ROADSIDE GIANTS IN FLORIDA

Before the interstates, the way to survive on a Florida highway was to build something big enough that a family doing sixty would argue about stopping. Nine of those survive in the register.

The logic has not changed since: make the object impossible to mistake at distance, put the shop behind it, and hope the highway does not move. Some of these were commercial from the start and still are. Some were built for a reason that has since evaporated, like a monument to the possum in a Panhandle town, erected in earnest.

Six of the nine are free to look at, and the ones that charge mostly charge for what is behind the giant thing rather than the giant thing itself. They photograph well and take ten minutes each, which makes them the natural filler between the register's longer stops.

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