Much like we did last year, my comrade Anne Stickney and I have turned the annual pilgrimage to BlizzCon into a week-long drive from the mountains of Colorado down to Anaheim, California. Unfortunately for me, my stretch of the journey begins in an airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I say unfortunately because a carnival of mechanical errors involving a leaky lavatory resulted in losing a full day of adventure. If you're interested in seeing those events play out, we've compiled a Storify log of my tweets during the experience. Be warned: it's full of colorful language and, at its conclusion, a NSFW geological formation, the sort of childish humor that can purge the weary soul.

The meat of the adventure, however, is the great American road trip. The roadsides of America are full of such utter wacky nonsense that if you have the opportunity to partake and pass on the chance, you're doing yourself a disservice. Follow along on this first leg of our journey as we explore Arches National Park, stumble across a busted van, and delve into the depths of a great big hole in a great big rock. The last two are far more interesting than they sound, I assure you.



Anne, Day 1

Our trip might have been delayed due to airline shenanigans, but it actually ended up working in our favor -- we suddenly had a lot more time to go see things in Utah than we had before. Because of that, I decided to drag Alex to the natural splendors of Arches National Park. If you've ever seen any sci-fi film, chances are you've seen shots from near and around this area of Utah -- the landscape is just bizarre enough to pass for alien scenery with little photo editing or touch ups needed. My parents used to take myself and my siblings on annual camping trips specifically to go traipse along the trails and check out all the scenery, but I hadn't been back there in years and years, so it was kind of cool to see it all again.

After we were done running around the scenic sands (but not on the living soil crust -- stick to the trails!), it was off to our real destination of the day, Hole in the Rock. I wasn't really sure what to expect from this place -- just south of Moab, it was listed as a highly-rated roadside attraction online, and it sounded just weird enough that we desperately needed to see what it was all about. It absolutely did not disappoint -- the second we pulled into the parking lot, I knew we'd found my version of road trip paradise.

So here's the story with Hole in the Rock -- it's literally a house that was built into a mountain. The home is a series of caverns that were carved out with various large and nasty-looking tools, and strategically placed sticks of dynamite. It's a fully functioning home, 5,000 square feet of underground, low ceiling, perfectly preserved housing including a fully functioning kitchen, bathroom, and a fireplace with a working 65 foot chimney carefully carved up through the mountain for proper ventilation. The place was built by Albert Christensen, who lived there with his wife Gladys until he passed away in 1957 -- Gladys passed away in 1974, and both of them are buried there. Also, Franklin D. Roosevelt's face is carved into the mountain. Albert liked him a lot, apparently.

Sadly, they don't allow you to take photos of the interior, but we took the grand tour and it was seriously weird -- the gift shop portion of the home used to be a diner, and the kitchen to the home was also the kitchen for the diner itself. The home didn't really have what you'd call proper rooms with doors, other than the bathroom and a room off the back that held Gladys' lapidary room in which she created jewelry to sell. However, apparently Albert liked to work on the home even while the diner was running -- hanging from the ceiling in the main portion of the home was a bell. We were told that he used to ring the bell to warn the diners that he was about to set off another stick of dynamite, and they should hold on to their plates or lose their dinner.

But that was only the start of this magical wonderland of roadside amazement. The grounds were littered with all kinds of cool statues, weird signage, enough old license plates and gas pumps to make the guys from American Pickers proud, and a zoo. Yes, a zoo. A small zoo, but a zoo with animals that wanted to be fed, and buckets of food to give to said greedy animals while you toured the place. I think my favorite was Jane Deer, who quietly followed us from one end of her enclosure to the other and daintily took every carrot I offered her -- although the giant pigs were a close second. One had a lovely squished face and giant tusks. His name is totally Grommash now.

We've holed up in St. George for the night, but tomorrow we're off to visit a haunted saloon and a little town called Goodsprings that might be familiar to those of you that play Fallout. And if I have any say in it, we're also going to visit a 104 year old fruitcake. Why? Because it's there. Which is pretty much the best reason to do anything!


Alex, Day 1

As a Wisconsin native, anything resembling a mountain is alien to me. It's a foreign concept. Even when standing at the foot of a mountain, gazing up at its dizzying heights, a base part of my brain insists that it's an illusion. Nothing natural is so big -- the land doesn't work that way. Land is flat. As such, I maintain the Arches National Park, and even the whole of Utah, is a fiction, despite being inside Utah as I write these words. Assuming it is real, however, it causes even my flat homeland to blow my mind. I'm no geologist, I have no idea what Wisconsin looked like back in the day, but every kid from Wisconsin was taught that glacial drift flattened the place like a pancake, enormous chunks of ice bulldozing the landscape. Looking at the mountains of Utah and Colorado, I can't help but wonder just how much ice would be necessary to flatten all of that out. Of course, Wisconsin didn't necessarily ever have mountains like that. I have no idea. Mountains are the elephant to my blind man.

In short: Mountains are weird, man. And sometimes, men do weird things with mountains. We spent our afternoon at a little place called Hole N" The Rock with its inexplicable dividing quotation mark in Moab, Utah. I'll leave the history of the place to Anne -- not because I'm uninterested, but because she got to writing her half of this article first and already did it. At some point, this couple's wild mountain house transformed into the ultimate tourist trap complete with two souvenir shops and a small zoo. The appeal of the zoo, the man behind the counter said, was that you get a bucket of snacks for the animals and you can feed them as you go. An exciting prospect -- who doesn't enjoy giving cute animals treats? -- but it's a little depressing to have deer, ostriches, and enormous-as-heck Ankole Watusi Longhorns chasing you across their enclosures, begging with wide eyes for another strip of carrot or an extra Cheerio. Were I less dour by nature, I might have been delighted. As it stands? Rather depressing. There's a bright side to everything, though. A Merlin-themed personality tester called me Mystical. Awesome.

Once we hit the road again, we popped open the Roadside America app, curious to find any other weirdness nearby. I glimpsed "Lightning McQueen and the Scooby Doo Van" on the attraction list. "That might be fun," I say to Anne, glancing out the window. "Wait. Is that it? Right there?"

Sure enough. I think the Mystery Machine has seen better days.

Tomorrow, we're going to see an old, moldy fruitcake. Anne makes it sound exciting. I'm skeptical. I'm far more interested in the 66-year-old slab of bacon. Luckily, they're in the same building.

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Filed under: Humor, BlizzCon