We'll Always Have South of the Border
So, Kathy's only real road trip experiences prior to this were her childhood annual family trips from New York to Florida to go to the annual New Year's Day Orange Bowl parade. Apparently, they didn't make too many stops and she mostly remembers just fighting with her brother James the whole way down, but the one thing she does remember is stopping at "South of the Border", located just south of the North Carolina/South Carolina Border:
I've never been to the place or even heard about it until I knew Kathy, but as far as I can tell, it's like a really, really extravagant rest stop that's kind of Mexican-themed. Kind of a Mexican Casa de Fruta. (Or, I guess, just kind of a Casa de Fruta.) Anyway, it's landmark attraction is the 200-foot tall "Sombrero Tower", otherwise known as the Eiffel Tower of the South:
Just like the real Eiffel Tower, you can take an elevator to the top of the tower to the observation deck (which, I guess, is the brim of the sombrero). Except instead of looking down and seeing beautiful downtown Paris and the Seine River, you look down and see, uh, nothing much. Interstate 95, I guess. The parking lot. Some cars.The thing I'm looking most forward to is seeing the billboards, which apparently start hundreds of miles before the actual attraction, and then repeat at regular intervals, designed to work bored kids in the backseats of all those station wagons into a frenzy:
I know that right now Kathy isn't really keen on going to South of the Border (maybe it brings back bad road trip memories), but I'm betting that after passing twenty kitschy billboards with slogans like "You Never Sausage a Place -- You're Always a Weiner at Pedro's", the nostalgia's going to kick in and she won't be able to resist. Wish me luck.
posted by Dave @ 2:52 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Do they have many flamingos in Mexico?
Yes. And sausages, apparently.
All I can think of is that you could potentially have the world's coolest t-shirt collection after this trip... And I'm jealous that you saw narcoleptic goats. I mean, come on! Imagine being able to toss that into a conversation - "What did you do this weekend?" "Oh, I went to a birthday party, re-grouted the tub, and salted some garden slugs." "Well, _I_ saw some narcoleptic goats." Granted, as a youth, I wouldn't want to be stuck in a car with Kat's brother all the way to Florida, but still. For an Eiffel Tower / Sombrero thingy? It might have been worth it.
And that's a darn sexy map of your trip that you have there in an earlier post.
Can't wait till you get to Chicago!
(sorry - finally got around to reading the blog just now and have therefore commented on many past posts that have nothing to do with South of the Border)
The narcoleptic goats were a major draw for us, but when we actually saw them they were indistinguishable from regular-old sleeping goats. Or dead goats, for that matter.
Although we definitely should've gotten a T-shirt. I can't believe we didn't take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy a "My friends saw narcoleptic goats and all I got was this stupid T-shirt" shirt.
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