Quirky Places to Spend New Year’s Eve

It’s never too early to start pondering where to travel to ring in 2010.  Here are a few choices at the top of my list:

• San Padre Island, Texas: Free fireworks on New Year’s Eve are followed by the smartest Polar Bear Dip in the western world, where water temperatures average in the 50s and a forecasted high of 73 degrees, unofficially the balmiest Polar Bear Dip in the U.S.
  

  New Year's Day polar bear dip at San Padre Island, Texas. Notice how NOBODY'S shivering!

  Originally started by four friends on a whim, the South Padre Island Polar Bear Club has 1,200 members from all over the United States and beyond.

• Key West, Florida: Three equally bizarre celebrations make you want to clone yourself…twice.  First, at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, there’s a conch shell drop at midnight.  A few blocks away at the Bourbon Street Pub/New Orleans House complex, at midnight, a drag queen named Sushi perched in a giant red stiletto drops into the crowd.  Finally, in the historic seaport district, there’s a wench drop; a woman in full pirate regalia descends from the top of a ship mast at the stroke of midnight.

• Mobile, Alabama: It was fitting that Mobile would showcase the MoonPie on New Year’s, since the treats are traditionally thrown from the floats at the city’s annual Mardi Gras parades.  This year brings the second annual MoonPie Over Mobile New Year’s Eve Celebration, where a 600-pound electronic version of the marshmallow treat doesn’t drop but rises to light up Mobile’s skyline at the stroke of midnight.  The giant MoonPie is made of 1,500 golf ball-size lights, eight sheets of 2-by-2 square aluminum tubing, ten sheets of plywood, and a massive amount of banana-colored paper-mache.

• Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California: You can Romp with the Beasts all night at Safari West, a 400-acre wildlife preserve in Sonoma County.  While you’ll party under the watchful gaze of giraffes, gazelles, and zebras, you’ll only be allowed to dance with the two-legged ones.

• If you’re interested in oddball drops — aside from Key West, that is — Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, has an annual New Year’s Eve Droppin’ of the Carp, where a 23-pound frozen carp named Lucky wearing a crown descends into the crowd at midnight.  But perhaps Pennsylvania  has the highest per-capita ratio of weird New Year’s Eve drops than any other place on earth:  Lebanon drops a 16-foot bologna, Dillsburg boasts a giant stuffed pickle, in Carlisle they drop a car, Mechanicsburg a wrench, and in Bethlehem, a giant marshmallow Peep.

Related posts:

1. Mobile, Alabama: Mardi Gras in The OTHER Big Easy
2. Pumpkins Everywhere
3. True Confessions of a 25-Year Flight Attendant
4. The Birds
5. Mardi Gras 4 Different Ways