Land of the Giants: The Biggest and Boldest Roadside Attractions

Bigger is always better when it comes to roadside attractions. Here are a few that have taken me by surprise.

Dog Bark Park Inn

Cottonwood, Idaho

If you travel long enough, you might convince yourself you’ve seen it all. Then, one day, you make wide turn in a road and encounter a three-story-high beagle. With windows.

The drivers behind me on central Idaho’s U.S. 95 probably thought I’d had a heart attack when I suddenly veered off the highway and went bouncing along a barely-there gravel road, kicking up a trail of dust in the direction of the Dog Bark Park Inn, the most indelible landmark you’ll find between Washington State and Boise.

But really, you don’t just cruise on by when you spot a dog the size of an office building, let alone one with a wooden staircase leading up to its innards.

I’m pretty sure I had the presence of mind to turn off the ignition as I hurled the car door open and leaped from the driver’s seat. I strode toward the enormous canine, my arms outstretched like Dorothy approaching Oz. A rope was draped across the stairs, and a sign directed me to a gift shop just up the hill. That’s where I met Frances Conklin and her partner, Dennis J. Sullivan.

“That’s Sweet Willy,” said Frances Conklin, who along with Sullivan, built Willy and began renting the big dog out to overnight guests more than 20 years ago. “You wanna see inside him?”

That, I said, would be an affirmative. Conklin led me down the gentle hill toward Sweet Willie, who, only now I noticed, was holding in his mouth a leash that led to a smaller dog, albeit a dog the size of a compact car.

I could not help noticing a sign posted on Willie’s flank: “A Noble & Absurd Undertaking.”

“That just about sums it up,” said Conklin, leading me up the stairs. “There’s no textbook that says if you build a big dog in the middle of Idaho a lot of people will come stay in him. But we built him right at the dawn of the Internet, and word spread.”

For the inside of a dog, even an enormous one, Willy’s apartment is surprisingly roomy. A queen bed has as its headboard a charming wooden mosaic of dogs representing 15 or so breeds. It was created by Sullivan, an accomplished and successful wood artist, who sells dog carvings in the gift shop.

The main bedroom and bath occupy Willy’s belly — but my eye caught a ladder heading up the inside of his neck.

“Go on up,” said Conklin.

I did not need to be told twice. Clambering up, I found myself in a tiny bedroom, just big enough to fit inside the head of a giant dog. A small bed occupied the spot I reckoned to be Willy’s snout.

“Definitely,” I said as I backed down the ladder, “I would sleep up here.”

She smiled approvingly.

“In the early days, I spent a lot of time in the head of the dog,” she said. “It’s where I did a lot of thinking and writing.”

Sadly, Conklin and Sullivan can’t keep looking after guests inside their giant dog forever. He’s booked nearly every night during the tourist season, but Sweet Willy’s days as a canine bed and breakfast are probably numbered.

“Dennis and I have got more than 153 years between us,” Conklin said. “Ultimately, we’d like Sweet Willy to be preserved as a roadside attraction, at least.”

Conklin and Sullivan waved goodbye as I turned back onto the highway. In my rearview mirror, Sweet Willy and his pup remained in view a lot longer than you might expect.

The Giant Fire Hydrant

Fire Museum of Texas, Beaumont, Texas

For some reason, it comes as no surprise that when the Walt Disney Company announced that it was planning to donate The World’s Tallest Fire Hydrant to a deserving museum, more than 300 institutions across the U.S. lined up waving their arms and screaming “Me! Me!”

Ultimately, the Mouse House settled on Beaumont, home of the Fire Museum of Texas. The enormous 4,000-pound hydrant — white with black spots to commemorate the re-release of Disney’s animated classic 101 Dalmatians — was assembled at Disneyland. In 1999 it was trucked to Beaumont where the hydrant, capable of spraying water at 1,500 gallons a minute, was dedicated with a gala celebration that included 101 dancing Texas firefighters carrying dalmatian-spotted umbrellas.

You’d think a 24-foot-tall fire hydrant would hold onto its “world’s tallest” title longer than a couple of years, but, doggone it, that’s how long it took for Elm Creek, Manitoba, to dedicate a nearly-30-foot-high usurper. Unbelievably, just five months after that, Columbia, South Carolina, doused all competitors with its 39-foot-tall steel hydrant.

Still, none of the latecomers can boast a dalmatian spot pattern copyrighted by the Disney Company.

Giant Pistachio

McGinn’s Pistachioland, Alamogordo NM

For a while as you drive east from New Mexico’s White Sands National Park, it’s the peaks of the nearby Sacramento Mountains that provide most of the vertical eye candy. But as you cruise into the town of Alamogordo, something quite different catches your eye, and by quite different I mean a 30-foot-high pistachio nut, its gargantuan shell splitting open to reveal the tasty, if monstrous, green nut within.

