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I’ve managed to score a funny travel photo from Kristen Cummings, the writer behind the travel blog Touristish. She writes about the unique, quirky, and off-the-beaten-path travel ideas for those of us trying to be less touristy and more touristish. Right up my alley!

Anyway, it’s about one of my favourite quirky travel subjects – funny signs. Especially those handmade ones that are always unique! And sometimes, not quite politically correct!

I’ll let Kristen tell the story!

I have a great photo of the “gift shop” at Slab City, California, USA. This place is a lawless transient-hippie-camp-type-place that was featured at the beginning of the movie “127 Hours“.

(The Travel Tart: that’s that rather amazing, but macabre story of where a rock climber gets his arm jammed by a boulder, and he decides to amputate it with his pocket knife to free himself! Ouch! Well it saved his life!)

Slab City is next to the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea was meant to be a beautiful resort area in the 1950s for rich Californians to spend their holidays. Then an ecological disaster made the Salton Sea a non-draining cesspool, and its salinity got so high that there would be a massive fish die-off every year.

The stink drove the rich tourists away, the sand is (still) made entirely of fishbone pieces, and all the fancy resorts became abandoned, turning the Salton Sea’s surrounding cities into ghost towns. Some of the people who still owned land around there have been holding out hope since the 1970s that someday the disaster will be cleaned up and the resorts will come back, and they will become MILLIONAIRES! But that’s never happening.

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They practically give land away there, and the people who live there are either:

a) quirky artists,

b) running from the law,

c) elderly dreamers on a fixed income, or

d) Hungarian (for some reason).

Slab City (where this photo was taken) is one of the many quirky “cities” in the area, and it’s specifically been taken over by squatters, unlike the unusual landowners in other parts of the Salton Sea region.

I stopped here to buy some “shit” for my son…. a.k.a. a $20 painted rock and a t-shirt.