Rock City

Rock City is a legendary club, situated on Nottingham'sTalbot street (just up from Nottingham Trent University) which provides a home to students, metalheads, punks and all manner of drunk who like cheap drinks and never seem to manage to meet any form of dresscode.

Voted best rock club by readers of Kerrang! magazine it hosts all manner of bands, from the upcoming hopefuls to major well-known bands, and the odd obscure foreign punkband on the way.

Aside from the bands there are three regular nights. Thursday is student night with dirt cheap drinks and a fine balance of guitar-driven rock diluted with pure unfiltered cheese. If Britney Spears makes you want to vomit, you'd better head down to the basement (disco-II) for a bit of a mosh.

Friday nights are 'Love Shack'. If you love the 80's then you'll love this. Despite my previous mention of a lack of a dress code Love Shack has a strict shirt and shoes policy so all you rockers might want to go to The Old Angel instead.

Saturday is *the* night to be in rock city - 3 rooms (even rock citys sister-club, 'The Rig' is opened up) catering for varied rock tastes, fairly cheap beer and plenty of laughs. Fantastic.

The only other things to mention are that various corners of the club do amass quite a large amount of broken glass, if the ceiling was covered with the same substance as the floor then you'd be able to walk on it, the moshpit is usually so soaked in beer you can't stand up around it and the toilets are best described as 'festival grade'

Also a classic tourist trap on Lookout Mountain, GA, next to Chattanooga, TN. See 7 states! Fairyland Caverns! Mother Goose Village! Once a beautiful private park with a trail through unusual natural formations and past waterfalls and scenic views. They opened to the public in the 20s. In the 50s they added fairy-tale/mother-goose-themed installations to attract families travelling to and from Florida. Phenomenal kitsch: dioramas of various sizes depicting Red Riding Hood and the like, painted with phosphorescent paint under black lights. Scultpures of Gnomes 'hiding' among the natural scenery. The entrance to Fairyland Caverns is a man-made tunnel with quartz crystals and geodes lining the walls and dozens of Barbie dolls in home-made fairy costumes hanging from the ceiling by fishing line. Hard to imagine any child actually interested in this place.

For decades Rock City employed a guy who travelled around the South offering to paint people's barns, if they were close enough to the highway, for free, but they had to agree to allowing him to pain the walls red and the roof black with 'See Rock City!' on it in big white letters. This one man painted thousands of barns, and hundreds can still be found along rural highways throughout the South. Rock City pioneered long-distance tourist trap roadside advertising, inspiring but never surpassed by Wall Drug and South of the Border. They also managed to get people to buy miniature See Rock City! barn birdhouses and place them in their front yards around the world.

See Rock City!

Kansas has its own Rock City tourist stop near Minneapolis, Kansas. It's a five acre park filled with several naturally-formed boulders as large as houses and hundreds of car-sized rocks spread out over an area the size of two football fields. The huge rocks look oddly out-of-place in the flat Kansas landscape. The scenic Solomon River Valley provides a beautiful backdrop for the park. It is by far the largest example in the world of its kind. This is a interesting diversion for people making the long trip across Kansas along interstate I-70. It's also a popular field trip destination for children.

Geologists think the rocks were formed millions of years ago from Dakota Sandstone, which had been deposited when areas of Kansas were covered by an inland sea. After the sea water receded, the bottom of the sea became the land surface. Ground water containing dissolved calcium carbonate seeped through the porous sandstone, cementing the sand grains together in a process known as concretion. The rocks slowly increased in size as additional layers of sand were cemented together. Over time the looser surrounding sandstone was eroded by wind and rain, lowering the land surface. This left many of the concretions totally exposed, while others still remain partially embedded.

Rock City is run as a public park by a local non-profit corporation named Rock City, Inc. A gift shop at the park sells crafts from local artisans. It's open 9am to 5pm daily from May 1 to September 1. Admission is $3 for adults and $. 50 for children.

The neatest thing about the park is that visitors, including children, are allowed to lean, sit, stand, or climb on any of the rocks. Children can spend hours playing on the odd structures.

Address:
Rock City, Inc.
1051 Ivy Road
Minneapolis, KS 67467-8755

Telephone: 785-392-3068

Directions: From interstate highway I-70 take US-81 north to KS-18 west to KS-106 north. You will see Rock City signs on I-70 that will point out the way.

3.6 miles southwest of Minneapolis, Kansas
20 miles north of Salina, Kansas
109 miles north of Wichita, Kansas
131 miles west of Topeka, Kansas
193 miles west of Kansas City, Missouri