While it may look as though 8 large trailers have plummeted nose-first from the sky, they were in fact carefully placed by Frank Bates, who happens to own a nearby RV dealership. Google’s 45-degree imagery gives us a great look at the installation from the air.

This blog post has good images and information about the trailers, and the official website has a bunch of links and a documentary video. The neighbours are less than impressed with this apparent advertising ploy, but Bates is insistent that it is a true piece of art¹ inspired by his visit to Cadillac Ranch in Texas

We visited Cadillac Ranch back in the early days of this site. The satellite imagery hasn’t improved, and while there is now a Street View, it’s sadly from the very early low-resolution systems.

We visited Carhenge – another well-known car sculpture – in our Monumental Wannabes post last year. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare apparently it’s now for sale.

We switch modes of transport briefly for a visit to a monument in Santa Rosa, California, that at first glance appears to be a fuzzy obelisk.

Closer observation reveals that it’s actually constructed of bicycle frames – three hundred and forty of them (and one tricycle) according this Wired article. Created by Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector the sculpture is named Cyclisk and stands almost 20m tall.

Google’s newly-released Street View imagery of Belgium allows us to see another bicycle sculpture in the town of Brakel, which is on the route of the Tour of Flanders spring classic race.

Returning to car art, we move to Sydney, Australia, where a large rock appears to have played a key role in a terrible accident involving a red Ford Festiva.

This is actually a sculpture named Still Life With Stone and Car, by artist Jimmie Durham, and it was created through the relatively simple process of, um… dropping a large rock on a car.

Originally placed near the Opera House, the sculpture was later moved to its current location where a pair of signs help dissuade any unknowing passers-by from calling the police to report the accident.

Sadly, this kind of cruel vehicular torture isn’t isolated – in 2009 we visited two places where cars have been impaled in the name of art.

In Toronto this car appears to have been abandoned for so long that it has been reclaimed by nature.

Commonly known as The Garden Car, it is more officially called the Community Vehicular Reclamation Project. More details can be found in this blog post.

Perhaps the most bizarre vehicular artwork can be found in rural Vermont, in the form of a large concrete gorilla holding aloft a Volkswagen Beetle.

The story behind its creation can be found at Roadside America.

To wrap up, a few artworks about which I haven’t been able to find much information. First, another Airstream trailer which has been converted into a spaceship in a park in Sacramento, California.

In Albuquerque an old Chevrolet has been tiled for some reason, and mounted on top of an arch.

And finally, in Geldrop, the Netherlands, a tiny old Fiat 500 has been bronzed and topped with a statue of a girl – the work of artist Carla Rump.

If you know of any other vehicular art, please post it in the comments. I’d particularly be interested to know if anyone from Stockholm knows if this bus-made-of-cars is visible on satellite or Street View. I really wanted to include it in this post but couldn’t find a precise location for it.

Locations: Australia, Belgium, California, Florida, Netherlands, New Mexico, Ontario, Texas, Vermont / Categories: Other Vehicles, Street Views, Structures, Weirdness

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At number ten the small town of Scary, West Virginia. Having the main street called Scary Road wasn’t frightening enough, so they named another street Big Scary Road!

At numbers nine and eight, we can just about make up the popular Halloween activity, by visiting Trickum Road and Treat Mountain Road, both in rural Georgia. Sadly they don’t intersect.

In the Netherlands we have a town named after a popular Halloween costume – Monster – which is number seven on our list. I’m not sure if it’s real graffiti, a real monster, or just an artifact of Google’s blurring efforts, but the town sign appears to have a ghoulish claw attached to the letter M!

Number six continues our monster theme. A touch of green face paint and a fake plastic bolt through the neck brings us to the tiny village of Frankenstein, Missouri.

Wikipedia claims that the town wasn’t actually named after Mary Shelley’s novel or its characters, but for a Gottfried Franken who donated land for the construction of a Church.

At number five we have one of the more popular decorations for Halloween parties – Spiderweb, South Carolina.

At numbers four and three we have a ghostly sound and a startled response – Boo, Sweden and Eek, Alaska.

Many children dress as pointy-hatted, wart-riddled old hags for Halloween, so (bending the rules slightly to include bodies of water as well as towns) at number two we have Witch Lake, Michigan.

