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Highway Summer ’25, We Hardly Knew Ye
September 1, 2025
Another summer vacation season draws to a close for millions of offbeat attraction lovers. Seemed quick. Did Time’s foot fall asleep on the acceleration pedal?
We’re several mutations past losing whole seasons to the COVID era (when communities fashioned N95 masks for giant statues or sent home at-risk docents). America’s nutty policies and politics supposedly thwart some overseas visitors. Road snacks are expensive, gas fluctuates (the kind in your car, not your intestines), EV charge stations slowly spread, like an itchy butt rash.
In many ways, 2025 feels like a Rebuilding Year. The towns along U.S. Route 66 — anticipating 100th anniversary surges in 2026 — are on a frenzied tear to refurbish old places, fix neon signs, build more sights celebrating Route 66, and stock plenty of Mother Road merchandise. Warmer Rt. 66 states expect child-free pilgrims to continue this fall.
Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, preeminent collection of anatomical specimens, announced plans after years of debate to “de-anonymize” body parts by IDing donors by name. Henrietta Lacks probably deserves some credit; her immortal “HeLa” cells were used anonymously for decades of cancer research without her permission. Lacks’ statues, belatedly, now stand in South Boston, MA and Roanoke, VA (replacing a vanquished Robert E. Lee monument in the same spot).
Meanwhile, back at the Mütter Museum, we finally know the full name of the original owner of the Mega-Colon.
The Evil Knievel Museum, formerly in Topeka, Kansas, claims it will reopen in Las Vegas by the end of the year.
Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum has been packed up and plans to reopen soon in a more spacious location in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Trump tariffs had the Historical Rubber Duck Museum threatening to move to Canada this summer, but tempers appear to have cooled, bathwater has warmed, and the ducks are still in the USA.
The replica Space Shuttle formerly at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was bought and moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota. Then the buyer went bankrupt and the Shuttle currently sits, disassembled, in a Minnesota warehouse.
The World’s Largest Statue of the Beatles, built by the recently deceased David Adickes (he was still sculpting at 98), is on the move to a car dealership in Texas.
Two “Big John” statues should be back from the repair shop by year’s end: a former grocery clerk destroyed in a 2024 hurricane in Cape Coral, Florida; and an Indian giant that collapsed in Kingsport, Tennessee, being prepared for a new life as a mini-golf mascot.
And, believe it or not, the forever-delayed RoboCop Statue (for 14 years now) is said to finally — no, really, finally — be unveiled in Detroit by the end of the year
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