Strange Daze in Abita Springs
Welcome to the UCM Museum, pronounced "You-See-'Em Museum," located in picturesque (even when it's raining) town of Abita Springs, Louisiana. Although not our original destination — in fact, it wasn't even our second choice — it was by far the best time I could imagine having on a gloomy Saturday in South Louisiana. Amy and I drove over from Mobile and met up with her sister, Ashley, at the Abita Brew Pub.
Plan A: Our intentions were to take a trip to the Abita brewery, spend some time in the tasting room, take a tour of the place and then head back for a late lunch/early dinner at the pub. But, upon getting there, we soon learned that the brewery was inexplicably closed, and tours weren't being offered.
Plan B: Figure out a plan B. We had all been to Abita before, and I remembered seeing a pamphlet for a museum of oddities, a spot that Ashley learned about from a travel television show. We couldn't remember the name, but Abita's small enough that a simple stop at the fruit stand yielded directions that took us pretty much about 2 blocks, where we discovered the UCM Museum. A one-time service station along La. Highway 36, the collection of oddities and artwork has been in Abita since "around 2000," according to the self-titled curator of the place, John Preble. We were fortunate enough to arrive at this unique roadside attraction on a day when Mr. Preble (rhymes with "pebble") was manning the front desk, something we'd later learn doesn't happen all too often.
We were greeted with a welcoming sign on a mid-July afternoon in the swamps, and one look through the door at which the flashing sign pointed made us realize that we were in for a real unexpected treat. Just to the left of the door, you can see the same alligator in the first photo, clad in a red dress and Mardi Gras beads.
This sign on the front door was clearly instructions for me as I strolled through the entrance with my still-so-new Nikon D80 strung over my shoulder. I'd brought my camera for this very reason, and I wasn't about to let the day go by without some hard-core documentation.
Just inside the front door is the gift shop, half of which was once the service station, as was clear by a circa 1993 photo of the "museum" hanging on the wall. A giant crawfish dangles from the ceiling, and gag gifts, postcards and generally strange items fill the shelves.
Everywhere you look in the gift shop, intriguing things reside. From the bottle caps that cover the walls to these floating soda cans hovering above a motherboard-clad ceiling, there's eye candy everywhere. We wandered through the shop for a few minutes and soon decided the museum was calling, so we paid the ever-so-reasonable entrance fee of $3 each and opened the door to the day's alternate reality.
4 comments:
Ironic...I was raised on Long Island & reside in Abita Springs now!
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