Western Canada is littered with bizarre roadside attractions.

On a day trip through southern Alberta, for instance, you can see the world's largest teepee; a large concrete replica of the USS Enterprise—along with a townful of people wearing plastic Vulcan ears, if you're there during the right week in the summer; an eight-foot-high pinto bean wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and vest, named Pinto McBean; and a small museum devoted to preserved gophers dressed in costumes, posed, and arranged into scenes. (Gophers dressed as Mounties apprehending ne'er-do-wells, Edwardian gophers sitting down to tea.)

Heading westward, things become more surreal. Along the TransCanada Highway in British Columbia, you'll find a collection of giant crumbling concrete statues of characters from Disney films half-hidden in the forest; a staggeringly enormous collection of tiny model villages; a town that bills itself as the chainsaw carving capital of the world; and a house constructed entirely from embalming fluid bottles.

Most of them languish in disrepair. They're relics of a kinder, gentler time when people might have been inclined to drive from Calgary to Vancouver for a "family vacation", stopping to see everything along the way. I'm too young to have seen any of those roadside attractions in their heyday, but not too young to have been subjected to cross-country road trips in my family's station wagon. Not only did we stop at every roadside attraction, no matter how bizarre or macabre or outright frightening it looked from the highway, we also stopped for the night wherever was cheapest and most convenient, regardless of what sort of accommodations were on offer.

When I was ten years old, this was my introduction to the Three Valley resort: eight hours of car travel from Calgary to Revelstoke, followed by a jaunt through the embalming fluid bottle house and a family photograph with the lawn gnomes in front of it, then an hour of perspective alteration at the miniature museum and another hour tromping through the forest to see all of the crumbling Disney characters looming over me from the shadows, then back in the car for the brief final leg of that day's travel, and around a corner through an impenetrable-looking mountain pass just as the sun set to be confronted with row upon row upon row of bright red eaves and turrets arranged in a monstrous castle configuration straight out of someone's nightmare vision of old-world kitsch. It was unexpected and terrifying, and I loved it.

The resort is nestled between the Monashee Mountains and the Lake of Three Valleys, at the foot of Eagle Pass. It's on the TransCanada Highway just west of Revelstoke; if you're planning on going there, it's maybe a five-minute drive out of town and it is absolutely impossible to miss. Revelstoke itself is just east of Rogers Pass, which was the first real road and rail gateway to the west. It's a good place for a town; and a good place for a resort, too, because the drive through the pass is just harrowing enough to warrant a rest afterward.

It started out as a standard truck stop with attached motel in the 1950s, owned and operated by the Bell family, who have been renovating and expanding and re-renovating it ever since. (As far as anyone I've ever talked to about it knows, it's never not being renovated.) Half a century later, it's only a motel in the broadest sense of the word, and it boasts an enormous number of rooms and a great deal of unusual amenities on top of the normal motel fare. There's a beach next to the picturesque lake upon which resort patrons might lounge; it has its own museum of antique automobiles, collected and preserved by the Bell patriarch; and it has a ghost town (called "Three Valley Gap"), made up of old buildings collected from various towns and villages across British Columbia, brought to the resort, and restored. Last time I drove past Three Valley (a week and a half ago) I observed some more construction between the ghost town and the highway; the Three Valley website says that it's destined to be Canada's largest covered roundhouse and turntable complex, and that it will house a collection of railway memorabilia.

Tourist pamphlet propaganda aside, Three Valley is a very, very odd place. The renovations seem to have been carried out without an eye to what the complex ought to look like when it's finished. The best word to describe the layout is "chaotic". As I recall it, very few things were in places where you'd expect them to be; for instance, finding the restaurant involved navigating a narrow, poorly-lit hallway and going in a side door, because the front door was blocked off by construction equipment. The rooms we stayed in had telephones, but they didn't work; the televisions were also only for show, as they just picked up CBC, and only sporadically. The ceilings were low, and the windows were painted shut.

The picturesque lake, on closer inspection, proved to be smelly and stagnant, and the beach was a narrow strip of packed-down dirt with some park benches placed at ten-foot intervals for lounging upon. The ghost town was rickety and unimpressive by daylight, though more than sufficiently ghostly by night. I imagine that most of these problems have been renovated out of existence. I also imagine that further renovation has created new and different problems.

For all of that, there is a strange kind of beauty in the chaos. Somewhere in the middle of the complex is a sunken garden filled with rosebushes and surrounded on all sides by haphazardly laid out bits of motel; I stumbled across it once by accident, looking for the swimming pool, and couldn't find it again later on. The Bell family still owns and operates Three Valley, and from all appearances they're very happy doing it; there are Bell children manning the registration desk and guiding tours in the museums, and Bell grandchildren staffing the restaurant, and somewhere in the middle of it the Bells that built the original truck stop and motel are still merrily overseeing its expansion.

It fits in perfectly with its surroundings, the miniature museum and the Disney characters in the forest and the embalming fluid bottle house. The entire complex as I remember it is creepy and off-putting, but it's there because someone decided to start a self-contained motel empire in the middle of nowhere in particular, and they did it. It is weird, and it is admirable, and it is worth stopping in briefly on your way past it just to admire the chaos and its grandeur.

Some information from the Three Valley website, but most from tourist pamphlets and memories of too many road trips.