Lucy stands stall in front of an 80 foot tall Van Gogh replica.

On our recent road trip, I was introduced to my wife’s tradition of looking for roadside attractions along the way. Thanks to Roadside America, we had a wide variety of things to see that could break the monotony of the drive.

Fifi in four states at once

Some of the attractions had historical value, like Custer’s Last Stand: Little Big Horn (Crow Agency, Montana), Four Corners Monument (near Shiprock, New Mexico), and Billy the Kid’s grave (Fort Sumner, New Mexico). A few we would have done even if we hadn’t found them on Roadside America, like the Seattle Underground Tour (Seattle, Washington). The Berkeley Pit Overlook (Butte, Montana), a former pit mine now holding a toxic lake, was a surprising but informative stop. Even the Statue of Victim of Sewage Tank Collapse (Spokane, Washington) taught us a bit of local history.

Yep, it looks like a milk bottle

A few of the attractions only merited a glance out the window as we drove by, like the Plumber Guy (Moab, Utah), the Church of God-Zilla, Zilla, Washington, the Milk Bottle Building, (Spokane, Washington), the Center of the Universe (Wallace, Idaho), and Our Lady of the Rockies (Butte, Montana).

There were inevitably a few disappointments. We were unable to get our car to roll uphill on Gravity Hill (Salt Lake City, Utah). Excitement built up to a crescendo as we approached the Wonder Tower (Genoa, Colorado), but it was closed indefinitely by the time we arrived.

A house carved into a mountain

Other worthwhile distractions on trip were the World’s Longest Aerial Tramway – really more than just a roadside attraction (Albuquerque, New Mexico), Hole N’ The Rock (Moab, Utah), Spider VW Bug (Lexington, Oklahoma), Teapot Dome Gas Station (Zilla, Washington), Dick and Jane’s Spot (Ellensburg, Washington), Fremont Troll (Seattle, Washington), World’s Largest Easel (Goodland, Kansas), Glenn Goode’s Big People (Gainesville, Texas).

My lovely wife even submitted one of the attractions to Roadside America – Danger: Falling Cows (Manson, Washington).  But there was one roadside attraction that clearly stood out as her favorite. Which one? The World’s Largest Ball of Twine (Cawker City, Kansas). Now we’ve been there, done that.

That’s one big ball of twine

Whether staying in a hotel or a house, one of the first necessities to take care of is figuring out how to get wi-fi access. It can be as important as the bed and the shower.

I have to admit that I don’t have a smart phone with cellular data. I carried a Blackberry for a previous employer that was nice to have for simple tasks, especially when there was no wi-fi nearby, and I’m having fun now with a borrowed iPad with cellular data. But that’s not good enough when I’m trying to move a lot of data, or in situations like I’m in now, where the house I’m staying in is nestled between hills that completely block all cell signals.

Internet access at a hotel can be an adventure. Often it seems that so many people are sharing the high-speed connection that it’s not high speed for anyone. I’ve done some software testing using such terrible hotel networks that I reproduced bugs there that I never saw anywhere else. At least at a hotel, I can easily ask at the front desk or look for instructions in the room for how to get connected. When I’m staying at someone’s house, the situation can be more delicate.

When I arrange to stay at the house of a friend or family member, I don’t generally ask in advance about Internet access. It seems impolite, when I’m getting free accommodation and maybe even free meals, to expect to use their Internet connection, too. My hosts rarely volunteer the details about their wi-fi network, which usually requires a password. But it would hardly affect them at all to share a few megabytes with me, would it? Often it wouldn’t, but where I’m at now, they say they’re nearing their monthly quota of data on their satellite Internet service, and they risk getting their bandwidth throttled if they exceed the quota, so the wi-fi is turned off most of the time.

I’m reminded of the time I had house guests from Denmark. They were keen to get Internet access to be in touch with home. For some reason, I needed to move my Uverse router, and when I plugged it back in, I didn’t get it right. We were unplugged from the Internet for a few days, which must have been an annoyance to them, though they didn’t complain. I felt I had failed as a host.

So you’ll see this post the next time we go on an excursion beyond the hills. Meanwhile, I’m learning that I can survive with only a land line phone to connect me to the outside world.

What do you think – should house guests expect their hosts to share their Internet service, and fork over the password as part of showing where the bedroom and bathroom are?

Finding overnight accommodations for more than four people has been a challenge. A majority of hotel rooms have one or two beds, accommodating up to four people if two people are willing to share each bed.

To accommodate more than four people, the option that hotels seem to prefer is for you to get multiple rooms. This presents numerous problems. Of course, this is much more expensive. It would be nice to have adjoining rooms with a door you can open between them. It seems that adjoining rooms are getting more difficult to find, especially on-line. So there’s a good chance that two rooms would only be connected by a hallway, and if the hotel is mostly full, your rooms might not even be all on the same floor. There is no way that I’ve seen to get a reservation that guarantees that multiple rooms will be near each other.

Hotels often require an adult to be in each room when there is a multiple room reservation. So a couple traveling with children would have to stay apart from each other, and a single adult traveling with several children would not have an option to use more than one room.

So assuming everyone is willing to share a bathroom (except for the rare case of a suite with more than one bathroom), I prefer to get everyone into one room. Online reservation systems do ask how many people are staying, but then might offer a room with only one bed for six people, without explaining whether there are sofa beds or cots available (and usually don’t explain the extra charges for additional bedding).

I have enjoyed using SixSuitCaseTravel to find information about hotels for larger groups. One concept you may find there is “room for 6, book for 5”, if you have small children you can fit two to a bed that the hotel says should only fit one person.

Can we open up additional viable hotel options online if we don’t indicate how people are really staying in the room? I don’t want to cheat the hotel if the prices are based on how many people are in the room. Maybe there are fire codes that are relevant to how many people are in a room? But I know there are cases where we find a room that would make my group happy but we have to get creative with the search parameters to find it.

What’s your experience with trip planning for a group of more than four?

We were taking a ferry from Seattle to the Kitsap Penninsula today. Toward the end of the ride, a lone man approached my wife and me to comment on the beautiful sunset. He seemed friendly, and we chatted for a while. He mentioned a job in telecommunications, and I said he looked more like the artist type to me. He was dressed in an eclectic jacket with big buttons, a V-neck shirt, and a necklace that looked like a claw of some sort. His hair was, well, big, and further exaggerated by the stiff wind. Sure enough, he’s a musician.

We talked about mandolin fingering and the bizarre string layout on ukuleles, and then one of the kids made a disparaging remark about my kazoos. Well, that led us down a path of kazobos, wazoos, and electric kazoo pickups. As we parted, I promised to send him information about the Kazoobie electric kazoo.

I was dressed plainly – jeans and a T-shirt. I was even giving my hiking boots a well-deserved rest for the day, and was wearing my sneakers. It’s hard to dress artistically when you have to pack light because of limited luggage room. So our new artist friend was pleasantly surprised after he first approached us to find us talking about kazoo lore and chickens on a road trip.

The thing that stuck with me was when he encouraged us to “talk to strangers”. It turns out that’s the name of his album. I have the feeling that’s a key part of his philosophy of life.

(The stranger’s name is Joe Abrams.)