South of the Border

We stopped a few little places along the way for breakfast or what not but the biggest place we stopped at by far on the first leg of our trip was some place called, South of the Border. I had never heard of it before but a friend of Mike's who had been down that way before said that we had to stop and check it out. Little did I know that it was famous in the Carolinas and that back in the day the current head of the Fed Ben Bernakie had worked there as a kid before becoming a Wall Street big shot. We didn't know exactly what it was except for the name but we saw signs for it coming up for more than a hundred miles before we got there. The signs were the most stereotypical Mexican take offs I've ever seen. Every picture had a little Mexican person in a big sombrero and a bunch of colorful nick naks. Of curse this just made me want to see it more. I told Harry that I hoped that it would be just as tacky as all the signs seemed to suggest. The first note that we were finally getting to South of the Border came when a huge sombrero maybe a hundred feet of the ground came into view over the horizon. If your hoping for a Mecca to tackiness nothing can be a better sign than what might be the worlds largest sombrero.

As we pulled up we saw a veritable cornucopia of tackiness. There were more than a dozen brightly colored buildings all arranged around both sides of a street to make a sort of Disney's main street sort of a feel but only of run down brightly painted buildings with names like "El Drug Store" on them. We parked and started to look around. What became increasingly clear was that besides being tacky the main purpose of the place was to sell fireworks. About half of the stores seemed to be selling nothing but fireworks and the other half seemed to be either closed or restaurants for tourists. The name it seemed came from the fact that it was in South Carolina just across the border from North Carolina. I gather that it must have started to sell fireworks to people from all around. We went inside a few of the stores one seemed to sell nothing but party hats. Which we dutifully tried on but did not buy, another store sold beer and cigarettes in amazingly large quantities. We tried a few of the other stores but they were either closed or uninteresting. We did stop along with most of the other people there to take a picture while standing under the legs of a giant sombrero wearing sign holding mascot. I can only imagine how many people over the years have take exactly the same picture. You could probably do a great through the years montage of people all standing under this thing.

Eventually we headed across the street to the hundred foot high sombrero we had seen driving up in the hopes that there would be some sort of elevator to the top. What we found at the bottom was an arcade filled with all the sorts of games I loved as a kid. There was skiball and airhocky, as well as foosball and a whole lot of old arcade games. I don't think they were exactly going for a retro look as much as the things in there were just very old. We had a great time playing a bunch of the different games for just a few dollars in quarters. They also did have a ride to the top which we went on. The elevator up had an operator whose job seemed to consist of taking our tickets then pressing the up button before he went back to his book. The top presented a great view of the nothing which stretched around for miles. The top was also filled with so much graffiti that some of it must have been there for years. On the ride down we were accompanied by a bunch of complaining kids who added nicely to the smell of rotten eggs in the elevator. We eventually stopped playing and engaged in what I'm not proud to say was probably a five minute discussion about how to spend are small number of prize tickets before someone noticed a kid waiting to spend his tickets and we just gave ours to him. A lot of other countries have tacky things but I don't think anyone does it as well or as big as America.

P.S.
If you are having problem seeing the comic from yesterday I suggest either clicking on it or you can visit it directly at http://xkcd.com/616/