Specialty guidebooks to the U.S.A

Thematic, oddball, and other specialty American guidebooks

There are dozens of specialty guides to the U.S.A. A few standouts include:

National Geographic Guide to America's Hidden Corners - Discover 75 of America's best out-of-the-way escapes— from historic small towns and quaint villages to unspoiled coastal regions and remote deserts and mountain ranges. Take the back roads to places nationwide that are well off the tourist routes. You'll uncover hidden corners you didn't know existed. Love my copy. Shame it's out of print (though you can still get it online).

Off the Beaten Path series - This guidebook series from Globe Pequot does exactly what its titles say: take you off the beaten path and into the eccentric corners of America. It also covers pnty of states that other series ignore, like Wisconsin, Iowa, Idaho, North Carolina, New Jersey, West Virginia, Wyoming, kasnas, and Upstate New York (alongside Maine, Utah, Oregon, South California, Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, Arizona, and other more popular places). Tired of the same old tourist traps? Take the road less traveled and discover the hidden attractions, unique finds, and unusual locales other guidebooks just don't offer.

1000 Places to See in the U.S.A. and Canada Before You Die - My old co-author Patricia Schultz has created a mini-empire out of this series. It's a traveler's life list, a guide, an inspiration, a memory book. Open it to check out where you've been, and where you should go next. What to see and what to do and what to show the kids. Where to eat and where to stay. And how to change your life. Covering the U.S.A. and Canada like never before, here are 1,000 spectacular, compelling, essential, offbeat, utterly unforgettable places.

Guides to oddball sights

Eccentric America : The Bradt Travel Guide to All That's Weird and Wacky in the USA - Sadly no longer in print (though Barnes & Noble sells some used copies cheap), this great book was the winner of the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Award for Guidebooks in 2002, and voted Best Travel Book of 2001 by the North American Travel Journalists Association. Author Jan Friedman covers madcap mayhem from the nude Olympics and topless automobile racing to the treehouse bed-and-breakfast resort and the California community that has its own fashion police. This is the definitive guide for those with a taste for the extreme or a desire to add something just a little bit different to their tour of the United States.

Weird U.S. - A travel guide of sorts to America's local legends and best-kept secrets. It's chock-full of the crazy characters, cursed roads, abandoned sites, and bizarre roadside attractions that the authors feel reflect the shared modern folklore of our time. So, come along with the Marks now. Visit places like the Coral Castle and Albino Village, explore abandoned insane asylums and forgotten tunnels—in one of them you just might run into the maniacal Bunnyman!

Weird U.S.: The ODDyssey Continues - What's weird around here? That’s a question Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have enjoyed asking for years—and their offbeat sense of curiosity led them to create the bestselling phenomenon, Weird N.J. Now the weirdness has spread throughout the U.S.—again! More than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don’t venture.

Watch it Made in the U.S.A. - More than just a travel guide, Watch It Made In the U.S.A. will help readers appreciate firsthand the products, companies, technology, and workers that inspire our economy. Authors and factory tour experts Karen Axelrod and Bruce Brumberg provide fascinating photographs, advice for business and family travelers, helpful itinerary planners, and all the practical information necessary to visit nearly 300 factories and company museums across the U.S.A., from Boeing to Ben and Jerry's, Hallmark to Harley-Davidson.

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