I grew up in the US Deep South states of Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas. With everyone I loved in Georgia and my small family moving between the other two states for most of my elementary school years, we drove back “home” for every big holiday and summer break.

The landscape of this region never met a roadside gimmick it didn’t love.

A big chicken beckoned us as its eyes spun around and its beak clucked. Giant peaches, oranges, and peanuts told us exactly where to stop for a snack. See Rock City on the red rooftops of barns became a direct commandment no civilized Southerner could ignore.

These attractions were the wallpaper of getting somewhere.

But the first roadside attraction I remember consciously noticing wasn’t even on the road. It was the dinosaur from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. We didn’t visit that dinosaur, but I do recall begging my parents to stop so I could see an enormous purple dino on one of our excursions. As I walked around it, I remember thinking that some artist had made it for no reason other than to have it admired by travelers eager to get somewhere else.

That, in retrospect, was my first lesson.

Someone creating an homage to something they loved just so they could share it with the world. Knowing it would most likely be forgotten once the wheels were rolling again.

Roadside Attractions: History or Mythology?

My second lesson came later, in my flight attendant years.

I started flying for a living, and when I did stop, I’d be in some unknown place with time to kill, so I’d visit local attractions. It was during those short breaks that I realized every region has its own mythology.

Roadside attractions just help make that mythology become real.

Sure, you can read a history of a place. You can eat its food and talk to its people. But how do you really learn about a location? Well, if a city’s got a UFO museum or a hospital for Cabbage Patch Kids, that can explain a lot. These places tell you what people in certain locales find worth preserving.

You’ll gain insight into what the local color thinks:

• Is funny

• Is sacred

• Is valuable enough to spend money on

And that can tell an extraordinary story.

Roadside Americana is more than folk art with a gift shop. It’s the “id” of a region—that primal unconscious part of us turned into a 3D representation. Funky and photographable.

I started seeking out these weird art installations the way some people seek out churches or famous tourist destinations. I made a mental list of every last one, adding to it each time I landed somewhere new. It became my framework for getting to know a culture.

Show me a city’s roadside attractions, and I’ll tell you something true about that place.

The Thing in the Desert

But the one that changed everything was THE THING.

This was before my flying days, when I still wasn’t sure who I wanted to be or where I wanted to live.

Maybe you’ve seen the signs if you’ve ever driven along Interstate 10.

They stretch from El Paso, Texas, to Tucson, Arizona, with just the words THE THING? painted in red or blue on a yellow billboard. This gets repeated like a mantra until you either pull off or die of curiosity. I had driven past these signs on several roadtrips, always too eager to reach my destination to stop.

The last time I drove back from Georgia to Phoenix, I made a decision.

I would stop.

I was in my mid-thirties. A mid-point serving me an invoice for so many deferred decisions. Like postponing motherhood. I had gone back to Georgia with the hope of reclaiming something. A sense of home, perhaps, or the version of myself I’d long left behind. In the end, the return didn’t work out. The Georgia red clay might have been stuck to my shoes again, but the feet in those shoes were attached to someone different. And those feet were pointed toward a destination I had discovered in Phoenix, Arizona.

When the signs for The Thing started to appear, I was ready to face them this time. I paid my two dollars and walked in. I followed the yellow footprints through the corrugated metal tunnels past the Model T and the Rolls Royce built for a maharajah, past the torture devices and the displays of dubious provenance, until I got to The Thing itself.

A mummified mother and child, encased in glass.

Real?

Fake?

Who knows?

Was that even the point?

The mother is curled around the child in a protective posture.

I stood there longer than I intended to. I was in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, having paid two dollars to see something that might be papier-mâché, and I was holding back tears.

I don’t know exactly what I thought I was grieving. The version of my life I hadn’t gotten to live yet. The sense that time was doing something irreversible while I drove back and forth across the country, looking for my place to belong.

The Thing didn’t give me any answers. Instead, it had me questioning everything. Why this macabre tableau of a mother and child? And why now?

Once back in Phoenix, I became a flight attendant, met my husband, and had my daughter at forty.

I don’t think The Thing was the cause of those decisions. I’m into mysticism, but not from roadside mummies. But I do think about how many times I had driven past the exit, too busy and too certain of my destination to stop.

There is mystery in the road not taken, isn’t there?