We provide this handy graphic to help you understand how it got its name! Note the bonus Halloween content with Bat Lake just to the north-west!

No Halloween celebration would be complete without a gourd-like squash of the genus Cucurbita, carved into a gruesome face and lit from within by a candle. So tied for number one we have a pair of communities called Pumkpintown – one in South Carolina, the other in Tennessee.

Happy Halloween from all of us at Google Sightseeing! If you know of other Halloween-named towns, please post them in the comments.

Locations: Alaska, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Netherlands, South Carolina, Sweden, Tennessee, West Virginia / Categories: Street Views, Weirdness

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No point in wasting time. Let’s get Spread Eagle and dive right in…

We hope this Naked Baker is at least wearing a hairnet.

Is there anyone in Southern California who’s up for a Nude Wash¹?

There are five different creeks in the southeastern United States that are Naked. Along Naked Creek in Virginia is Naked Creek Road, which happens to lie across the creek from Moose Bottom Road. What that symbolises, we have no idea.

Leave it to the Netherlands to take things to the next level. The city of Wageningen has an entire Nude street, replete with a Nude auto shop!

Our own Noel Ballantyne brings us this wonderful Muff from Country Donegal²:

Don’t worry, ladies; we’re keeping your interests in mind, too. In fact, we know a place in Sint Maarten specifically geared toward many of your tastes:

If all of this nakedness and nudity is a bit much for you to handle all at once, perhaps we should tone it down and focus on Ass Allround:

Not to get too lewd, but we did uncover a prominent Nipple Knob while compiling this entry. As well, we also caught a Wanker in broad daylight directly on Street View.

Thus concludes what is undoubtedly the most Sexey post ever on Google Sightseeing.

Locations: California, France, Germany, Idaho, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin / Categories: Buildings, Natural Landmarks, Street Views, Weirdness

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The countries receiving updated imagery are Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Romania, South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Additionally, there is brand new coverage of two of Britain’s Crown Dependencies, the Isle of Man, and Jersey.

Peel Castle, Isle of Man

Mont Orgueil, Jersey

Of particular interest in the United States, brand new imagery has been added throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego, taking in sights such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Staples Center, and USS Midway which are now shown in stunning high-resolution.

What can you find in the new imagery? Send us your finds via our suggestion form, or on Twitter, and we’ll post a roundup later in the week of your best finds!

Read the full story at the Google Latlong blog.

Locations: Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, North America, Norway, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom / Categories: Street Views

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Take Monaco, for instance, where the cameras approach the eastern border only to be greeted with this giant abstract sculpture at the crossing (or is that just Monaco giving a massive middle-finger to Google’s camera?).

The western entrance to Monaco is quite stunning, with the road descending into the principality as cliffs loom overhead.

Moving south into the Pyrenees, we reach the border of Andorra, where we can sneak a peek into the ski resort of Pas de la Casa, including some oddly-coloured apartments on the hillside.

For sheer impressiveness, however, it’s hard to beat the sight of the Rock of Gibraltar looming over the Spanish border at La Linea while a thunderstorm prepares to hit overhead:

The prize for ‘Most Ornate Entrance Captured on Street View’ might have to go to the border between Rimini, Italy and Serravalle, San Marino, where the microstate has constructed a pedestrian overpass and an observation tower for tourists, leading into a major shopping district. The other main entrance to San Marino would probably be described as ‘quaint’ by comparison.

The absurdly complicated Dutch-Belgian border at Baarle (documented previously on Google Sightseeing) is likely to have presented special challenges to the Street View team. However, they have cleverly managed to avoid publishing any images captured on Belgian soil – despite examples such as this, where the camera car must drive from Holland at one end of the block, across a tiny sliver of Belgium, and back to Holland at the other end.

Baarle’s not the only town cut in half in Street View. Here’s a place where you park in France to dine at a cafe in Luxembourg:

Near the tri-point of Italy, Austria and Slovenia, we get this multi-national flag arrangement at an old Austrian customs building. Further into the Alps, the Street View car camera ends its trip at the ski resort of Nassfeld, where one of the ski lifts lies right next to a field of grazing cattle.

