We’ve been visiting Virginia this week, and I will have some great intel to share with you over the next few weeks! But for Photo Friday, I chose this image of Isabel, a 60-foot long sea serpent crafted from driftwood, with coconut shell eyes.

She lies in the front yard of a rental home right on Sandbridge Beach, which is about 15 minutes south of Virginia Beach. A local sculptor, Scott Dilatush, created her in 1999.

When we found her, it was somewhat serendipitous that we discovered a public access path to the beach just to the left of her yard. And a (free) street parking space. The four of us had a glorious day on that beautiful, uncrowded beach, wading over the sandbars, looking for shells, flying kites, building the requisite sandcastle, etc. I’ll remember it for a long time.

This photo makes me happy! Not too hard to figure out why, since it’s a warm, sunny beach. Virginia Beach, to be precise, and our home for the next five days! To be followed by a few more days in Williamsburg…AND the weather forecast looks AMAZING!

Virginia Beach, we're on our way!

It’s time for another GBOGH Road Trip! Please follow along for frequent updates on our Facebook page or on Twitter, hashtag #GBOGHRoadTrip.

On our itinerary:

World’s largest Wegmans supermarket in Fredericksburg, VA

World’s longest stretch of pleasure beach, Virginia Beach

The world’s largest living history museum (Colonial Williamsburg)

We’ll also be tracking down a giant gorilla, a giant statue of Neptune, and a giant sea serpent.

And … still up for discussion …the world’s tallest dive coaster at Busch Gardens. Early polls suggest that 0 out of 4 GBOGH family members are actually willing to ride this coaster, because of our shared “chicken” gene. To be continued…

In the meantime, we’re celebrating summer and the start of “Road Trip Season” with a fun GIVEAWAY!

Hullabaloo, an award-winning kid’s music duo, has just released their eighth album, Road Trip. There are 13 family car travel-inspired songs with traces of twang, funk, rock, folk and blues. Such an entertaining break from sappy children’s music! We test drove the CD on our trip to Rochester, and I cracked up when I heard the lyrics to the title song, which mentions the world’s largest ball of twine!

I have two copies to give away to residents of the U.S. or Canada! Want to enter to win? Just sign up to receive our e-mail notifications (see upper right hand corner). If you’re already a subscriber, just comment below and give me your funniest family road trip story, or share your road trip plans for this summer!

Two winners will be chosen — one randomly, and one based on how much I like your road trip memory!  You’ll be notified on Monday, June 6th, and will be asked to provide a mailing address.

On our way up to Rochester last weekend, we stopped to see the World’s Largest Pancake Griddle in Penn Yan, NY!  Don’t we look tiny in front of this thing? It measures 27 feet across.

Pass the syrup!

It is not lost on me that The Boy has grown nearly as tall as me…sigh…he needs to stop doing that.

So, the story is that on September 27th, 1987, the Birkett Mills company cooked the world’s largest (buckwheat) pancake in this huge griddle, which was placed over hot stones. They mixed the batter in a cement mixer, and flipped it with a crane.

After we left, I tweeted that I think Penn Yan is Dutch for “middle of nowhere.” The very nice staff at the Penn Yan Public Library responded, graciously setting me straight as to the true origins of the name.

In its early days of settlement, the town welcomed emigrants from Pennsylvania as well as from the New England states. “Penn Yan” credits both parties – “Penn” in honor of Pennsylvania, and “Yan” in honor of the Yankees, as all people from the New England states were called.

I’m sharing this on Photo Friday at Delicious Baby.

First, a big thank you to everyone who helped get the Go BIG or Go Home blog to the #1 ranking in the “Reader’s Choice” category of Travel Blogs for Families on Babble.com! We’ve fallen slightly to the #2 position, which isn’t as BIG a position as we would like. We would appreciate your vote if you haven’t yet had a chance to show your love with a click on the thumbs-up icon!

Erica in front of the World's Largest Pineapple!

There are a few reasons why the “Go BIG” family doesn’t do a lot of international travel. So we leave the finding of the BIG stuff to helpful guest contributors, and live vicariously through them!

Like Erica and Cassi, the enthusiastic bloggers at Nonstop World Travel. They get to explore far and wide, free from the burden of having to locate rectangular chicken nuggets for crabby youngsters. Sigh.

