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Hidden on a small island in the middle of Mahón Harbour, the Lazareto of Menorca is one of Europe's largest and best-preserved maritime quarantine stations. Built during the 19th century, it was designed to isolate ships, passengers, and cargo arriving from ports affected by deadly diseases such as plague, cholera, and yellow fever. Long before antibiotics and vaccines, quarantine was one of the few effective ways to stop epidemics from spreading across Europe. The complex functioned like a self-contained world. High walls separated different quarantine areas, while hospitals, chapels, gardens, warehouses, and living quarters allowed hundreds of people to remain isolated for weeks. Every space was carefully planned to prevent contact between those under observation and the outside world. Today, visitors can walk through this remarkably intact complex and explore a forgotten chapter in the history of public health. Surrounded by the calm waters of Mahón Harbour, the island offers a striking contrast between its peaceful setting and the dramatic stories of fear, hope, and survival that unfolded within its walls.
Most walkers leave Skaftafell aiming at Svartifoss, but the trail offers an earlier surprise. Hundafoss drops through Bæjargil in a narrow, green-sided gorge, giving the uphill approach a quieter prelude before the main waterfall’s basalt-column setting. Its smaller scale is part of the charm. Summer foliage can partly hide the first angle, while a clearer side view makes the slender fall and dark gorge easier to read. Hundafoss feels less like a roadside checklist stop and more like a detail revealed by following the trail. The waterfall works best as part of the Svartifoss walk, not as a separate South Coast detour. Continue only when trail conditions, weather, daylight, and the group’s walking margin support the wider Skaftafell plan.
On Saturday, 2nd August 1980, at 10.25 am, a bomb exploded in the 2nd-class waiting room at Bologna Centrale. The blast affected the surrounding areas of the station, causing a part of the building to collapse and also struck the stationary Ancona–Chiasso train, standing at platform one. At the time of the explosion the station was busy with commuters. Among those present were students and workers on their daily commute and families and travellers from various Italian cities and other countries on their summer holidays. The attack killed 85 people and injured a further 200 travellers. The youngest victim was only 3 years old, the oldest 86, with many victims been young adults in their teens and twenties. The Bologna Centrale Bombing is the most deadly massacre to have occurred in Italy during the years of the ‘strategy of tension’, a period marked by terrorism and political violence. The bomb left a physical gash in the wall of the waiting room. During the reconstruction of the station, a part of the wall was preserved as a memorial in the current waiting room. Anyone passing through can still see the exact location of the explosion and read the names engraved on the memorial plaque. Every year, Bologna commemorates the 85 victims and their families. At 10.25 am, on the 2nd August, the city observes a minute’s silence in front of the station.
On August 2, 2027, the Moon's shadow will cross southern Spain, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. Near Luxor, in the Nile Valley, totality will last six minutes and twenty-three seconds. That number is the whole story. Most total eclipses give you two or three minutes. The celebrated North American eclipse of 2024 managed four and a half at its very best. Six minutes and twenty-three seconds is the longest totality available on easily accessible land until the year 2114 — eighty-seven years from now, which for most readers of this sentence means: this one, or none. It gets better. Luxor in August has a cloud cover probability somewhere between one and twenty percent, close to the highest certainty an eclipse chaser can buy anywhere on Earth. The path across central Egypt is roughly 250 kilometres wide. And the shadow falls across the greatest concentration of ancient monuments in the world, built by a civilisation that organised its entire cosmology around the sun going away and coming back. Eclipse chasers have been calling it the eclipse of the century since 2024. They are not exaggerating, and hotels along the path have been selling out for a year already. Why Luxor, specifically The path of totality crosses ten countries. Only a handful are realistic destinations, and one is clearly best. Luxor sits close to the centre line, gets close to the maximum duration available anywhere, and — unlike most of the path — has an airport, hotels, and infrastructure built for large numbers of visitors. Maximum eclipse falls around 1:05 in the afternoon local time, with the sun 82 degrees above the horizon, almost directly overhead. Cairo is not in the path. This is the single most common planning error and it is worth stating plainly: you can stand in Cairo on August 2, 2027 and see a partial eclipse, which is to a total eclipse roughly what a photograph of a meal is to dinner. Aswan gets four to five minutes. Luxor gets the full six. The reason to be there rather than anywhere else Ancient Egypt built machines for tracking the sun, and several of them still work. The clearest is the Temple of Abu Simbel, completed around 1244 BCE for Rameses the Great — the pharaoh who became Shelley's Ozymandias. Four colossal statues, each twenty metres high, face the desert. But the building's real achievement is hidden inside: it was constructed along the axis of the sun, so that on two days a year light travels the length of the temple and floods the innermost sanctum, illuminating three of the four figures seated there. Ra, Amun, and Rameses himself. Only the fourth, Ptah, the creator-god, is left in shadow. The temple was cut apart and moved wholesale in the 1960s to save it from the rising water behind the Aswan High Dam — its statues cut into three-ton blocks, the mountain it was carved into lifted along with it. UNESCO's World Heritage Convention was created, in fact, in order to do this. It still works. Every February 22nd and October 22nd, at dawn, the light still arrives. In Luxor itself, the Colossi of Memnon have stood for 3,400 years and were, for centuries, an acoustic wonder of the ancient world — the northern statue famous throughout the Roman Empire for the sound it made at dawn. Atlas Obscura's Luxor entries also include the tomb of Nefertari, called the Sistine Chapel of Egypt for its paintings, the tomb of Rekhmire, and Deir el-Medina — the village called Set Maat, the Place of Truth, where the workers who cut the royal tombs lived and left behind the most complete surviving record of ordinary life in the ancient world. For wider context, Atlas Obscura's collection on ruins of ancient religious cults places Abu Simbel alongside the other sites where people built permanent architecture around impermanent gods, and the Egypt destination guide holds 67 places and many stories. The rest of the path, honestly The shadow makes landfall in southern Spain — Cádiz is in the path, as is Gibraltar — before crossing to Tangier in Morocco. Both are legitimate alternatives with real advantages: easier logistics for European travellers, far shorter flights, and cities worth visiting for their own sake. The trade-off is duration. Totality at the Spanish end is a fraction of what Luxor gets, and August cloud risk on the Atlantic coast is higher than in the Egyptian desert. If duration is what you came for, go to Egypt. If you simply want to see one, Spain is a great deal less complicated. The path also crosses Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Somalia. Several are subject to serious travel advisories and some are effectively closed to leisure travel. Check your own government's current guidance before planning anything, and treat any operator selling packages to a place your foreign ministry advises against with real scepticism. An eclipse is six minutes long. It is not worth it. What to do with the twelve months Book now, and book flexibly. Hotels along the Egyptian path have been filling since 2024 and prices are climbing. This is the rare trip where booking eighteen months out is not excessive. Decide between the city and the desert. Luxor gets the crowds and the monuments; the point of greatest duration falls just southeast of the city, in open desert between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea. A few seconds more, and considerably fewer people. Get proper eclipse glasses, and understand that they come off only during totality and go straight back on the moment the sun reappears. Give yourself days on either side. August in Upper Egypt is extremely hot, and the monuments deserve more than a rushed morning. The eclipse is six minutes. The trip should not be built around six minutes. And be somewhere you'd want to be anyway. Cloud is unlikely in Luxor but not impossible, and the only insurance against an eclipse that doesn't happen is a destination worth the journey regardless. On this particular path, that problem solves itself.
At Beer Spa Bernard, you can soak in a steaming hot tub infused with hops, malt, brewers yeast, and other beer ingredients while pouring yourself unlimited Czech Bernard Beer from the tap beside your private tub. Inspired by centuries-old Central European brewing traditions, the experience combines spa relaxation with Czech's famous beer culture in a way that is equal parts wellness and unique to Prague. Beer Spa Bernard is a family oriented, children are welcome to accompany adults and, instead of unlimited beer, kids will receive unlimited juice. Wine is also available for adults as well. Whether you visit for a spa day or a beer day, you will leave with an unforgettable experience as it is one of Prague's most unique and quirky attractions.
The Late Baroque towns of the Val di Noto are a UNESCO World heritage site made up of eight towns in southeastern Sicily. Rebuilt in a style unique to the island after the devastating earthquake of 1693, an estimated 7.4 on the magnitude scale, causing around 60,000 casualties. Many towns in southeastern Sicily were completely razed, including the medieval town of Noto, with half of its residents killed by the earthquake. Upon rebuilding Noto, the decision was made to relocate it closer to the Ionian coast, about 10km south of the destroyed former settlement. New Noto was built on flatter land, with its buildings more spread out for aesthetic and safety reasons, aimed at avoiding the domino-like effect that the cramped buildings of the old town had succumbed to during the earthquake. Construction on the town's cathedral began in the early 18th century. Upon its eventual completion in 1776, it was one of the town's grandest structures, and was dedicated to St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra. The first sense of grandeur and occasion for many visitors will be climbing the massive grand staircase to cathedral's giant bronze front door. The original ornate interior was destroyed when the cathedral's dome, and much of the roof, collapsed in 1996, owing to structural weakening from an earthquake in 1990, combined with sub-par remedial work from previous renovations. After the dome's reconstruction was completed in 2007, the inside of the church was painted mostly white. While the present-day interior looks somewhat plain, the imposing lecturn and cherub adorned chancel provide Baroque intricacies to match the cathedral's outer features. Noto is regarded as the capital of Sicilian Baroque, with the Cattedrale di San Nicolò viewed as a seminal building, and part of the final flourish of the Baroque style in Europe. The warm golden hues that most of the town is draped in, comes from the pale yellow sandstone used during its early formation. Nowhere does this magical glow emanate from more brightly than from the town's stunning cathedral centerpiece.
For years, the real-world location of the original Backrooms photo remained a total mystery. In 2024, dedicated internet sleuths traced the image back to a 2003 renovation photo taken inside this Oshkosh building while it was being converted from an old furniture store. Today, the building houses John's Hobbies. While the infamous yellow walls have been completely remodelled, the upper floor where the picture was taken now operates as an RC car racetrack, drawing internet culture enthusiasts from all over the world.
Cornwall is one of the most unique counties of the United Kingdom, where folklore, myth and history frequently merge to create beautifully characterful communities with people as vibrant as the tales that are shared. One of these communities is Hayle. Hayle’s history stems back to the Bronze Age but its more recent past (past few centuries) has been grounded in mining and shipping, two significant industries that employed lots of people. This obviously resulted in several Inns being set up, including one established to the north of Hayle some time in the 13th or 14th Century, called The New Inn. A nearby well, possibly the holy well of St.Phillacks (or St.Piala's) Well, given its close proximity to the pub, was used by the Inn to brew Cornish Ale. From this point onwards, we now venture firmly into territory that blurs history, with the allure of folklore, myth and stories that have been passed down through time and generations. What is true and what is made up, is now up to you to decide. As the pub’s version of the tale goes, one morning, the local Innkeeper pulled up the bucket from the well as he had done many times before. To his shock and horror, the bucket was filled with blood. An investigation found a body at the bottom of the well that was so horribly mutilated, it was never properly identified. The only theory behind the victim is that a local tax collector stumbled upon some bandits and met a brutal end before his corpse was dishonourably dumped down the well. A different theory based in science is the local tin mining operations tinged the local soil with minerals, which then allowed rainwater which flowed into the well, to run red. The New Inn was locally referred to informally as The Bucket of Blood. This unofficial name caught on so well that in the end, the Landlord grew tired of trying to fight the story and renamed the Inn: The Bucket of Blood. A name that sticks to this very day. Another myth that cements this wells mysterious past comes from the 18th century and is tied to a very real man named: Erasmus Pascoes, a local resident and eventually, Sheriff. Legends states he used the holy well to wash his diseased dog but shortly following this simple act of cleaning his companion, the local community fell ill. Explantions about this episode of Hayles history ranged from the act of an angry God or saint, to a spirits curse, to the dog contaminating the local water with diseases. Regardless of the cause and effect, the episode only worked to re-enforce the folklore behind both the well and the pub. While the question of what is real and what is not real about this well and pubs history is up to you, what cannot be denied is the interesting tale behind why this local establishment has its name. It’s already colourful history that spans centuries is only made more unique by this horrific tale that may or may not have lent itself to the very name that the pub now is known by.
Hidden in a section of limestone above Dovedale lies Reynard's Cave. The small cave is situated behind a large natural rock arch and the combination is one of the Peak District's most distinctive geoligical features. Excavations in the late 1950s suggested that the cave was used as a spot of temporary refuge during the Neolithic, Roman and Medieval periods. Coins, pottery and other fragments were found from these eras. The cave is also a roosting site during the Winter months for bats. There was a very interesting discovery during 2013 excavation where a tooth was found at the rear of the cave, thought to belong to a brown bear. Archaeologists were unable to determinte how it had ended up in the place it was found. The tooth was dated from scientists at the University of Oxford and dated to be from the Mesolithic period.
At the bottom of the world, the world’s southernmost ATM offers an ordinary convenience in one of the least ordinary places on Earth. Located at 77°51′ south, it's the southernmost cash machine in the world—and the only ATM anywhere in Antarctica. The ATM was installed to serve the staff working at McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s largest research base. It functions just like any ATM in the United States, dispensing U.S. dollars to people living and working thousands of miles from the nearest conventional bank. Cash can be used in the station's store, and, before the station went dry, in the two bars. There are actually two ATMs, but only one is functional at a time—the other is used for spare parts. Every two years, Wells Fargo sends a technician to Antarctica for maintenance and upgrades. Cash is recycled between the store and the ATMs, so no new money needs to be delivered to the station.
James Dalton Trumbo was a controversial writer who penned quite a few Hollywood films in his era, including Roman Holiday (1953) and Spartacus [960]. He was one of ten left leaning directors and screenwriters that refused to testify before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities Committees and as a result, was blacklisted. A Colorado native, Trumbo moved to Grand Junction in 1908 from his birthplace in Montrose. He graduated from Gran Junction High School, served as a reporter for the local paper, and attended CU Boulder. He was a novelist, playwright and screenwriter and won two Academy Awards. He was also famous for writing for hours at a time in his bathtub, a scene this statue commemorates. The statue was the first in a series of installations commemorating the city's famous residents.
The Puente de la Amistad (Friendship Bridge) connects the cities of Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, and Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. Built in 1965 as a symbol of goodwill between the two neighboring countries, the bridge offers beautiful views of the Paraná River just miles from the popular Iguazú Waterfalls. Crossing the bridge can feel less like international travel and more like entering an enormous open-air shopping trip. Thanks to Paraguay’s lax tariff laws, Brazilian locals and tourists stream across in search of deals on electronics, clothing, food, and other goods in Ciudad del Este. The bridge is packed with pedestrians, cars, buses, and sacoleiros—shoppers who make frequent trips to Paraguay to buy goods for resale in Brazil. “Shopping Paris” is a popular mega-mall just feet from the Paraguayan customs office, boasting four floors of stores, restaurants, and even an indoor snow park for skating and sledding. The bargain-hunting frenzy has a stranger side, too. The bridge and its surroundings are notorious for smuggling and tax evasion, with authorities often intercepting goods that exceed customs limits or were never declared. For visitors, the experience is a strange mix of tourism and commerce: you can cross the bridge to score bargains, watch shoppers haul bags of merchandise back to Brazil, enjoy the gorgeous scenery, or simply for the novelty of saying you've walked across an international border.
The Outer Rim is a sci-fi themed coffee shop in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle, boasting fan art spanning multiple sci-fi franchises! Opened in late 2023, The Outer Rim is the passion project of graphic designer Martin Kuenn, combining a clean mid century interior design aesthetic with his collection of sci-fi art. You can admire the unique interior design and lovingly curated collection of art/action figures while enjoying a themed drink, as well as a selection of pastries.
The first castle at this location was a simple earthwork motte-and-bailey construction, built at some point in the 12th century. The site of Torthorwald Castle was owned by David Torthorwald by the 13th century. During the First War of Scottish Independence, some of Sir David's descendants supported the English army. As a punishment, King Robert the Bruce confiscated the lands in 1306 and gave them to Sir John de Soules, who then passed away in 1310. Humphrey de Kirkpatrick acquired the lands in 1326, and he started construction of the stone castle which would become Torthowarld Castle. In 1425 William Carlyle married an unnamed Kirkpatrick heiress with the ownership of Torthorwald Castle passing to the Carlyle family. In 1544 Michael Lord Carlyle, sacked the castle in a raid against his sister-in-law, Jonet Scrimgeour. He retained the castle until the late 16th century. In 1609, ownership of the castle passed to his half brother, from the Douglases of Parkhead family. The last resident of the castle was Archibald Douglas of Dornock whom lived there until 1630. The roof of the castle was removed in the 18th century, and shortly after that Torthorwald Castle drifted into ruin. Efforts were made during the next century to stabilise its structure, but sadly, in 1993 the north end of the tower collapsed and it now sits a forlorn ruin on the edge of the village.
Some museums are about reading plaques. This one is about feeling transported. The McCandless Collection is filled with beautifully preserved classic cars, vintage signs, racing memorabilia, and the kind of automotive treasures that spark conversations between generations. Every vehicle has a story, and every corner reflects a genuine passion for preserving an important piece of American car culture. Whether someone grew up around these cars or is seeing them for the first time, it's the sort of place where people slow down, reminisce, and leave with a new appreciation for the craftsmanship, history, and personalities that shaped the golden age of the automobile.
