Thinking big

This spring, I visited the World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things Traveling Roadside Attraction and Museum. Or rather, it visited me.


Note the jaunty artificial turf accents in green and blue. The spikes on the seats of the bouncy horses are a thoughtful touch.


WLCoWSVoWLT curator and founder Erika Nelson drives this pickup around Kansas -- as well as further afield -- and if you’re lucky, she’ll stop long enough to give a talk.

She has a snappy slideshow that she accompanies with a carnival barker patter. Seeing and hearing about the sights -- the huge fiberglass dinosaurs in California, the mammoth pecan in Missouri, and who can forget the world’s largest ball of twine right here in Kansas? -- was a hoot, and adding to the fun were audience members who would occasionally pipe up with, “Hey, I’ve seen that!” (In fact, I was one of them when the enormous ketchup bottle of Collinsville, Illinois, popped up.)


Nelson not only tracks down and takes pictures of giant roadside attractions, but also makes teeny models of them when she gets home. The ultimate goal is to take the teeny model back to the giant original and photograph them together.

For a better idea of what the WLCoWSVoWLT entails, visit its Web site, or better yet, browse the Flicker photo stream. There’s a blog, too, which is worth looking at just for the bowling ball story. I feel a bike trip coming on….