In this month’s guest post, these insatiable travelers tell us about the BIG things they’ve seen in some intriguingly remote locales.

Where we went, and who was coerced into going:

We’ve gone to a few of the biggest and baddest places around the globe, but our favorites would definitely be…

●     The world’s largest Pineapple in Nambour, Australia,

●     The Great Wall of China — the world’s largest man-made structure

●     The Amazon — the world’s largest rain forest and highest flux river

●     El Gigante — Easter Island’s and the world’s largest Moai

No coercing was necessary; although, the Pineapple may have gotten cut if it hadn’t been en route down the coast of Australia.  Thankfully, we got to thoroughly enjoy the giant tropical fruit.

WHY did you go there, exactly?

If there’s an opportunity to travel, we’ll take it.  The idea of traveling to the Amazon was co-opted from a cousin who ended up backing out on the adventure, and the Great Wall was an add-on to a wonderfully free grad school trip to a conference in Suzhou.

We also have a serious love for the quirky corners of the world, so Easter Island had been on the short list for a while.  When we found the time to head down to South America, there was no resisting temptation.  Next thing we knew, we were face to face with El Gigante and the rest of the Moai. Similarly, when we found the world’s largest pineapple as a spec on Australia’s map, we had to pay it a visit.

Okay, what was so cool about it?

Read the rest of this entry »

So, I was going to color Easter eggs with a “Go BIG or Go Home” message, similar to what I did with the Christmas cookies and the Jack O’Lanterns. I would like partial credit for the idea. The wrinkle in that plan is that the eggs would be colored on Thursday, and they would have to stay fresh until Sunday.

I’m happy and relieved to have found something MUCH better to share with you for our Easter post! A really BIG basket! This is the Lorain Easter Basket in Ohio.

Many thanks to Dominique King for sharing her photo with us! Dominique is the blogger behind Midwest Guest. A travel writer at heart, Midwest Guest allows her to share stories about the often underappreciated Heartland region of the U.S.

Dominque reports that Lorain’s big Easter Basket draws scores of visitors to the park on Ohio’s Lake Erie shore each spring to take photos of their families in their Easter finery. City parks employee David Shukait created the 7-foot-tall concrete sculpture, and the City of Lorain installed it as part of a public works project in 1941.

See more photos and get more info on her blog today.

Happy Easter!!

We don’t get out to the west coast as often as we’d like. Our last trip was to Anaheim and Carlsbad, CA in 2008 to visit Disneyland and LEGOLAND. Our last post featuring the west coast was over the summer, when my very own Dad reported “from the field.” My parents went to several BIG sites: San Francisco’s Chinatown; the tallest waterfall in North America at Yosemite National Park; and the world’s largest tree in Sequoia National Park.

This month’s guest post brings us back out to California, as well as Arizona. Tiffany and her hubby are a young, adventurous couple traveling full-time in their little painted Airstream, “eddie.” (p.s. Did you know that “Eddie” is also the name of the World’s Largest Kid? And that I like to insert shameless links to other posts on this blog to increase page visits?)

Their blog, WanderingAirstream.com, chronicles their journeys in their beloved 1973 Argosy Airstream. I just love that they’ve lovingly restored and renovated eddie. I’m a sucker for before-and-afters (too much time watching HGTV!)

This is what eddie looks like inside.

The "Go BIG" family would last about an hour together in this space.

I take issue with them for removing the avocado oven, but otherwise, COOL! And compact. I think Tiffany and her husband must have a VERY healthy relationship to spend all their time together in this vehicle!

Here’s Tiffany’s report about two larger-than-life billboard installations they found during their travels:

Traci invited me over today to share a couple of BIG roadside attractions that my husband and I found on our travels. We love the biggest, tiniest, quirkiest of just about anything, and as we are traveling the country full-time in our vintage airstream,  we are always on the lookout for the unusual.

But these caught us out-of-the-blue. We had no idea of their existence, and were just lucky to have stumbled across them.

The first is a giant cut-out family outside of Temecula, CA. It is very close to Diamond Valley Lake, off of Hwy 74 East towards Hemet, CA. Turn right on Winchester Road, South towards Temecula, go about 10 miles and you’ll run right into them!

