World’s Largest Frying Pan

Some things are better left to the imagination. The new book 101 Places Not to See Before You Die lists some of them, in the form of vacation spots and roadside attractions that sound really awesome in the abstract but in reality are somewhere between “Meh” and “Oh my hell, please just let me go home,” ranging from Mt. Rushmore to the Jersey Turnpike to Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Since vacation planning is one of my many time-killing hobbies, I definitely want to read this. Because my favorite vacation destinations (and stops along the way) are kind of out there – figuratively, and occasionally literally.

There was the visit Grandma/rafting trip that took me over the Cherohala Skyway from Tellico Plains, Tenn., to Robbinsville, N.C. (very cool, excellent views, don’t wreck or plan to stop for a bathroom, watch out for the motorcycles). There was the one-day drive from my house to Nags Head (4 hours and 37 minutes!), around on 264, where I didn’t see another car for 50 miles, to Bath (which I’d wanted to visit since reading about it in North Carolina Legends when I was about eight years old).

I’m one of those people who love to take backroads as much as possible, stopping at any place that looks interesting. Which is how I ended up in Rose Hill.

Every time my family went to the beach on I-40, we’d pass a sign proclaiming Rose Hill the “Home of the World’s Largest Frying Pan.” And every time we passed it, we’d wonder what exactly the World’s Largest Frying Pan was… but by that point, we really just wanted to be out of that stretch of 40 where there’s not much, so we never did stop to check it out.

Right after I finished college, the guy I was dating at the time and I decided to take advantage of the fact that I finally had a job that offered vacation time, so we went to the beach for the weekend. Finally a grown up in control of the trip schedule, I’d planned a whole itinerary that included taking Highway 421 almost the whole way to Wilmington – and at long last stopping in Rose Hill.

Since the then-BF was a blacksmith, he was particularly excited about the frying pan. Was it cast whole, or in pieces? Had it been hammered out in a forge? And other metal-production questions I didn’t completely understand, but that fascinated him.

The thing about driving through eastern N.C. – with all the windows down, of course – is that you pick up some interesting smells (yay, hog farms!). Right outside of Rose Hill, we drove through a pocket of fresh cat food. I still have no idea what that smell was from. Anyway, we stopped at the first gas station we came to for directions.

I never want to assume that locals know their own landmarks – landmarks are generally without honor in their own countries – but the staff at the gas station not only knew of the World’s Largest Frying Pan, they were really excited to tell us how to get to it. You go about a half-mile down this road, one of the clerks told me – and it’s on the right. You can’t miss it.

Well, the “it’s on the right” part was true, at least. It’s in a sort of recreation area, under a shelter. And, no offense to the people of Rose Hill, but it’s hard for me to believe that what we saw under that picnic shelter was the world’s largest anything.

It’s basically a big deep-fry pit with black-painted cardboard masking around the bottom and a fake handle sticking off to one side. So it looked like a frying pan. Or, more accurately, like the set that volunteers would build for a community theatre production of “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”

The blacksmith just turned to me and said, “CARDBOARD?”

We got back in the car. We went to the beach. We never spoke of it again.