Meteor City, AZ Arizona is famous for giant prehistoric holes in the ground, the Grand Canyon and the Meteor Crater. As children, my brother and I visited both places with our family. We decided to revisit these sites and see them with the eyes of adults. My baby eyes had fallen out around the 7th grade, when I found a page from a Playboy magazine at the park. Lucky for me, my adult eyes grew in several months later. Double lucky for me they didn't grow in crooked and I didn't have to go through Junior High with "eye braces" or "glasses" as the doctors like to call them.

A few miles before we got to the meteor crater we saw signs for Meteor City. Wow, a whole city built around a meteor and a meteor theme. I couldn't wait to see the Meteor City town hall, the Meteor City historical museum, the Meteor City Reservoir and maybe catch a ball game at the Meteor City Asteroids baseball stadium. When we pulled off the interstate we were surprised to find Meteor City is neither a meteor nor a city. It's a geodesic dome with the words "Meteor City" and a lightning bolt painted on the side, and a rainbow mohawk running across the roof. Now the place gets tourist points for being a dome building in the middle of the desert, but other than that it isn't much of an attraction. There isn't anything there that has anything to do with a meteor. Inside the dome is a gift shop and not a very good one. It's emphasis was more on gifts relating to Route 66 than gifts relating to the giant hole in the ground a few miles away.

Author's Note: When you're rating tourist attraction gift shops you rate the "neat/cool" factor of the items in or around the place. The "neat/cool" factor is based on how loud and how often you use those words while looking at all of the crap, then dividing that number by the number of minutes you're at the place. This place would rate a "neat/cool" factor of .03 They get that high a rating just for being a geodesic dome. So just slowing down to take a look and then speeding back up to the posted speed limit would have served a better purpose. Also the rating would shoot up to a 9.

The Meteor Crater is a spot where umpteen million years ago the plot of "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" actually occurred, except the earth didn't have to deal with Bruce Willis or Elijah Wood back then. Unfortunately, the meteor hit the earth about 10 miles away from the interstate, so it's a little bit out of the way. We drove the distance, but didn't see the sight. Before you call us stupid for driving 10 miles out of our way to "not" see something, let me explain. First of all we discovered there was an eight dollar charge to see the place. Second, it was getting late. Third, there was a storm on its way. Fourth, we wanted to see the Grand Canyon that day. When we added up all these reasons, we got 18 and that was enough to make us turn around and "high tail it" to Flagstaff.

Copyright © 2000 The Van Gogh-Goghs