Exploring Today

Those past experiences as a single woman inspired me to share Roadside Americana with my family today.

When we go, we don’t hesitate to check out the most unusual and unlikely spots to stop for a break. We’ve taken Aurora to the EXPEDITION: BIGFOOT! The Sasquatch Museum in Cherry Log, Georgia. She acquired her favorite stuffed animal, a green alien, at the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. She’s been to Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, to see everything Elvis. We’ve stopped at the Lodge in Wakulla Springs, Florida, to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

What I’m trying to teach her with these trips is harder to pinpoint than any lesson in a curriculum. Sure, it’s geography, history, and mythology. But it’s also something unnamed. It’s the awareness that the world is more visceral and alive than it seems when you blaze through it at 70 MPH on the highway and never slow down to really look.

It’s taking the time to see things.

To pay attention to the odd and unusual just for the heck of it.

The roadside was always a curriculum. I just had to get lost enough to notice.

Roadside Attraction List

Here are some of the roadside attractions we’ve explored:

• The Thing — Benson, AZ

• International UFO Museum — Roswell, NM

• BabyLand General Hospital — Cleveland, GA

• Unclaimed Baggage Center — Scottsboro, AL

• Biosphere 2 — Oracle, AZ

• Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch — Picacho, AZ

• Bird Cage Theater Museum & OK Corral — Tombstone, AZ

• Rock City — Lookout Mountain, GA

• Expedition Bigfoot, the Sasquatch Museum — Cherry Log, GA

• Mermaids of Weeki Wachee — Weeki Wachee, FL

• Fountain of Youth — Saint Augustine, FL

• National Museum of Funeral History — Houston, TX

• Santa Claus House and Giant Santa — North Pole, AK

• Crater of Diamonds — Murfreesboro, AR

• The Big Chicken — Marietta, GA

• Fort Raleigh (The Lost Colony) — Manteo, NC

• The Lodge at Wakulla Springs — Crawfordville, FL

• The Winchester Mystery House — San Jose, CA

• The Hoover Dam Statues — Boulder City, NV

• The Fremont Troll — Seattle, WA

Where are you traveling this summer?

I’d love to know if you are incorporating roadside attractions into your trip. And if so, what are these places teaching you and your children about travel, history, and mythology? What are you noticing?

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Starting next week, we’ll take a closer look at specific roadside attractions, and I’ll detail how I use them to teach about an area and its history.

First up: Ponce De Leon’s The Fountain of Youth

Summer family vacations and fun in the sun.

Unless you’re a homeschooler who evaluates the beach as a learning environment. If so, there may be a lot to consider.

When I was on the verge of having my daughter, I wasn’t even thinking about homeschooling. I was a flight attendant and met my husband at an “older” age. He called me a vampire because I mostly flew red-eyes, which fit my fair skin and red hair. I had a miscarriage while flying, and I processed my trauma by writing about it. Between the miscarriage and getting pregnant with my daughter, my doctors ran several tests and a food allergy panel to prevent a repeat miscarriage

My husband thought it was hilarious that my test results revealed I was low in Vitamin D and slightly allergic to garlic. He wasn’t making fun of my health; he now had proof to back up his vampire theories—our running family joke.

How Sensitivity Affects Learning

The truth is, I’ve been an odd bird since childhood.

Strongly sensitive to everything around me, including the natural world, I learned to do things my own way, not to stand out, but to survive.

As a child, I’d opt for black-and-white Hollywood movies instead of cartoons, and I’d do DIY arts-and-crafts projects instead of playing outdoors. I longed for individual artistic expressions over team sports. Preferring to have one or two close friends rather than joining the crowd.

I still require a lot of downtime to recoup my energy. I can’t write in noisy coffee shops like my husband. I am also careful to pack supplements that support me when traveling.

So why wouldn’t I homeschool?

It certainly fit my lifelong need to do things my own way.

Exploring the beach is no exception.

When you say “beach” to me, I’m inclined to envision Bette Davis and Joann Crawford in that last scene from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? rather than a fun family trip.

Here are some pictures of my daughter and me recreating that classic movie in one of our mother-daughter Halloween photo shoots.

Yes, by many people’s standards, I’m weird.