The lone glimpse of Russian soil captured so far on Street View is the view across a small lake from Norway (the only place you can actually drive south into Russia from), where we get a blurry view of a building on a hill overlooking the lake. Hmm, a regular house, or a Cold War spy shanty? You be the judge…

South Africa is the only African country so far visited by Street View, but sadly most of the border shots are not particularly notable. For example, the images simply stop by a fence on the middle of the road at the border with Swaziland, while the border with Botswana couldn’t be any more different, merely possessing a single stop sign.

We end our forbidden borderland odyssey with a glimpse from Singapore across the Straits of Johor to downtown Johor Bahru.

With luck, one day we’ll be able to get a glimpse beyond those borders as Street View continues to roll out coverage in countries across the globe. (Then we can finally find out just what it is they’re trying to hide from us…)

Locations: Austria, Belgium, Botswana, Crown Dependencies, France, Italy, Malaysia, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain / Categories: Natural Landmarks, Street Views, Structures

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The Blue Road was created in April 2007 in the city of Drachten – a 1km stretch of road was painted bright blue, though it had faded somewhat by the time the Street View car visited.

The project was intended to symbolise a canal that formerly ran through this part of the city, to remind residents and visitors of what it would have been like. A plan to rebuild the canal has stalled due to financial difficulties.

The work cost an estimated €75,000 and used 4,000 litres of paint, with some observers questioning the impact on the environment as this gradually washes away.

In addition to all the standard road markings, the words WATER IS LEVEN (water is life) were painted along the road in 8m-tall letters.

An additional feature of this work was a blue car sinking into the ‘water’, though – just as the road surface has faded over time – the car has been modified, probably by the local teenagers. Nearby we have proof that artists sign even works of this scale, with Hofstra’s signature still clearly visible.

To the north-west, the city of Leeuwarden hosted an installation called Art-Eggcident in 2008. A number of large (up to 30m) eggs were painted in the Wilhelmina square.

Again, the paint had faded before Street View captured the work, and the additional installations – a few large plastic yolks, and a statue of children playing – had been removed¹.

Somewhat amusingly, this van was parked opposite the square! Which came first the chicken or the egg?

Three of Hofstra’s other large-scale projects look really interesting but unfortunately have not been captured by Google’s cameras: Invasion of the Ants, Carcreditcrisis, and his most recent work, Above Water. You can see more at his official site, and this blog post has an interesting interview with the artist and some good pictures.

Locations: Netherlands / Categories: Large Type, Other Vehicles, Street Views

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In the northern town of Groningen at Bjoeks Klimcentrum we find Excalibur, the world’s tallest climbing tower. The 37m-tall tower has an overhang of 11m; the Street View cameras distort the perspective a little in close-up images, but a more distant view shows that it really does lean a long way!

Excalibur contains 24 routes of varying difficulty, each creatively named by the person who developed it, such as Let your senses guide you, Pimp my climb and Volvo driving soccer moms!

It’s too bad that nobody was climbing the tower when the Street View car went past. While there is soft material and a pad at the base, the overhang appears to lean over some large jagged rocks that probably provide a pretty good incentive for not falling off.

The facility has a large number of indoor walls, while the exterior is adorned with a variety of holds.

If you’re not afraid of heights, this blog post has some dizzying perspectives of Excalibur, while this YouTube video shows what it’s like at the top!

There is another unique climbing wall in Enschede in the eastern part of the country, near the German border. A very active climbing club at the university has created a network of routes on the exterior of a 9-storey student residence.

Street View shows somebody on the lower level holds further along, though the main wall is closed off. And while there does appear to a soft surface at the base of the wall, I really hope climbers get to move the spiky fence out of the way before attempting an ascent.

You can read more about this wall at the Archello architecture site.

Our final destination is in the southwest, just inside the border with Belgium. Street View just gives a distant glimpse of a concrete tower that was used in the creation of the Oosterscheldekering flood defences for this region. After construction of the barrier was complete, the tower was left in place for climbers to use.

This photo on Flickr gives a closer look at the climbing areas.

