an 80 foot tall brontosaurus. There's a giant jackalope you can sit on. I have a picture of my daughter on it, on the website. Uh, indoor outdoor attractions. It's just, it's mind boggling. You know, if you've ever gone to like gas station kind of thing where you go in and they've got the key chains and the shirts and the hats and the for wherever you are kind of thing. Put that into blocks of stores. Wow. If, if you can imagine it, they've got it with wall drug written on it or they've got it with camouflage on it or they've got, I mean it's just, it's, it's amazing camouflage on it. I always kind of envisioned it like truly a drug store from the 20s or the teens and like it blossomed from there. Yes. And they have a lot of those old buildings. Speaker 1 15:15 So you'll go in and it looks like an old pharmacy or it's an Old Soda Fountain and then there's a burger shop and then they've got like this long hall and it's got like a wooden boardwalk kind of thing. And those machines that have the, you put in a quarter and you can squeeze the handle and then this sorcerer looking type guy will give you your fortune kind of thing. And there's also like carnival. It's just after driving in the car, because I went from where we're, we were in like Omaha, Nebraska, and then I drove all the way over there. So I had spent seven hours in the car and you get out and it's just, it was like going from complete quiet. Oh yeah. Two crazy. And it's full of people and it's like the fair and a mall all rolled into one. And you find that you're thinking maybe you do need a Sasquatch bottle opener by the time you leave. Speaker 1 16:01 I didn't know I needed a tiny little jackalope. I did not end up getting one. For those of you who don't know. And jackalope is a rabbit and then it has antlers on it and physical creatures. It's a mythical thing. Yeah. Um, they were everywhere. It was something. Wow. That's not how I envision it at all. So now I'm envisioning a thing like if a tornado swept it away, you can't remake this. Oh No, there's no way this is all like it's been building up for decades and decades. It's all walked through one big building and then you were outside but surrounded by buildings and there were water fountains and things to do and then you could walk into another building or and weird corners and you'd, and there'd be like a little shop with art in it and then another one that had salt water taffy. Speaker 1 16:42 It was, it was wild. So like that's a little bit what I envisioned the Pike Street market as cause you go into these little corners and weird and you come back out one level though. But it's one thing. Nothing you can compare it to. No, it was, it was, I am not a tourist strappy kind of person. Yeah. And this we stopped and it's such an experience. I mean you have to, if you're in South Dakota, you just have to go, there's nothing like it. No, there is nothing like it. It will change you forever. Probably will. Our road trip is very meandering. We can't actually take this road trip in any sort of time frame. This would take us like four months. The way we've mapped it out so far. Because I also want to go see the Weeki Wachee mermaids in Weeki wachee Florida because I saw Peter Pan and there's mermaids and they're on the rocks and the swimming with Wendy and they're kind of mean. I hope these ones aren't kind of mean. But that's kind of what it's like. It's like somebody watched Peter Pan and they're like, we can do mermaids. Yes. Aren't they like big human sized fish tanks? Yeah. And it's ladies in the tanks and there's a magic show on Netflix where the magician tries to magic underwater with Speaker 0 17:50 them and they're all just be in chill and cool and he has the same setup cause they do have some way that they can breathe. They've got a little bit of an air source that's very discrete but he could not get it figured out. And so it, it is definitely a skill. Oh yeah. Afloat when you can't kick your legs apart. Cause that's one of the signs of drowning is you need to be able to kick your legs freely. And these ladies can't. So they must have some serious core strength to do that. Dolphin kick. Well that and what I've seen is they've got long hair, maybe a wig, but you know I've had, my hair is not horribly long. But if you're in the water and you're like doing a summer salty kind of thing and then it's all over your face. I mean it's not pretty like easy make it v but these ladies make it look really pretty. Speaker 0 18:31 Yeah. It's gotta be some skill involved in looking calm and elegant the way they do. So I would like to see them cause now I can respect the effort that that must take. And Kid me just thinks it looks so glamorous. We've got one last place we want to go. I want to go to Saint Augustine, Florida cause everything in Spokane. It's about a hundred years old because everything burned down with a fire. The Chicago fire story, also the Spokane fire story. Nothing's old here. So I want to see something really old and it was colonized by the Spanish, about 454 years old and has a long native history preceding that. So it's very old top of Florida on the outside. And so pirates loved it there and the Spanish loved to be there but didn't love the pirates. So it's a piratey tourist town and I would love to be a pirate tourist. Speaker 0 19:19 It's got a long history with that. You can go to a hotel on Amelia island, which is outside on the coast and you can have a bedtime story read to you by Princess Emilia and pirate Louis, Ori and his parents. I would like to go to there and see, you know, the fairy old Castillo de San Marcos and all the old Victorian homes and love to go there. Ooh, that sounds lovely. Well, if you could think of places that you want to go, you should get ahold of us and tell us about it so we can talk about it. Maybe on a brainstorm. Maybe we could actually go. Wouldn't that be fun? We'd love it. We're on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast, and you can find us on Twitter as at my brain junk trace, and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know, and I guarantee you won't be bored and save a twizzler for Amy. Yes, please. I'm going to need more than one on my bag. We haven't even talked about chocolate Twizzlers Speaker 2 20:24 <inaudible>.