September 2, 2019

Schaefer Auto Art

By roadsrus

Big Folk Art exhibits seem to be popping up all around the US.  In the past couple of years, Ruth & I have been to Houston’s Smither and Eclectic Menagerie Parks, the Tinkertown Museum on the east side of Sandia Peak near Albuquerque, the Mystery Castle south of Phoenix, and the fading Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe.  I have written about all of these.  There’s an actual Folk Art Park in Atlanta, GA, a Coral Castle in Homestead, FL that may blow away soon, something called the Forevertron in Sumpter, WI, and the Garden of Eden in Lucas, KS.   These I have yet to visit, but they all sound goofy and interesting.  I recently saw Schaefer’s Auto Art on Hershey Road near Erie, PA on a cold, snowy, blustery spring day.  If you’re ever in the area, check it out.

Schaefer’s Auto Art has been around for more than 25 years.  Atlas Obscura, my source of info about it, calls it unusual, out of the ordinary, and an unconventional sculpture garden.  It is all three.  Welder and fabricator Richard Schaefer created this roadside park.  It’s free and you can just leave your car along the road and wander around it for as long as it lasts.

There’s a clever Volkswagen spider, a monstrous black and yellow bug made from an unidentifiable car, a 40 foot red and white rocket, a dilapidated, leaning police car, and several more sculptures.  My favorite is the cute, 2-headed dinosaur.  I hope that Richard’s creative juices keep flowing and that he continues to make these playful creations, but I suspect that Schaefer’s Auto Art won’t last as long as, say, Smither Park.  See Schaefer’s handiwork before his vehicles are either hauled to a museum or a junkyard.

Hank

About roadsrus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roadsrus
This entry was posted on Monday, September 2nd, 2019 at 8:52 pm and posted in Pennsylvania. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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