Locations: Netherlands / Categories: Buildings, Stadiums and Sport, Street Views, Structures, Towers

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Glasgow airport in Scotland have their fire training centre conveniently located next to a road, giving us a great look at it from Street View.

From this we can clearly see that, while some airports may use abandoned or decommissioned planes for training, in many cases it is merely a ‘plane-shaped object’ that can withstand repeatedly being set on fire – though convincing enough to upset a nervous flyer, particularly if it happened to be ablaze as you taxied past! Nearby is a small collection of old and wrecked cars – perhaps used to practice extractions?

At Zurich Airport there is an old DC-8 which looks to be in relatively good shape, so is probably used for evacuation exercises rather than fire training (which likely happens at the smaller object just to the east).

Another ‘plane-shaped object’, complete with a couple of fire trucks can be found at Leeds-Bradford Airport, a mere 150m from a runway!

The sprawling airport in Denver has 4 fire stations and the impressively titled Denver International Airport/Denver Fire Department Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting (ARFF) Training Academy, with a full-size plane mockup.

A similar training school can be found at Durham Tees Valley Airport which has a veritable array of old planes and ‘plane-shaped objects’.

Recently, the trend has been for airports to invest in expensive training systems that can challenge firefighters with a range of different situations. At Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam there is a full-size mock up of a 747, in an area clearly marked Fire Training, which has 20 computer-controlled fire training settings. There is also a very similar system at London’s Gatwick Airport.

Manchester Airport has a high-tech system from a different manufacturer, that also resembles the front two-thirds of a 747.

We previously covered some of these “Fat Planes” back in 2006, but let us know what other training locations you can find on Google Maps or Street View. Bonus points if you can find one that is actually on fire!

(I shall now sit quietly and wait to see if spending a couple of hours browsing maps and street views of airport security perimeters has attracted the attention of the government’s online monitors).

Locations: Colorado, England, Netherlands, Scotland, Switzerland / Categories: Aircraft, Street Views

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Fortunately the girl, who must have been slightly taken aback when the world’s media¹ turned up at her door asking if she was dead, was in fact perfectly all right.

A fact that any of the reporters could have been assured of if they’d moved down the street one step, from where you can see the girl is clearly playing with a friend.

Perhaps this will spark a new trend however, as presented with the Google car, some less playful people continue to get up to their old tricks…

As Google’s cars have covered even more ground around the world, there have been some interesting things to learn about the human condition. For example, apparently some girls are rather adept at something the world’s men thought they had all to themselves.

Although it does appear that not all women have mastered the art of peeing standing up quite yet.

Not to be outdone, men have gone one step further and LEARNED TO FLY. Yes ladies, you heard us right. (Although we can only do it momentarily, and it helps to be over a deep bit of water).

We hope that wider knowledge of Street View provokes more interesting responses from people when they see the car – there was another media frenzy recently when someone was spotted multiple times on the streets of Aberdeen, wearing a horse’s head. Suspiciously the images have all been removed now, so instead here’s a real horse, wandering through traffic on the way to the local Tesco.

Of course, if we all started lying down in the street, or donning interesting masks at the first sign of an approaching camera then, in an attempt to keep the controversy alive, the international press will have to start making up stories about politician’s homes being removed from Google’s services.

Sorry, I forgot, we debunked that particular story the week before last.

So have you been captured on Street View?² What did you do? And if you haven’t yet, what do you plan to do to gain international notoriety when your time finally comes?

Locations: England, Italy, Netherlands, Saskatchewan, Spain / Categories: Street Views

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Common desserts include cookies, pastries and ice cream, although the ice cream isn’t normally this big.

Desserts are often eaten with a dessert spoon, intermediate in size between a teaspoon and a tablespoon (we’re pretty sure this is a dessert spoon).

One of my favourite desserts is cake (although I usually like my cakes without freaky papier-mâché models popping out of them).

Fruit may also be eaten for dessert…

…but the healthier options can be easy to ignore when presented with giant bars of chocolate.

Some strange people prefer to have a cup of coffee instead of dessert. Weirdos.

…

Erm… what? Desert week?

Don’t be so ridiculous, I’d have noticed.

Locations: Georgia, Germany, Iowa, Minnesota, Netherlands, Ontario, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah /

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