Bigfoot isn’t the sole object of Seattle’s large foot obsession. Tucked into the Pike Place Market under the main arcade, the Giant Shoe Museum proves it’s not the size of the museum that counts, but the size of the shoe. Just a dollar’s worth of quarters will reveal to you sizeable shoes at which to gawk and apply your own theories as regards to common foot size stereotypes. One thing’s for certain: the clown shoe they have on display looks like a creepy deflated dong.

My father has always been a car guy. Not in the “let’s take this engine apart and put it back together” sense, but in the “this looks sleek and powerful, let’s see how fast it goes” sense. I vividly remember him borrowing a friend’s Corvette and taking my brother and I on screaming joyrides on dark Wisconsin backroads, complete with warnings that we were never to tell Mom how fast we really went. There was always a stack of Car & Driver magazines next to the recliner, and I’d thumb through them, picking out my favorites. In my own way, I’m now a car girl. I’m not as handy under the hood as I’d like to be, and I’ll never get my hands on the Lotus Elise I so coveted as a teen, but I’m in love with the freedom that cars represent. While I’ve handled not owning a car just fine, I loathe being reliant on mass transit or on the kindness of friends. Being behind the wheel opens up a world of possibilities. If I don’t like the situation I’m in, I can always pack up the car and leave…and that’s how I ended up in Seattle almost ten years ago. I crammed everything I could fit into my car and hit the road, moving into the area sight unseen.

Although I have no intention of leaving the greater Seattle area any time soon, I still love the open road, and (as evidenced by this blog), take road trips as often as I can manage. America’s Car Museum in Tacoma, Washington, manages to appeal to every type of car lover, from the mechanic to the aesthetic to the symbol. They cover what cars have been from their earliest stages, to what they are becoming, from the early coachbuilt models for the super-rich to a completely solar-powered car, from art car to turbocharged, from ubiquitous hippie wagon to ultra-luxe one-of-a-kind. Every few steps, I found a new favorite, and by the time I left, I had a newfound appreciation for all things automotive.

The average American eats about 150 bananas per year. Ann Lovell, owner of Bananas Antiques and collector/curator of the attached Auburn Banana Museum, finds that number a little low for her tastes. “I average 365 a year,” she laughs. Ann started collecting banana memorabilia almost thirty years ago; she found their cheerful yellow color and place in American history a-peel-ing, and things escalated from there. She now has over 6,000 banana items that she rotates through the museum, from tintypes of people posing with bananas (which used to be considered a rich man’s luxury fruit) to banana advertisements and banana instruments.

Our banana is not our grandparents’ banana, and a large portion of Ann’s collection is not based on the banana we enjoy today. Bananas are a monogenetic cultivar, which makes them highly susceptible to disease; prior to 1960, the main varietal grown and consumed in Europe and the Americas was the Gros Michel. Panama disease eventually ran rampant through the groves and wiped out the plants, and the Cavendish was selected as its replacement for large scale growth and export, due to its resistance to Panama disease. The Gros Michel isn’t extinct, but it’s no longer viable to be grown in mass quantities for export. The Cavendish is what you see on grocery store shelves today. However, another disease has reared its ugly head among the Cavendish: Black Sigatoka, and it’s expected that within 10 to 20 years, we’ll be seeing a different varietal of banana in stores, possibly the Goldfinger: a thicker, squat fruit with a reddish skin already enjoyed in Australia.

As a fearless reporter who dares to ask the hard-hitting questions, I had an important question. “So…Dole or Chiquita?” “I prefer organic, actually! The flavor is better, you should definitely try one if you get an opportunity.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’m mildly banana intolerant.