Tag: america

World’s Biggest Pheasant

We needed to make up some millage so we spend a whole day speeding through South Dakota, stopping for a breather at a town called Huron – which proudly boasts as being the home to the world’s largest pheasant. As far as we know there’s no real story behind why it’s there other than shooting pheasants to death seems to be very popular in that area. There is however a legend:

Once there was a giant ring-neck pheasant whom all the hunters wanted to claim as a trophy. One day a young boy happened upon the Giant Pheasant and, because of its magnificent beauty, spared the bird’s life. In exchange, the pheasant promised to remain always at that spot, until every person in the world has seen the World’s Largest Pheasant and his [smaller] offspring.

We’ve been pulled over by the cops twice today, once for some odd rule us foreigners didn’t know about, and once because we were speeding, although we were not, it’s more likely because we had out of town plates. This really is middle America folks.

The Biggest Ball of Twine (kinda)

OK, we had to see it, it’s the Biggest Ball of Twine, well not really, the biggest one is somewhere else and is a tiny bit bigger, but that one was rolled by any passing joe, the ball we visited (in Darwin, Minnesota) was all rolled by one person, a guy called Francis Johnson, so it’s really the only one that counts. Unfortunately Francis is long dead, and there was no-one there to give us the tour so our visit was a bit fleeting, seeing as we were about 300 miles behind schedule. I’m pretty sure we covered all angles, I mean it’s just a large ball in a gazebo, what else is there to say?

(of course this is twine we’re talking about here, and not string, that a whole other deal, obviousley).

Meeting Dr. Evermore

Today we visited Dr. Evermore and Lady Eleanor and had a tour of the Doctor’s massive machine; The Forevertron, which (once complete) will blast him into space in a glass egg within a copper frame to live forever on a beam of light. There are many other machines and characters to help him on his way such as the Gravitron which will remove all the water and excess weight from his body, as well as a viewing platform for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to view the launch and a huge band of birds to play a tune during the fantastical celebrations on the day.

Dr. Evermore is actually Tom Every, Lady Eleanor is his ex-wife (Eleanor), and the Forevertron is part of Tom’s huge sculpture garden full of steam-punk scrap metal sculptures all involved in the fantasy story Tom has created around Dr.Evermore’s journey into space. He’s been building it for 25 years and it really is pretty damn huge and pretty amazing to wander around. Tom and Eleanor spoke to us for 4 hours, bought us drinks, gave us a door knob, a signed book, dvd and two letters we’re waiting for an appropriate time to open. It was hard to leave the place but we had 5 hours to drive today as we are running a little behind today.

During this five hour drive we came up with a new idea for a title for this thing, what do you guys think of ‘The World’s Greatest Documentary (What We’ve Made)’? Answers in the comments below please.

Some hiccups

Z1 buggered

Thought I’d mention today about some of the obstacles the lord has chosen to fling in our path. The glorious image above is a screen grab from our camera. As you can tell, it’s poorly. The trippy effect seemed to come and go in a seemingly random fashion. We tried keeping it at a constant temperature, and it seemed to help it. Until it finally just decided to not turn on at all and go play with all the top loading VHS decks in the big Dixons in the sky. We have since bought a standby camera. It’s a top of the line consumer camera from Sony. Shockingly good picture, and we’ve made a Frankenstein converter for our pro mic. What else has gone wrong… ah yes, after searching behind a wrecker’s yard and an army ammo factory and opening up various chained gates labelled “DO NOT TRESPASS” we found Dr Evermore’s Forevertron. Only to discover it was chained up (with padlocks) and no sign of the good Doctor. It’s not all bad though. We’ve rearranged to meet Dr Evermore this morning and spent yesterday getting the crapped knocked out of us on terribly built huge roller coasters, and bombing around the Wisconsin Dells in a huge jet boat.

