The first stop on our cross-country tour of secret America is the mighty Integratron! Built in the Sonoran Desert of California in the 1950s by UFO contactee George Van Tassel, the Integratron is a 38-foot tall cupola designed in accordance with the instructions of flying saucer pilots from Venus. According to Van Tassel, the Integratron rejuvenates cells and functions as a time machine too. Cool!

Van Tassel is long dead (or maybe living happily on Venus) but you can still visit the Integratron. Now it’s used to give people “sound baths” that do something to your chakras (whatever they are) and maybe, just maybe, dislocate you in time.

Oregon’s Enchanted Forest is my favorite place on earth. It’s difficult to describe the otherworldly vibe of this kiddie amusement park located in the middle of an old growth forest—you really have to experience it. But the Enchanted Forest feels as if it’s been dislocated in time: Here, it’s somehow still 1971, the year park opened. Instead of the dreary trappings of 2022 America, it’s filled with colorful, concrete, semi-amateur depictions of fairy tales, manmade caves, weird little houses, animatronic statues, and one-of-kind roller coasters and dark rides. The employees are super friendly, and it’s maintained just well enough to not be skeevy, but not so well that it takes on a sterile aesthetic—it feels lived in. The Enchanted Forest is like Disneyland if it had soul, and was built by a lunatic.

History books and “traditional” museums don’t do justice to our vibrant, chaotic, and often disturbing national character, so we’re stopping at the Miracle of America Museum in Polson Montana to get in touch with the real America, where there’s a ton of everything and none of it makes sense. Inspired by a visit to the Berlin Wall in the 1960s, former farmer Gil Mangels acquired this one-of-kind collection. His huge complex of more than 40 buildings is packed to the rafters with a bewildering assemblage of over 300,000 artifacts, including a real Vietnam era bomber plane, classic cars, tons of military gear, anonymous industrial equipment, dozens of tractor seats and pipe fittings, and anything else you could think of, provided it was made before 1960 or so. If nothing else, this museum will inspire you to declutter your house.

A side-trip from Montana to Alaska might seem a little excessive, but not when the destination is the Hammer Museum. Unlike Los Angeles’ lying-ass Hammer Museum, it’s not full of art; Alaska’s Hammer museum is full of hammers—big hammers, little hammers, other hammers, they’re all yours to behold at the Hammer Museum. Far from just a tool to drive nails into wood, hammers can also be used to smash things, tenderize meat, make judges feel like big-shots, and be lost in your garage. This museum will leave you saying, “There sure are a lot of hammers here.”

To offset the Hammer Museum’s theme of man-building-things, our next stop is the Titan Missile Museum in Tucson, where man’s will to destroy reaches its logical conclusion. There’s nothing better on a roadtrip than a reminder that the entire earth is poised on the brink of nuclear annihilation, so travel deep inside this decommissioned missile silo that once housed a 9-megaton nuclear warhead and the Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver it anywhere on the planet. Live the thrilling lives of the crew in their underground bunkers, who manned their control stations 24/7, waiting for the order to end human existence. That’s my idea of vacation fun!

The America West is dotted with ghost towns, eerie remnants of cowboy era hamlets that now serve as haunted monuments to the toil and misery of the American frontier. But this is not one of them. The Buffalo Ridge Ghost Town was built in the 1960s as a simulacra of cowboy days and is populated only by robots. As an added bonus, most of these ad-hoc automatons don’t work correctly and are slowly decaying, providing visitors with a unique mixture of historical inaccuracy and existential dread. The cowboy “choir” singing along to a warped tape is particularly unsettling. This dollar-store Westworld is the kind of place that probably won’t be open too much longer, so see it today before it collapses into dust or the robots gain sentience and kill us all.

Cawker City, Kansas is home to the world’s largest ball of twine. Most of the businesses in this tiny town sport some kind of twine-related totem. Every year, local residents hold an esoteric, occult ritual they call the “twine-a-thon” where more twine is added to the ball.

But why? The Twine Ball is already over 10 feet tall, weighs more than 9 tons, and has its own gazebo. How much more can it demand of Cawker City’s residents? Will the gigantic sphere’s hunger for growth ever be satiated?

Don’t take this the wrong way, but your great grandparents were really fucking weird. Back in the early part of the 20th century, over five million Americans were members of fraternal lodges and secret societies that ran the gamut from horrifying racist nightmare squads like the KKK to the Ancient and Honorable Order of Turtles, whose mission was to get drunk. Many of these fraternal lodges required elaborate, sadistic initiation rituals for new members, and the DeMoulin Co, in Greenville, Illinois was happy to supply the props and costumes needed to torment recruits. These included trick guillotines, collapsing chairs, and an alarming number of implements meant to electrocute people. All of these and more are on display at the Initiation Pranks Museum at DeMoulin’s corporate headquarters. Do not miss this chance to look at the relics of this forgotten aspect of pop cultural history and revel in your ancestor’s oddly kinky nocturnal interests.

You might not think a tour of a state’s treasury office would be very interesting, and you’d be mostly right. But the Arkansas constitution, drafted in 1890, directs the state to hold at least $250,000 in cash in its vault, and it requires Arkansas to let any citizen check to make sure the money is actually there, physically, in cash. So you can go down to the Arkansas treasury office and demand that they show you that the state comptroller hasn’t blown the tax money on hookers and highway improvements. They’ll open the heavy vault door and let you hold $500,000 in $100 bills in your hands and have your picture taken, just like millionaires do. This is the most interesting thing you can do in the entire state of Arkansas.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, is one of the most notorious prisons in U.S history. It has a gift shop. The stark penal colony at the end of a desolate 20 mile stretch of road currently holds over 6,000 people. Sadly, you can’t watch them eat and fight; you can, however, visit the museum and check out prison relics like “Gruesome Gertie,” the Louisiana state electric chair that killed 87 men and women before being decommissioned in 1991.

Times have changed of course, and the museum takes pains to remind visitors that Louisiana’s State Pen is no longer a heartless institution in which prisoners are exploited and abused. But if you stop by Angola on a Sunday in October, you can check out the prison’s annual rodeo, in which unprepared and inexperienced convicts try to ride 2,000 pound bulls. It’s only $5 a ticket.

If you’re embarrassed by your all-too-human desire to gawk at atrocities and anomalies, perhaps you’d enjoy Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s collection of medical abnormalities is housed in a stately, sober environ that feel more like a 19th century academic institution than a carnival freak show tent, but rest assured, the place is crammed with freaks and freakiness. Among its huge collection of medical esoteria is the thorax of John Wilkes Boothe, the “Hyrtl Skull Collection,” a “large collection of conjoined fetal specimens” (including the liver of the original “Siamese twins,” Chang and Eng), thousands of objects that people swallowed, and the amazing 9-foot long “megacolon.”

To the Mütter’s credit, the place does not shy away from or apologize for the “would you look at this 74-pound ovarian cyst!” appeal of its strange exhibits. It leans into the macabre instead—its YouTube channel is awesome and active, and you can buy a plushie of the megacolon—and in so doing uses morbid curiosity to educate. As its website exhorts us: “Become disturbingly informed.”