The Big Apple rises over Highway 401. Up in Kenora there's giant fish called Husky the Muskie towering overhead. Down under, they look up to the Giant Prawn.
Every day oversized roadside attractions of various shapes – and dubious taste - draw scores of travelers who take pictures of their friends and families at such colossal curiosities found all over the globe.
Call them kings of kitsch. There's the Big Duck outside New York City, the giant curling rock in Manitoba, and don't forget the Big Banana in Australia or the Giant Easter Egg in Alberta.
If you're in Ontario, it's hard to miss the Big Apple, that 12 metre-high, bright red, pomaceous fruit gracing a field as you drive along Highway 401 between Toronto and Kingston.
Billed as the largest in the world, the Big Apple has an observation deck, nearby restaurant, petting zoo and they sell various baked goods made with — no surprise — apples.
“It is wonderful to have as an identifier for our community, which is a major apple growing area,” said Rebecca Goddard-Sarria, community development officer with the Township of Cramahe.
More than 500,000 people visit the Big Apple annually. Modeled on Australia's famous Big Pineapple in Woombye, it was built out of fiberglass and foam surrounding a metal structure in 1987.
Canadians, Americans, Australians and their Kiwi cousins in New Zealand uniquely share an enormous passion for way much larger-than-life objects of interest, usually situated along their highways.
From the jumbo shrimp found at numerous businesses along the U.S. Gulf coast to the planet's top banana at Coffs Harbour on the Pacific coast between Sydney and Brisbane, Australia, many lay a claim to being the world's largest and some actually have Guinness World Record certification to prove it.
And while the sizable crustaceans perched above various seafood eateries and bait shops from the Florida Keys to Galveston, Texas, are pretty big, they all pale to the giant prawn atop a former seafood restaurant and tourist centre in Ballina, on Australia's west coast.
Some gigantic items are stand alone icons drawing attention to the community they represent, like Sudbury's 10-metre Big Nickel, paying homage to the local nickel mining industry.
Others trying to cash in on their own coin's notoriety include Boiestown, New Brunswick and Iowa City, Iowa's wooden nickels, but they are dwarfed by the stature and metal content of Sudbury's huge five-cent piece.
Other biggies such as the Aussie top banana, which first appeared on a plantation's roadside fruit stand in 1964, have grown into major amusement parks and are destinations rather than mere extra-large roadside oddities.
“The Big Banana has got everything, from the waterslides to the ice skating rink to the toboggan to the food, especially the choc coated bananas. Plus its good education about bananas,” said visitor Kath Webber.
Alberta holds Canada's record with more than a dozen major gargantuan items. Included are the seven-metre tall mushrooms in the town of Vilna, Drumheller's eight-storey high T-Rex (about four and a half times taller than the original terrifying prehistoric reptile king) and Vegreville's gigantic Ukrainian Easter Egg.
It's always a safe assumption that everything is bigger in Texas, home the world's largest caterpillar, fire hydrant, pecan, rattlesnake, roadrunner and watermelon, just to name a few.
Along with the Lone Star state, California, Ohio, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin are major American biggie boosters.
The roadside “world's largest” in those states include a giant basket, pumpkin, snowman, various fish, birds and animals, balls of twine, yo-yo, artichoke, corkscrew, paper cup, hamburger and doughnut just to name a baker's dozen.
Then there are the rafts of oversized Adirondack and Muskoka chairs in various rural and cottage country areas on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, including the town of Varney on Highway 6, south of Owen Sound, Ontario.
Australians boast scores of titanic totems representing the animal kingdom from sheep to crocs, countless fruits and vegetables, and naturally the largest boomerang in the world.
Not to be outdone, the Tasmanians' giant Tasmanian Devil, of Mole Creek, is one of the island's most cherished big critters.
While the Aussies and their neighbours in New Zealand, more than 2,000 km away across the Tasman Sea, both tout the world's largest trout, it is the Kiwis who dominate when it comes to the furry little round fruit from Te Puke, the “kiwifruit capital of the world” where the famous giant kiwi constantly draws ogling onlookers.
Australians also claim their mega-sized sundial in Singleton, is the biggest in the southern hemisphere, while the Indians at Jantar Mantar, in Jaipur, herald theirs as the “world's largest”.
Cataloguing the world's biggest items is in itself an enormous project, matched only by the equally daunting task of listing the larger than life replicas of famous people from Paul Bunyan, the lumber jack of Midwestern American and Canadian folklore, to the Australian outlaw/hero of the late 1800s, Ned Kelly.
