Road Trip: Phase Two Point Five

On our drive up to Maryland from South Carolina, on I-95, we noticed a billboard with a stereotypical racist drawing of a Mexican and some sort of slogan like "Eat at Pedro's at South of the Border." I made a comment to Fuzzy like "Gee, that's racist" and didn't think much else about it. A few minutes later, there was another one, with a picture of a giraffe saying something like "The sky's the limit at South of the Border!" We were curious. They continued: "Hats around the world!" "Shalom!" "You never SAUSAGE a place!" Soon there were billboards every .2 miles and we were amazed, confused, and interested. At one point, we noticed that South of the Border was at exit 1, and we were at exit 95--That's a lot of miles of billboards! Suddenly, there was a giant sombrero floating in the sky, and we immediately took the exit.

South of the Border is a "highway oasis" at the South/ North Carolina border, that started as a beer and fireworks stand in the 50s and developed over the years to be a mile long tourist trap complete with a campground, motel, a million cheesy kitsch stores, fireworks, gas stations, amusement parks, pools and more. You can read more about it here and here.

It was no-man's land. I can imagine that it probably gets a brisk business in the summer when families are on vacation and school is out, but when we were there, there was nobody there, yet everything was open.

It was amazing. Glorious even! I don't know how long we stayed there, but it was like all time had stopped and we were in a different dimension or decade or world completely. We couldn't stop laughing, and we bought our fair share of cheesy magnets, hats, and coloring books.




To get a better feel for the place, here is the trailer for a new documentary made about South of the Border (S.O.B.) called S.O.B. and the Legend of Alan Schafer. I hope to see this whole documentary some day: