The latest instalment of Messy Nessy Chic's long-running "13 Things I Found on the Internet Today" series — a 250th-anniversary salute to American readers, filed from Paris — packs in enough oddball material to fill a road trip itinerary. Here are the stories with real travel legs.

The headline grabber: the Longaberger headquarters in Newark, Ohio, is back on the market at US$8.5 million. Nearly thirty years after opening, the seven-storey building shaped like the company's famous woven picnic basket remains one of the most recognisable pieces of corporate architecture in the United States, and it's a genuinely weird roadside stop for anyone driving through central Ohio.

Also flagged: NASA's colossal wind tunnels, the largest of which — the 80-by-120-foot tunnel at the Ames Research Center in California — is still running, plus Kellie Talbot's oil paintings of fading American neon signs, and New York City's last surviving column factory.

For film and culture buffs, there's a spotlight on the Nicholas Brothers' jaw-dropping routine in 1943's Stormy Weather, widely considered among the greatest dance sequences in American cinema. Fayard and Harold rose out of vaudeville and the Harlem Renaissance and performed into the 1990s.

The Paris thread runs strong. Erika "Aya" Eiffel, the American who held a commitment ceremony with the Eiffel Tower in 2007, founded OS Internationale for people who form deep attachments to objects; she credits her relationship with her competition bow for her archery success. There's also a rare 1929 guidebook, "Paris is a Woman's Town" by Helen Josephy and Mary Margaret McBride, written for American women travelling solo — its digitised pages cover everything from 1920s couture shopping to five pages of advice on hiring gigolos. And a 1913 love letter from caricaturist Alfred Frueh, which unfolds into a miniature art gallery, sits in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, ready to prep anyone for a gallery marathon of their own.

The richest nugget for travellers: Edward Hopper spent time in Paris three times between 1906 and 1910, lodging at 48 Rue de Lille in the seventh arrondissement. He sketched along the Seine, in the Latin Quarter and around Belleville, producing some forty oils and thirty watercolours that American critics initially panned. His dismissive claim that "Paris had no great or immediate impact" on him reads rather differently against those early canvases.

Rounding out the list: WWI-era posters from the American Committee for Relief in the Near East, which aided displaced Syrians, Armenians, Persians and Greeks from 1915 onward.

It's a grab-bag, but a good one — equal parts Americana road-trip inspiration (Ohio's basket building, NASA Ames) and a fresh lens on Paris for anyone who thinks they've seen it all. Credit to Messy Nessy Chic for the round-up.