But what makes me weird also helps me evaluate education in ways other people miss. As a teacher, I was always aware of the more sensitive kids in each of my classes. I wanted to ensure they weren’t left out and that their perspectives were seen and heard. So, I’m embracing my weird and taking a closer look at a popular homeschooling trend called beach school.

What is Beach School?

One of my daughter’s closest friends let us know she wouldn’t be able to attend a friend’s birthday party because they were headed to beach school. Honestly, when she said “beach school,” I thought they were taking a trip to visit family on the coast. Turns out she had enrolled her daughter in an official program that explored beach, marsh, and ocean ecology.

Pretty cool, right?

As chance would have it, we were headed to the coast the same week. But as someone who needs my husband to build an umbrella-covered nest for me on the sand to keep me from roasting, it made me think about how “beach school” might mean different things to different homeschoolers.

While I haven’t caught fire here yet, there are some considerations I have to take into account on a beach vacation. Both physically and educationally. When I think about ways to teach my daughter, I consider how she’ll best learn and also how I learned as a child.

My friend’s daughter sat at outdoor picnic tables and listened to parent-led instruction on marine foundational knowledge. They followed up these lessons with hands-on explorations of the coastal region’s animals and environment. Many children will find that learning on the beach is a viable way to absorb and retain information.

That style of learning would’ve never worked for me as a child, and unfortunately, I don’t think it’d work for my daughter, either.

I would have been overly concerned about sweating too much, the sand sticking to me, the sun being in my eyes, and the heat. I would’ve been worried that I was too pale, and the other kids would think I was weird. Or I would have braved the summer sun so as not to draw attention to myself, only to end up burnt to a crisp.

The cognitive load of my physical environment would have been overwhelming, shutting down any additional learning.

My daughter, on the other hand, who tans like her daddy, would have no trouble with the physical aspects of the beach, but the social ones could prevent her from learning. She’d be chatting nonstop, making friends with every kid she encountered, while missing all the key facts on ecology.

To her, beach school would be all about finding her new best friend.

Maybe you have an overly sensitive student who isn’t amped to learn among 20 of their peers on the shore. Or perhaps you have one who is so enthusiastic she wants to meet everyone!

While we never planned for an actual beach school, we turned our family vacation into an educational expedition you can re-create in your own way.

We live in Atlanta, and one of the fun parts about moving back to this side of the country is that my daughter can now connect with my husband’s cousins—ones she rarely saw when we lived in Arizona. The great part of homeschooling is that we’re able to pack up in late September and get to the coast when it’s far less crowded and much less expensive.

History’s Mystery

I made it clear that I wanted to include educational aspects in our trip.

I wouldn’t budge on visiting The Lost Colony, even though it was a few hours away. If you don’t know, North Carolina is home to Roanoke Island, and it’s a significant part of early American history. We learned about this settlement in the Early Explorers and Settlers unit from Core Knowledge’s 1st-grade history lessons.

A ship called Elizabeth II set sail from England in the 16^th century to seek out the “New World”. They were also competing with the Spanish, who had landed in the Americas. The ship hit the shore in 1585. A few years later, the first child from England, Virginia Dare, was born in North America. Many of the colonists traveled back to England expecting to return in a few months. Their return was held up for nearly three years, and when they returned to Roanoke Island, the colony was gone.

YES, the whole colony disappeared!

The only thing left was the word CROATOAN carved into a tree.

It’s one of history’s mysteries that hasn’t been solved to this day.

If you go to Roanoke Island Festival Park, prepare to sweat even in September as you venture into the Settlement site, where you’ll find blacksmiths fashioning nails and a traditional woodworker carving posts. Then you can step aboard a real ship—a recreation of the Elizabeth II. Fortunately, there’s only so much to explore outside before returning to the air-conditioned museum, where you’ll find a real CSI case that investigates the potential reasons the colony disappeared.

The case explores three possibilities:

• Were they killed?

• Did they move to another area?

• Did they merge with a local Native American tribe?

I have my own beliefs about what happened to that colony after looking at all the evidence, but I won’t spoil it for you. If this is a mystery you’d like to investigate, check out this video from In Search Of and decide what you think happened to The Lost Colony.

We also stumbled upon The Lost Colony Visitor’s Center late in the day, and I was shocked at how well-maintained it is. It featured an Elizabethan room with ornate 16th-century wood paneling, and a silhouette show of characters who tell the story of the Lost Colony. There are also pristinely manicured Elizabethan Gardens to explore.

