Offbeat America: 7 weird and wonderful things to do in the USA

21.07.2023 - 08:48 / roughguides.com

It’s hard to encapsulate the full depth and variety of the USA – any nation that can marry cities as life filled as New York, San Francisco and LA with landscapes as breathtaking as those of Alaska, Arizona and Hawaii is beyond easy summary. Its rewards come in droves, from all-American icons like baseball, blues and bourbon to the unbridled spectacles like Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

As a travel destination, the USA’s possibilities stretch to the far horizon – with plenty of surprises along the way. Here are 7 of the country’s offbeat highlights from the new edition of Make the Most of Your Time on Earth.

The saucy climax of Key West’s calendar is a week-long party known as Fantasy Fest. The old town is transformed into an outdoor costume bash, somewhat tenuously pegged to Halloween; really, it’s a gay-heavy take on Mardi Gras and flesh-flashing costumes. The week is punctuated with offbeat events, like the pet costume contest where dogs and their owners dress the same, and a sequin-spangled satire of a high-school prom.

Picture a nudist miniature golf course, an advanced pole-dancing workshop and a bunch of neon-painted bodies, and you may be getting close to imagining what Burning Man is all about. Every year during the last week of August, several thousand digerati geeks, pyrotechnic maniacs, death-guild Goths, crusty hippies and too-hip yuppies descend on the Nevada Desert to build a temporary autonomous “city”. Known as Black Rock City, this is the most survivalist, futuristic and utterly surreal show on Earth, where the strangest part of your alter ego reigns supreme.

© Sunshine Seeds/Shutterstock

As you manoeuvre your way towards the towering face of one of Alaska’s many tidewater glaciers, the gentle crunch of ice against the hull of your kayak sounds faintly ominous. It’s nothing, though, compared to the thunderclap that echoes across the water when a great wall of ice peels away from the glacier and sends waves surging toward you. Your first reaction is quite naturally a jolt of fear, but no need to panic: the danger will have dissipated by the time whatever’s left of the waves reaches you, leaving you to look on in awe.

Just after sunset, Mexican free-tailed bats emerge from the deep crevices of the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, flapping and squeaking in a long ribbon across the sky. An eclectic mix of townies and tourists watches from the south bank of Town Lake and from the bridge itself. Picturesque from any spot, the bats’ game of follow-the-leader is most impressive when you stand beneath the ribbon and look up – that’s when the sheer number of these creatures hits home. During the summer, the best viewing season, more than 1.5 million bats reside here, making it the largest urban bat