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes I enjoy planning our travel more than actually traveling. Mainly, because I’m usually alone, in a quiet place, reading and putting together our itinerary. I get my (temporary) fill of omnipotence without any complaints from the smaller people in our household about 1) being shortchanged of pool time, or 2) the unavailability of rectangular chicken nuggets.

Credit: Rochester Lilac Festival

And, by the way, I prefer the old school method of looking through glossy travel guides, as opposed to navigating through flash-ridden websites. Don’t look for my picture next to the definition of “early adopter.”

Our Go BIG plans for this spring and summer are coming together nicely! Now if only the price of gas would stop its precipitous climb.

These are the adventures we’ve planned so far:

APRIL:

World’s largest indoor theater – Radio City Music Hall, NYC

World’s largest hot dog stand – Nathan’s Famous, Brooklyn

MAY:

World’s largest collection of lilacs – Rochester, NY

World’s largest collection of electronic games – Rochester, NY

Frying pan used to make world’s largest pancake– Penn Yan, NY

World’s longest pleasure beach – Virginia Beach, VA

World’s largest gorilla – Virginia Beach, VA

World’s largest living history museum – Colonial Williamsburg, VA

Virginia Beach. Credit: CameronDavidson@CameronDavidson.com

JUNE:

World’s largest regional theme park company – Six Flags (Queensbury, NY location)

World’s largest Uncle Sam – Lake George, NY

AUGUST:

World’s largest cowboy boots – San Antonio, TX

We need something for July! Suggestions?

What do you think? If you know of any other BIG things in these areas, please comment and give us the scoop!

December 26, 2010

Can we get back in the warm car now?!

It was an Armageddon-like scene: packing the car with clothing and food, setting out in the dark of night, and racing against time to get out of state. We were escaping the blizzard, of course, which would have put an end to our Go BIG or Go Home road trip to FL.

We made it out just in time, as the northeast got socked in. Our miserly (cheap) decision to drive to FL rather than drive worked to our advantage, as the airports closed or canceled the flights we would have been taking.

Keeping it interesting was the snowfall in the south, which is both a novelty for the locals and an emergency situation, as roads become treacherous from lack of plows and lack of seasoned winter drivers.

We're not even getting out of the car this time...

Used to much worse, we shrugged our shoulders at the dusting. With front wheel drive, we looked quizzically at the cars which spun off the roads. And we were just plain irritated upon finding out that the Cracker Barrel in Jonesville, NC wouldn’t be open for dinner because the employees couldn’t make it in for work due to the two inches of snow. Matt’s mouth was set for chicken-fried…something.

Despite the surreal weather situations bringing down the worlds around us, we managed to see three BIG attractions on Day 1 of the Go BIG or Go Home Road Trip:

The huge Benjamin Moore paint can in Shippensburg, PA; a huge storage tank pained blue, standing in front of a paint store. It’s IMMENSE. There’s not much more to look at or do there, so we stopped, jumped out and took the photos. It was fuh-reezing that morning, so a quick stop was all we were willing to tolerate anyway. Even The Girl, who will brave freezing temps to play in the playground, yelled “yee-OWW,” and jumped back in the car asap.

World's Largest Apple!

We were all so disenchanted with the weather that Matt was the only one willing to exit the car to get a photo of the large Coke bottle in Hagerstown, MD, which is perched on the roof of a bottling company a minute from I-81. I don’t think the kids even looked up from watching Bolt on the DVD player.

We had to drive off the highway several miles to see the world’s largest apple in Winchester, VA. It’s in front of an upscale gift shop which called my name so loudly I almost succumbed. (“Christmas décor, 50% off.”) Again, we were too cold to linger, so we took a few photos and drove around the town to enjoy the historic architecture.

Then we began to notice more large apples in front of other businesses, painted in different themes. We discovered three more, plus the world’s largest apple storage facility. Call it a hunch, but I think the town has a history as an apple producer.

Love the fine print on this sign. Classic "C.Y.A."

So, we have an itinerary for the Go BIG or Go Home Road Trip Extravaganza next week.  Now we’re getting excited! Southbound, the plan is to take I-81 through VA, then I-77 and I-20 south through the Carolinas and into GA. Finally, we’ll catch I-75 to take us to Tampa. On the way back, I-4 to I-95. That route is more direct, but there seems to be less to see in terms of “world’s largest” sites within proximity of the highway.

