Continuing along on my epic road trip leading to my next big stop of Chicago, I decided to take a slight detour over to see the World’s Largest Ball of Stamps. I have a couple of cherished friends that still send me cards and postcards in the mail, and one of these friends loves stamps. Like, goes to stamp shows just to look at and buy stamps, loves stamps. So mostly I made this detour to go take a picture and make her jealous that I was in the presence of stamps and she wasn’t. I then taunted her by text. (Sometimes I am not a very nice person.)
Imagine my surprise when GPS took me off the freeway and right into Boys Town. It turns out, Boys Town isn’t just a Spencer Tracy movie! Who knew?! (Okay, probably everyone, but I was still kind of surprised I could just roll right in, park, and mosey on over to the stamps.)
My favorite stamp was the old timey bicycle one below.
You can read about the history of the ball of stamps on Atlas Obscura or Roadside America, but the ball has more than 4 million stamps on it! Why? Apparently, some of the boys were bored one year. Totally makes sense to me, that’s how I started taking landmark photos. Boredom can sometimes produce amazing things.