On paper, it required five yards of concrete and 35 gallons of all-weather paint to create a three-story pistachio sturdy enough to stand up to the perpetual winds that push across the New Mexico landscape. Beyond that, for Timothy McGinn, owner of McGinn’s Pistachioland, it required a precisely measured combination of entrepreneurial chutzpah and enduring love for his late father Tom, who started the family business in 1980.

As is the case with most oversized roadside attractions, the practical purpose of the World’s Largest Pistachio is to lure passing motorists to sample, among other offerings, the McGinn Country Store’s pistachio fudge, pistachio brittle, and Pistachio Delight white zinfandel. Or they might take the time to board a tractor-pulled trolley and tour the sprawling pistachio farm out back.

As for me, I had a very hard time pulling myself away from the shadow of that imposing pistachio nut (strictly speaking, pistachios are not a traditional nut but a seed, commonly referred to as a culinary nut. You’re welcome).

It’s almost as if a concrete nut this big has its own gravitational pull, drawing cars from the highway like helpless meteorites. Which gets us to the more esoteric purpose baked into the World’s Largest Pistachio: Timothy’s burning desire to erect a monument to his father.

“Today I hope and believe that my dad is smiling down on…this monument,” Tim said at the 2007 dedication.

That seems like a safe bet. Even from Heaven, the World’s Largest Pistachio would be hard to miss.

The Coffee Pot

Bedford, Pennsylvania

For generations of motorists heading west along the Lincoln Highway, Bert Koontz’s giant coffee pot was a must-stop landmark. Attached to a restaurant/gas station, the Coffee Pot luncheonette served ice cream, burgers and cokes not only to drivers, but also passengers in an endless caravan of Greyhound buses.

The 18-foot-high Coffee Pot — big enough to hold 800,000 cups of java — flourished for nearly 20 years following its 1927 opening. But the nearby Pennsylvania Turnpike decimated the small-town tourist trade. The pot went dry, and for years sat dormant.

Happily, in 2003 the pot’s fans scraped together enough money to move it to a quiet little park at the entrance to the Bedford Fairgrounds. If the resident quilting club is in session, they’ll let you look around inside.

Bob the Bull

Parsons Farm, Dagsboro, DE

There may be bigger bulls than Bob, the 15-foot-high, 20-foot-long fiberglass bull that stands along a lazy farmland road near Dagsboro, Delaware. But it’s a safe bet there’s not another bull that size wearing a checkered chef’s hat. And a red napkin around his massive neck. And sunglasses.

When it comes to me encountering giant bulls…and dog-shaped hotels…and prodigious pistachios…the result almost always involves the squealing of brakes and the flying of gravel. I crunched into Parsons Farm, a family business that features an open-air selection of fruit, vegetables, and homemade treats, and sought out the owner, Paul Parsons.

“Bob came a long way to get here,” Paul said. Built in Wisconsin, Bob started out as a 1970s restaurant landmark in nearby Ocean City, Maryland (the owner once coated Bob with Vaseline to discourage spring breakers from trying to climb him). After that business closed, Bob ended up in a field, baking in the summer, freezing in the winter, and finally cracking open.

That’s when Paul Parsons — who’d been a fan of Bob since his Ocean City days — got involved. He bought Bob, had him refurbished, and gave him a new home here at the family produce market.

“He’s had quite a busy life,” said Parsons. “We like to say Bob the Bull has retired to the farm.”

The Great Cross

St. Augustine, Florida

From the northbound lanes of U.S. 1 near St. Augustine, Florida, it’s clear that the long, slender cross standing like an exclamation point a mile or so from the ocean is undeniably tall. But there’s no way to judge just how tall it is until you drive onto the grounds of the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche, park your car, and start walking toward it: For minutes on end, the thing never seems to get any closer.

“I’ve got to be getting there soon,” I kept telling myself. And yet, I kept walking.

The trick is, the remote windswept shoreline offers no other tall structures for perspective. There’s the grass of the Matanzas marsh below, the line of the horizon straight ahead — and that cross, slim and stark, streaking 208 feet into the stratosphere.

The Great Cross — dedicated in 1965 to mark 400 years of Christianity in North America — never looks quite the same, thanks to the varying reflections of sea and sky off its 200 stainless steel panels (anchored against hurricanes by a hidden concrete pillar).

After what seemed like forever, I finally made it to the base.

I craned my neck and arched my back. A light breeze carried the muffled sound of sacred music being performed a few hundred yards away in the Mission Nombre de Dios church.

The long, lean lines of the cross seemed to stretch above me forever, disappearing into a violet twilight; a glimpse of eternity.