It’s not an ambitious schedule by any means…did I mention The Girl is only three years old? There are just enough stops to get her out of the car (and out of my hair) once in a while.

My mapping method is very old school. Matt is embarrassed to his very core by this rudimentary system, so lacking is it of bits and bytes.

I ♥ highlighters.

He started a shared Google map, and basically threatened not to do any of the driving if I didn’t enter our coordinates on it. Matt is Tech Boy. Have you seen his post listing all the travel tech gear we bring on trips? Would it surprise you to learn he was the President of the A/V club in high school?

Mapping method 2.0:

Look how I did a "screen grab," oh yeah, uh-huh!

Honey: Screen Shots are not 2.0 – Matt

So, here’s the list of places we plan / hope to see along the way. Stay tuned here, or on Facebook or Twitter to follow our progress!

December 26

Giant Benjamin Moore Paint Can, Shippensburg, PA

Giant Coke Bottle, Hagerstown, MD

World’s Largest Apple, Winchester, VA

Overnight in Jonesville, North Carolina

December 27

World’s Biggest Kid – Edventure Museum (also the south’s largest children’s museum), Columbia, SC

World’s Largest Peanut Monument, Ashburn, GA

December 29

World’s Largest Shuffleboard Club, St. Petersburg, FL

December 30

World’s Largest Speed Boat, Clearwater, FL

January 1

Giant 7-Up can,  Jacksonville, FL

South of the Border and the new Reptile Lagoon (the largest indoor reptile exhibit in the U.S.), SC

Overnight in Rocky Mount, NC

January 2

HOME to world’s most comfortable beds…our own!

Source: www.i95highway.com

There are three reasons why we’re driving from New York to Florida next month. The first is to see my family, in particular my new nephew. The second is that airfares are astronomical. (They would have to be in order to get me in a car with The Girl for 24 hours). And third, I’m hankering for a road trip adventure, with the opportunity to let the kids see some fun, maybe even educational stuff during their winter school break. I like to do what I can to keep their brains from turning to mush, since I put in so much time and effort in enriching those little sponges. If they forget to thank me when they’re grown, I do plan to remind them.

Here’s where you come in. I’m looking for recommendations on where to stop during our road trip. Particularly, I’m looking for “world’s largest” roadside attractions or other sites. For example, I’m considering the world’s largest model railroad museum in Flemington, NJ.

We’re also looking for great family-friendly places to eat, like diners, where we have half a chance of finding vegetables on the menu.

Our route for most of the trip will be I-95, with some time on I-295 around the capital and I-75 in Florida. We’re willing to veer off course up to 30 miles for a really great stop.

What’s in it for you? Well, our gratitude and a big fat online shout-out, for one. Also, everyone who provides a recommendation in the comments section below will be entered in our latest giveaway contest!

We’re offering a set of the first three books in the Wright on Time series by Lisa Cottrell-Bentley. This series of children’s chapter books are about an RV-living family who travels the USA. Each book is set in a different state with a different fun and educational theme! In addition to authoring the series, Lisa is a prolific blogger, whose sites include Do Life Right. She’s also a homeschooling mom to two daughters, who recently traveled cross-country by train and visited the world’s largest ball of twine…how COOL is that?!

The prize set includes Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming!

We’re not a homeschooling family, but the reason Lisa’s books resonate with me is that travel is one of the richest educational experiences we can offer our children. There are exciting lessons to be learned at sites like the world’s largest rotating globe, or the world’s largest light bulb at the Edison Center. There are so many opportunities to extend classroom learning when you travel, even to seemingly quirky attractions.

Never fear, there’s a second way to enter the contest. Just sign up to receive our e-mail notifications when new posts go live. All new e-mail addresses we receive from today through next Wednesday (11/24) will also be entered into the drawing. Sign up in the box in the upper right column.

Winner will be notified next Wednesday (11/24), and will be asked to provide a mailing address.  The prize will be mailed directly to them from the author, so the winner must reside in the U.S.

Thanks for your recommendations! Let’s hit the road!

Lisa in front of the world's largest ball of twine. I'm so stinkin' jealous!