Strangest Roadside Attraction in Every State

On the island of Oahu, the Dole pineapple plantation is home to one of the longest plant mazes in the world. The maze is made of 14,000 tropical plants, covers over two acres, and has three miles of footpaths. While 45 minutes to an hour is the average time it takes to complete the maze, the record time is around seven minutes.

The Museum of Clean’s motto is “exemplifying the idea and value of clean.” Perhaps few people would have been drawn to such a museum before the age of COVID-19. The museum is basically one city block of interactive displays and exhibits of cleaning equipment and other gadgets aiming to inspire visitors to be clean in everything they do.

After his son Jeremy — an avid Dungeons and Dragons fan — died in a car accident, Barrett Rochman built a memorial park across the street from his house with a D&D theme. Barrett hired local art students as well as sculptors and painters to create the sculptures in the park, some of which are modeled after the miniature D&D figurines found in his son’s possessions. Among the wizards and battle scenes is a castle built of tunnels, bridges, and small passageways that children and other limber people can traverse.

The world’s largest ball of paint is the creation of one man, Michael Carmichael, who has worked on it for more than four decades. What started as somewhat of an art project for his toddler son, who first painted the baseball blue in 1977, has now turned into a 14-foot, 2.5-ton unique attraction. By now, the ball has over 24,000 coats of paint.

The Squirrel Cage served as the county jail from 1885 to 1969 and then turned to a museum. In 2019, the Smithsonian Magazine listed it as one of the country’s top five most fascinating prison museums. The jail is unique in its design — pie-shaped cells surrounding a column that rotates the cells. Prisoners could access a door only when a guard used a hand crank to spin the entire jail until the required cell door aligned with the only opening. Following several accidental amputations, however, this particular prison design was no longer used.