Stuck on You

Winona, originally uploaded by William 74.

Winona, Minnesota is in the southeastern corner of the state, in the picturesque bluff country along the Mississippi River. It's most well known landmark is Sugar Loaf, a rocky outcrop that overlooks Lake Winona and the town itself. Comprised of limestone, Sugar Loaf was created by many years of limestone quarrying, stone that went into the buildings and sidewalks of the town below. Mining stopped in the 1880's, and the bluff quickly became a landmark. This old Cadillac visited there, probably sometime in the sixties.

I love old travel stickers. I think they make a great addition to an old car, just the perfect period detail to add to the window of your Chevy Nomad or Studebaker Commander. I like the designs-they always seem to have a cartoonish style that features thick lines and bright, accurately unrealistic colors. The typefaces are always bold and appropriately exciting-I really like the font used for "Minnesota" on this one, which looks like the script from one of the cars it would have been attached to. Like those old postcards that say "Greetings from Huntsville, Alabama!" with the big letters that have pictures of state landmarks in them, they evoke a certain era of American travel, when you loaded up the kids and hit the open road.

I am pretty sure that such souvenir stickers are still made, although I think the sheer variety of them is smaller than it was back in the day. My dream job is to travel the highways and byways of America in a 1966 Mustang, filling up the windows with stickers.

Rest assured, I'll be bothering you with some more travel stickers.