The scary and the fun

Ella\'s Deli

Found ourselves in a scary place deep in Indiana. The image above, left is taken from inside a tomb in the grounds of a Carmelite Monastery. They happened to be having some kind of big to do, and the place was full of Polish people chanting and generally being scary. These were not our people. THEN we found ourselves in Ella’s Deli in Wisconsin (above, right). An amazing place full of animatronic toys and stuff having from the ceiling and embedded in our table. The food was giant, as was the welcome from Ken and Katie who we chatted to for ages about the amazing place.

Painting into History

Today we met Mike Carmichael and his wife Glenda at their home in Alexandria, Indiana. Mike has been painting a baseball for the last 30 years, it is now the biggest ball of paint in the world with 21,201 coats of paint, and we got to paint coat number 21,201! Each coat is a different colour from the last, we choose yellow, mike handed us the rollers and the rest is now history. We signed the ledger detailing when we painted the coat, and what colour, while Glenda prepared our official certificates. Then, to our surprise, Mike offered to take us all out for lunch, which we gleefully accepted. Mike and Glenda led us to a nice little local dinner and we had a slap up feed. Mike and Glenda were great, really friendly and generous – we left Mike to return to the ball and add another a few coats, that man knows a thing or two about dedication.

Meet Joe

Chateau Laroche
Here’s Joe. The Head Knight of the Knights of The Golden Trail. He runs the Chateau Laroche just outside Cincinnati in Loveland, Ohio. He inherited it from Harry Andrews when he died about 25 years ago. He and his knights keep the Chateau all ship shape and Bristol fashion for visitors to come and just hang out. The Knights are kinda like a grown up group of boy scouts, that have a frikkin castle to play in. Really nice bunch of chaps, and Joe was just super. We also stumbled over Kings Island and got horribly beaten up on some of the best coaster we’ve ever ridden.

Appetite for Distraction

Howdy folks, right now I’m sitting in a motel room somewhere in between West Virginia. We’ve begun our 3 week road trip across America to is talk to some of the people that build the roadside attractions that are dotted along the highways and freeways of this country. We filming and photographing the whole thing, and when I say ‘we’ I mean me, Jason, Richard Johnson and the Boob.

We’re at day 3 right now, we landed in New York 3 days ago, we stayed the night, picked up the hire car and got the hell out of there.

We drove 130 miles down to Margate, New Jersey to visit Lucy the Elephant (America’s oldest roadside attraction). We spoke to Richard who runs the show down there and a very nice and knowledgeable chap was he. Then Sarah (also knowledgeable, also nice) took us on a tour of Lucy’s innards, which are surprisingly spacious for an Elephant. The chats went really well and we took some pretty video.We then drove another 220 miles to Haggerstown (which is a lot like an American version of Strood) and checked into a hotel for the night. Johnson got a bit frisky with the Boob during the night, Boob is still trying to catch up on the lost sleep.

Today we drove another 200 miles see Mark Cline in Virginia and have him show us around some of his attractions; Foam Henge, Dinosaur Kingdom and Professor Kline’s Monster Museum. He’s a really nice guy (yeah, another nice person, a theme may be developing) and also pretty amazing. He’s made so much stuff over the years it’s tricky to work out where he gets the time, even if he does do it full time. He just wants to entertain people and make them happy, not a bad way to make a living. Foam Henge is a life size replica of the stone original, Dinosaur Kingdom is a sprawling adventure through the woods where giant dinosaurs attack fighters from the civil war, and the Monster Museum is a full on walk through haunted house kinda deal that’s probably one of the best I’ve been in. Mark has invited us to visit his work shop tomorrow morning, and then we’re off to see how far we can drive towards Ohio for our next stop.

Have a Nice Day & These Fair Isles

 

A friend commissioned us to produce 2 collections of photography for his stock library. ‘Have a Nice Day’ depicts Americana as seen around California and Nevada. ‘These Fair Isles’ are shots from around England, mainly at sea side towns with the odd power station thrown in for good measure.