Tat’s Bizarre Travels

Ballard, WA - My 1^st and 4^th day stops on my Seattle tour were to the always incredible, always awesome Archie McPhee store. I’ve been shopping their online store for years and and was a ball of nonstop excitement about visiting the real life place. It is the rubber chicken and bacon floss mecca of the world. I was in heaven.

When you first enter the store you’re assaulted by a sheer wall of crazy plastic bits hanging from the celling, tacked to the walls and in bins for your buying pleasure. They have a section of wallets, shelves bobble heads, a wall of Jesus’, wigs, masks, urine specimen kits. The place is a wonderland of junk, and yes it seduces you into buying it. I mean really, who doesn’t need a glow in the dark squid?

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Seattle, WA - All of the rumors about the Ye Olde Curiosity Shop are true. The place is spectacular. Having been around for the last 100-odd years and owned by the same family the place has a wondrous collection of everything from shrunken heads and two headed calfs to t-shirts and plastic beads. And that is why the “for sale” items are not nearly as fun as the “please don’t touch” items.

Primarily a store, the Ye Olde Curiosity Shop is located right on the water, Alaskan Way, on a corner next to a souvenir store and the pier. Strangely it’s nestled among some of the most mundane fast food seafood eateries and souvineir shops. Perhaps that’s why there were so many more people inside than I expected. Of course, if they were freaked out by the shrunken heads they didn’t show it.

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Triadelphia, WV - There really is no place in the world like Cabelas. Except maybe another Cabelas. It’s not a unique sporting goods store, it’s part of a chain, and that’s what’s so bizarre about it.

Cabela’s is part 19^th century natural history museum and part consumer wonderland. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen so much taxidermy in one spot, including a natural history museum. There’s everything from “Conservation Mountain,” which takes up a good third of the store, to the Serengeti, complete with lions, rhinos and elephants. There is also a fair amount of carnage as stuffed beasts snarl with the remainents of another stuffed beast in it’s mouth. Oh, and the mounted heads. So many mounted heads.

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