Welcome to the Farewell to Finder’s Fest geo-art, brought to you by the Forest Minions! This series celebrates weird and unusual things throughout the Sunshine State. Please do not go to the posted locations. Rather, solve the challenging quiz found at the bottom of each page, for the final location. For the letterbox caches, please leave the stamp in the cache. They are not trade items. For the discerning traveler, we’ve included the GPS coordinates for these bizarre locations, when we were able to establish them.
Gibtown – Location 27.8536, -82.3826
In Hillsborough County on highway 41 just ten miles south of Tampa, sits Gibsonton, once known as the strangest town in America. Called “Gibtown” by its nearly 8000 residents, it has always been the retirement or wintering home of traveling show folks. During the Depression, carnival and circus folks wintered in this part of Florida, with many of them parking their trailers in the off-season near the Alafia River. This was in the days of the big ten-in-one sideshows that featured live human oddities like the Bearded Lady, or Inferno the Fire Eater, and famous Grace McDaniels the Mule Faced Woman.
Gibtown became the retirement or home-base for a variety of show folks where next door neighbors were Priscilla the Monkey Girl, the Alligator Man, the Lobster family, or Dotty the Fat Lady. In other places these strange people would have met with some degree of social rejection, but in Gibtown they were treated as average people bonded by the nomadic lifestyle of the traveling show.
Here is the super duper, way challenging, really hard trivia question, which, if solved properly, will lead you to the final coordinates:
Question: In what US state is it technically illegal for women to skydive, on Sundays?
A: Mordor = N29° 29.877' W81° 51.641'
B: Hogwarts = N29° 29.887' W81° 51.641'
C: Florida = N29° 29.897' W81° 51.641'