Finally a tea companion to the roadside attraction / big coffee pot series! This is definitely one to add to my travel plans. If I ever get to China to visit the Tea & Horse Road, this will be on my list of other places to visit!
It's located in Changshu, in the Jiangsu province of east China. A ginormous teapot (5.5 meters tall) is pouring "tea" into a bowl. Made of reinforced contrete, it took five artisans thirty days to finish.
Pretty cool!
When I started my travelogue list / map way back when, I was intent on mapping out destinations to visit where I could have good coffee, good tea, as well as visit roadside attractions and oddities. I actually started a graphical map that I could click on various locations and get the information about that site. But my travel project got stalled, partly because it's such a lot of work!
Enter MapMuse! This is a still-new resource that offers maps showing locations of specific interests. Check this out:
This puppy here shows locations of independent coffee houses across the U.S. Pretty cool, huh? If you click on a dark blob, you narrow it down by region, and you can continue refining your search, right down to the cross streets.
They do have a category for brands -- the perfect resource if you're trying to get into the Guinness World Book of Records by slurping frappaccino at every single Starbucks in every single town in the U.S.
You can also search the category results by zip code, which is always handy. But this is a great service for folx going into a strange city, who don't perhaps know the streets or zip codes or names of businesses to search by.
There is no interest group for tea, unfortunately. YET. I submitted a request for it, especially for locations serving high tea or afternoon tea. Once they add tea houses, this will be the ULTIMATE travel resource.
I bought more stuff. I couldn't help it, and it's not my fault, and ... other blame-diverting words.
It all started here with a blogpost about this teapot, shaped like an espresso maker. I think this so cool! I want one!! It's all mixed up, just like me. Then I just need to find a coffee maker shaped like a teapot. Heh.
So I went in search, but I couldn't find anything on it. Nada. Zippo. And Colin of the CoffeeCrew doesn't say where he found it.
I tried the Teapots, Teapots blog, but couldn't find it there either. BUT, I did find a post about interesting spot called TeaPot Island in Kent. The photo shows a woman standing next to a ginormous teapot fountain. Another must-visit place to add to my travelogue, for sure! There's not much detail on the Teapot Island website, but they do have a VERY interesting photo gallery of unusual teapots.
That was good for an hours' worth of diversion, but then I continued my search, and landed eventually at The English Tea Store, where they're having a closeout sale on some of their teapots! So ... well, you know how it is. I had to. It was a moral imperative. I bought two Amsterdam teapots, one large, one smallish. Very cute, very cheap, even with shipping. See, isn't it cute?
I am now putting the credit card away, in a box, high on a shelf, behind something really heavy and difficult to move.
Cindy of Cuppa Tea & a Blog has been traveling, but she's back home now and has posted some of her experiences with traveling with tea. Some good tips there for the tea-loving traveler.
I'm looking forward to hearing some of her travel stories as well. Hopefully she'll give me some more great places to put on my travel itinerary!
Ran across this article on Tea Talk stating that a new section of the ancient Tea & Horse road has been found. At least I think that's what it said. I tried to access the news source, but I can't read Chinese, so I'm SOL. A quick search on the net turned up lots of stuff about the Tea & Horse Road, but nothing recent about a leg rediscovered.
This is a fascinating bit of history. According to The Silk Road Foundation:
"Few people have realized how vast and unprecedented this sudden expansion of caravan traffic between India and China was, or how important. It was a unique and spec-tacular phenomenon. No complete story has yet been written about it, but it will always live in my memory as one of the great adventures of mankind. Moreover, it demonstrated to the world very convincingly that, should all modern means of com-munication and transpor-tation be destroyed by some atomic cataclysm, the humble horse, man’s oldest friend, is ever ready to forge again a link between scattered peoples and nations" [Goullart 1955: 88].
Some of the towns and villages along the road have been listed among the most important international sites for historic preservation. And apparently quite a few tourists are drawn to travel the Tea & Horse Caravan each year. Looks like a mighty long trek. All the way from Southern China to India? Maybe they're just visiting portions with key villages.
I found a coupla sites offering guided tours. This one has one called "25 day TEA HORSE ROAD EXPEDITION", and it's got a warning on it: "This is a long and winding journey on challenging and dangerous unpaved roads". I don't mind challenging roads. As long as I can stop for a cuppa tea along the way. This one's definitely going on my travel itinerary.
When last I woke up craving crumpets, I posted about a little shop in Seattle that made such good crumpets it made my mouth water just remembering. Well, Cindy, of Cup of Tea & a Blog, has posted a review of that very shop! It's called, not surprisingly, The Crumpet Shop. I'm glad to hear that she enjoyed it as much as I did. *sigh* I really do have to get going on my travel plans. Seattle in August maybe?
Guess I'm going to Canada! I'm adding this to my travelogue, for sure. (Will try to have a map online soon ... )
This one is supposedly the world's largest coffee pot. It's located in Davidson, Saskatchewan, measures 24 feet (7.3 meters) tall, is made of sheet metal, and could hold 150,000 8-ounce cups of coffee, according to the coolquiz.com trivia list.
It was built in 1999 "to symbolize Davidson's friendliness and hospitality." More photos and info here.
There are quite a lot of roadside attractions across Canada. I might have to visit some of the other sites while I'm up there. In Saskatchewan alone I could visit a giant avocet, a big indian head, Ralph the Grasshopper, and the world's largest oil can!
Here's another roadside attraction for my travelogue. This little coffee shop is famous for the big cup (which looks kind of like a flying saucer) crashing into its roof, and for the fact that Jerry "Beaver" Mathers inaugurated it when the place opened.
Milwaukee Coffee, 5010 W. Vliet St., Milwaukee, WI
From Milwaukee College Life: Coffee Shops, which lists tea shops as well as coffee shops, so I'll have plenty to do while I'm there.
Just for fun, I searched the Roadside America site for tea stuff. The teapot gas station shown on the coffee page couldn't be the only tea attraction in the whole U.S.! There wasn't much more, but I did find these three (I couldn't find the direct link for this, but if you search on "tea" you'll find the following info):
Historic Steaming Kettle - Boston, Massachusetts
Right outside of Government Center station of the Mass T is a 227 Gallon giant Tea Pot that has steam coming out the spout. Originally cast in 1873 for a tea company, it is now outside the "Steaming Kettle" Starbucks Store. [Carl and Anne Ambrose, 01/08/2005]
Directions: 63-65 Court Street, Boston, Massachusetts.
Phone: 617-227-2284
World's Largest Teapot Collection - Trenton, Tennessee
World's Largest Teapot - Chester, West Virginia - Directions here and GoogleMap here
You've gotta see this. In fact, if ever get another vacation, *I* gotta see this.
Roadside America describes for us in detail - with pictures, directions and other interesting factoids - these enormous coffee pots (and one tea pot), peppered all over the U.S., enormous roadside attractions for the coffee lover.
Shown here are the "Swedish-style" pot, painted with decorative hearts and flowers of Stanton, Iowa, and complimentary coffee cup water tower erected in 2000. Interesting side note about Stanton:
One of the few towns with a semi-legitimate coffee claim-to-fame, Stanton is the home of "Mrs. Olson." Or, at least, was the home of an actress -- stage name Virginia Christine -- made famous as Folgers' Mrs. Olson, hawking their "mountain grown" coffee in TV commercials and on the sides of coffee cans.
Some of the coffee pot attractions are buildings in the shape of coffee pots, some are just big structures originally designed to draw in tourists, interestingly, not all for coffee shops or restaurants. The oldest is a 12 foot tall silver-metallic coffee pot erected around 1860, created to advertise a silversmith!
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