The World Wide Web Gives Virtual Travelers a Taste of the Wonderfully Weird

If you thought clicking your way to a cheap airline ticket could be complicated, try pointing your browser to Roadside America (https://www.roadsideamerica.com).

Created by a trio of “roadside geneticists,” this maze-like Web site is dedicated to unraveling “the massively complex code that comprises the tourism landscape.”

But unlike e-commerce sites that force would-be purchasers to navigate a thicket of airport codes and cryptic fare restrictions, Roadside America reminds us that there’s more to Internet travel than landing a good deal: an appreciation of the bizarre.

Originally published as a 1986 book chronicling offbeat, off-the-interstate attractions in the continental United States, Roadside America has morphed into a high-tech, highly interactive guide to such unheralded gems as the mounted head of the World’s Largest Dead Dog in Huntsville, Utah, and the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Ala.

Reader input is a major component of what Roadside America’s creators describe as their “ever metastasizing” database of more than 7,200 attractions. (In the site’s “updates on roadside favorites” section, one disappointed traveler noted last month that the Museum of the Fantastic in Sisters, Ore., “appears to be closed, if not vacant,” and that “it was with heavy heart we continued on our journey, without even a glimpse of Hitler’s stamp collection to brighten our day.”) But Roadside America doesn’t depend on the kindness of kooky strangers to keep the site fresh. Weekly dispatches provide such news-you-may-or-may-not-use as the recent South Dakota death of Wall Drug founder Ted Hustead and a current exhibition of black velvet paintings in Huntington Beach, Calif.

Navigating this voluminous collection of kitsch can be both bewildering and exhilarating. Organized, pocket-protector types can always do a state-by-state search on the Electric Map, but Roadside America offers to take over the wheel via a trio of “hypertours.” The dawn-to-dusk excursions--seven days from Los Angeles to New York, six days from New York to San Francisco, and six days from Seattle to Montana’s Oxen Statue That Pees and back--combine “calculation, kismet and caffeine.”

The Travel Brain, meanwhile, celebrates serendipity by encouraging travelers to click on a blinking brain and be whisked from one oddity to the next. You could argue that anyone who downloads a Quicktime movie of an animatronic polka display (an Iowa highlight on a recent Travel Brain journey) needs to get a life. But at Roadside America, pointlessness is its own reward.

Of course, Roadside America isn’t the only travel site with a decidedly skewed sensibility--witness the dozen or so Internet galleries devoted to airline barf bags. Many sites are the product of a single warped imagination, like Michael Nejman’s To Die For! (https://www.2diefor.com), billed as an “irreverent, stream-of-consciousness celebration of cemeteries and the lighter side of death.”

Nejman, a.k.a. “The Grin Reaper,” has been visiting and photographing cemeteries around the world for nearly two decades. He shares his passion via a collection of graveyard photos, famous last words and epitaphs, film and music trivia, a suggested bibliography and a list of 10 top cemeteries. His favorite: the Cemetery of the Capuchin Fathers in Rome’s Church of the Immaculate Conception, famous for the preserved remains of 4,000 friars in the church basement.

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Electronic Explorer appears the second Sunday of every month. Laura Bly welcomes comments and questions; her e-mail address is LSBly@aol.com.