I was surprised to learn that Roanoke Island was home to a Freedmen’s Colony during the Civil War. There’s even a historic landmark to the Underground Railroad.

Seeking Sea Life

Later that afternoon, we visited the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island in Dare County. I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect much from a small, local aquarium after having visited both the Georgia and Phoenix aquariums.

I should have known better than to dismiss it.

What’s fascinating about coastal aquariums is that they are committed to conserving local ecosystems. Sure, we were able to see otters playfully wrestling each other and an albino alligator, ready for his close-up!

But we also got a big surprise when we tiptoed into a quiet area we thought was closed. It turned out to be a sea turtle rescue and rehabilitation center open to everyone.

When we spotted all the turtle pods, I assumed we’d see more ocean animals on display. What I didn’t expect was that we’d be eye to eye with a sea turtle who was rescued from Columbia, North Carolina, only 2 hours before! A sweet high schooler who was interning at the aquarium explained to us that only 1 in 100 sea turtle eggs survive, and only 1 in 1,000 make it to adulthood. These poor sea turtles can get caught in fishing nets, hit by boats, infected, and suffer a whole host of other ailments and injuries that keep them from living their best lives in the tranquil sea.

This Aquarium also has one of the coolest learning setups for teaching kids about sea turtle rehabilitation.

Children walk into a room and choose their sea turtle (plastic, of course). You bring him over to the diagnostic station, where a computer analyzes him and lets you know what injury or ailment your sea turtle has.

You’re then instructed to take your green guy over to the rehabilitation station. This is where my daughter was able to spray him with disinfectant, wrap him in a blanket, and put honey on his shell to help him heal. Once he had been treated, our turtle was placed in a recovery pool for a specific amount of time—1 second was equivalent to 1 month of recovery —before being released back into the ocean. (Back into the bin he went for other children to diagnose and treat him).

This sea turtle rescue room was so hands-on that we couldn’t get my daughter to leave, so my husband found an aquarium worker to ask about local summer camp programs. My daughter has been saying she wants to be a doctor, and this marine rehabilitation center was the perfect place for her to try out her healing skills.

That’s when I remembered that The Good and the Beautiful offers a free Marine Biology curriculum for download. While their math and reading curricula aren’t my first pick, I love that they make some of their more specific content available for free to homeschooling families. Now, I’m considering looking into these lessons when we get back to dry land.

And that’s the beauty of homeschool.

The official beach school program that my friend and her daughter participated in was a perfect fit for their interest and learning styles.

For us, going to the beach and staying open to possibilities was where the magic happened!

We were able to follow up on history lessons we’d already read about, like the Core Knowledge lesson on The Lost Colony. And we’re now eager to investigate new marine biology lessons when we get home.

For us, cementing foundational learning at home and then exploring the real-world applications is our best bet for learning and retaining information.

If you have multiple children, each one may learn differently.

But whether you:

• Enroll your children in a bona fide beach program

• Learn at home and then seek out real-world coastal experiences

• Go on a beach vacation and follow up with relevant educational resources

The takeaway is:

As luck would have it, or rather because of my vampire skin, I hung out on the beach with my daughter and husband for only an hour before returning to our condo to write.

While I was gone, my daughter befriended a little girl on the beach because, of course, she did. These two got a learning adventure they hadn’t bargained for. A jellyfish had washed up on the shore. My daughter and her new best friend, along with my husband and the new friend’s family, huddled around to scrutinize the sea creature. Someone looked up the specifics of this particular jellyfish. The group eventually determined that the jellyfish needed to be buried away from the shoreline.

A call back to my husband’s cousin, as we were leaving town, confirmed that jellyfish washing up on the shore are harbingers of storms to come.

Just as we were leaving town, we learned the coast was getting hammered with heavy rains. Two hurricanes, Imelda and Humberto, were making their way towards the beach.

Yep, that’s how we completed our week of beach school.

As we rode away from the storms, I started thinking about how we must investigate this crazy coastal weather phenomenon of double hurricanes.

We clearly created our own version of beach school, and it’s not over yet.

Would official or unofficial beach school work for your family?

How do you incorporate real-world experiences into your homeschool?

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