Weird Places to Take Your Family This Summer (Minus One)

The mystery is why balls roll uphill, people can walk on the walls, and you can't stand up straight in some places. It's a gravitational anomaly, folks, and people have been trying to figure it out since '39. Is it built over a buried space ship, or maybe some kind of tracking devices left by aliens from outer space when they visited here? Is it part of a trail to get back to another galaxy​? Who knows, but there it is right in the redwood forests outside Santa Cruz: The mysterious spot where the laws of gravity are suspended. For a truly weird place to take your family this summer, try the Mystery Spot's 45 minute tour.

Mystery Spot.
465 Mystery Spot Rd
Santa Cruz, CA 95065-9658
(831) 423-8897

Weird Place Not to Take Your Family: The Cathedral of Junk in Austin Closed

The town motto is Keep Austin Weird, but they must not mean it because they're getting rid of the weirdest thing going: The Cathedral of Junk, a 32 year project built by Vince Hannimen in his back yard. Vince has been soldering bicycles, sewing machines, electric doodads and clocks together with bumpers, tricycles and old appliances to create a 60 ton maze of junk that stands, ooops make that stood, three stories high. It was a maze of intricate towers and rooms made of mass production cast offs, "a monument to excess consumption." Well, the neighbor's didn't like the view, and the zoning czars got on his case, the upshot of which is that Vince officially dismantled the Cathedral of Junk in June of 2010.

Cathedral of Junk
4411 Lareina Drive
Austin, Texas 78745
(Call first to see if anything's left.)
(512) 299 7413

Weird Place to Take Your Family This Summer: Forevertron in New Freedom, Wisconsin

Forevertron is officially the World's Largest Sculpture, composed of 380 tons of junk. The conglomeration is the brain child of Tom Every aka Dr. Evermore, a scrap artisan and visionary junk engineer. He started constructing the Forevertron in 1983, as a mammoth fantasy device that would supposedly propel him "through the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam inside a glass ball inside a copper egg." Of course, it didn't exactly work, but maybe that's because the good doctor made it out of old carburetors, discarded power house machines, and part of the lunar decontamination unit that moon rocks passed through in the Apollo space mission. Plus a few dynamos from the Ford Museum built in 1882, all hooked together somehow. Also on the grounds you'll find the 70 piece bird band of ten foot high percussive instruments with legs and arms and . . . stuff, made with . . . stuff. And that's not all. There's lots more weird . . . stuff, making this a suitably weird stop on your family summer vacation. Forevertron US 12, North Freedom, WI behind Delaney's Surplus Admission: Free. Hours: M, Th, Fri, Sa 9 am - 5 pm, Su Noon - 5 pm. (Call to verify) Phone: 608-219-7830

http://www.mysteryspot.com/ (1)

www.keepaustinweird.com (2)

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/7816 (3)