My family and I often joke that we have spent more time together in the car than we have in any one single house.
Between moving to new houses for my dad’s job in the military and driving to visit family, road trips were a huge part of my growing up.
I’ve been on so many long car rides with my dad and brother that all the memories start to blur together, but we recently started reminiscing about some of the memories made on the stops during those road trips.
Most small towns don’t have much that can entice you to add to your ETA (aside from a Love’s truck stop, which my family is very allegiant to for bathroom breaks) but every once in a while somewhere will grab your attention.
Ashburn, Georgia is one of those towns.
While we unfortunately never drove through during our time living in the peach state, we definitely would have if we spotted “The Big Peanut.”
The town recently rebuilt the 5,000-pound, 40-foot monument after it was destroyed in 2018 by Hurricane Michael.
The local chamber of commerce raised almost $80,000 to replace the giant brick pillar, on top of which sits a peanut and a crown crafted from sheet metal to honor Georgia’s peanut belt.
Hopefully the reconstruction of The Big Peanut will carve a path for the “Big Peach” in Byron, Georgia.
Luckily, my family had the opportunity to see the giant peach before it was similarly toppled by a storm in 2011.
It’s sad to see that it’s no longer standing but it was quite a feat to last all those years after its construction in 1987, especially considering the Big Peach was perched atop a very thin pole.
Alas, you can still make a stop at the Big Peach Antiques Mall that the fruit statue used to advertise.
The Big Peanut and the Big Peach pay homage to Georgia’s agricultural staples, while just a few states over in Texas, their roadside attractions seem to embody the entire culture of the state.
The Big Texan Steak Ranch is impossible to ignore from the freeway thanks to the bright yellow building, huge steer statue and super tall cartoon cowboy sign.
The roadside restaurant in Amarillo, Texas was named one of the south’s most iconic steakhouses, largely because of the famed “free” 72-ounce steak.
The only stipulation – as you might have guessed – is that you must finish the meal, including the steak, shrimp cocktail, baked potato, salad and roll with butter, within one hour or your tab will run $72.
Thankfully, neither my dad or brother had the audacity to try the challenge, so we just stopped at the gift shop and took some photos of the landmark.
We did, however, take a detour in Kentucky to have a meal at the original Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Corbin.
Also known as Sanders Café, the first KFC is still a functioning restaurant that has also been preserved as a museum.
I remember sitting on the old wooden bench with a statue of Colonel Sanders posed with his arm around my brother and I, and, of course, chowing down on the tastiest mid-trip meal.
To this day, my dad says it is the best fried chicken he has ever eaten.
My family hasn’t been on too many road trips recently but we do have one more pit stop on our list: Casey, Illinois.
The entire town is basically a cute roadside attraction, as it is home to 12 of the world’s largest things, ranging from a pitchfork to a barber shop pole, and lots of other “big things” that don’t quite hold the record.
A lot of the big things coordinate with shops in town, like the huge knitting needle and crochet hook in a yarn shop or the jumbo piggy bank outside the local butcher shop.
There are plenty of photo-ops, too – you can pose inside a giant mousetrap or even take a ride on the world’s largest teeter totter, which is 82 feet long.
I’m not sure when we’ll all be able to get together to drive through Illinois but when we do, we’ll be sure to send a postcard from the world’s largest mailbox to document our latest pit stop.
-Kayleen Petrovia is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.