Møllestien is a narrow lane of 28 small, color-washed cottages running about 330 feet (100 meters) through the heart of Aarhus, its cobblestones edged by hollyhocks that climb the cottage walls. The street feels almost staged in its stillness. It was not always still. The lane predates the 1200s and may follow the course of a path first established during the Viking Age. For centuries, it lay at the city's edge, where many of the city's outcasts ended up. In 1686, three women from the lane were tried for witchcraft, accused of causing the death of the city bailiff. One died in prison, reportedly under harsh interrogation. A second was banished. The third was sentenced to be burned alive, but the punishment was commuted on the condition that she submitted to Church discipline, after which she disappeared from the street. At the western end of Møllestien, where a small park now lies, a burial ground for criminals, paupers, and unidentified bodies operated during the same century. When the area centuries later was redeveloped, workers uncovered 38 skeletons beneath the ground. In 1700, a widow on the street killed her two children and three visiting children with a knife. Her husband had the year before drunk himself to death in one of the lane's many illegal taverns. Local accounts portray the killings as tied to a street marked by chronic drinking and desperation. Conditions remained extreme into the 1900s. By the 1920s, one family lived with only a loose stacking of stones in place of an outer wall. Prostitution was part of the same economy, and some houses still contain small staircase hatches described as lookouts for approaching clients. The transformation came in the late 1950s, when artists and actors began moving in and renovating the houses and planting hollyhocks. When a private investor acquired seven properties with plans to replace them with a parking garage and supermarket, the newcomers successfully campaigned to stop the project. What remains is a preserved fragment, one of the few places in Aarhus where 1800s working-class housing survives intact. Today, only about one house changes hands each year.
The capital of North Macedonia is characterized by its pompous, classically styled buildings that line both sides of the Vardar River, further enhanced by numerous statues, some of them enormous. All of this has been built in recent years following independence from the former Yugoslavia. But just behind these grand buildings lies the typical city of the Communist era, with its gray, functional structures. And if there is one style that stood out in the architecture of that time and in this part of the world, it is undoubtedly Brutalism. A few meters from the river, we find a gem more appreciated by architects worldwide than by the tourists who visit the city. This is the Post and Telecommunications Building by the Macedonian architect Janko Konstantinov (1926-2010). Konstantinov studied at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade and, after graduating, specialized in his field at the Royal Academy of Arts and Architecture in Copenhagen. He gained experience working on projects in the United States, Sweden, and Finland, where he collaborated with the legendary Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. Following the devastating 1963 earthquake, Konstantinov moved to Skopje to participate in the city's reconstruction led by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tage, working on various projects. The Post and Telecommunications complex is considered his masterpiece. Built in several phases, the Post Office building, completed in 1974, is a prominent feature. Its open lotus shape symbolizes the city's rebirth. Its flying buttresses give it a Brutalist, cathedral-like appearance, which, in Konstantinov's own words, alludes to the "medieval monasteries and churches of the Balkans." The Telecommunications building, constructed between 1979 and 1981 right next to the Post Office, is notable for its cylindrical towers and circular windows. In the Post Office lobby (1979-1981), the final phase of the Telecommunications Center, the sharp concrete ribs extending above the dome appear both archaic and futuristic. In 2013, a fire severely damaged the building, destroying its glass dome and the murals that decorated the interior. There are plans to convert the entire complex into a cultural center.
Copper, of course, has been known since antiquity, but it only became an important industrial metal in the latter 19th century with the rise of large-scale electrical technology. Previously copper deposits were worked only if cheap and accessible. When the Grand Gulch deposit, then called Adam's Lode and marked by brilliant blue and green copper-bearing pebbles on the ground surface, was discovered after the Civil War, the shifting economics of copper led to mining beginning in 1872. Some of the ore concentrates assayed up to 75-80% copper, an extraordinary amount. The concentrates were freighted by wagon to the railroad line at St. Thomas, Nevada, whence they were shipped to smelters in Salt Lake City, Utah. Even with increased demand for copper the operation remained marginal due to the transportation difficulties. Peak production, and profitability, only occurred during World War I. At this point some 80 people are thought to have lived by the mine, including the women and children in the miners' families. However, copper prices plummeted after the war due to the precipitous drop in demand, and the mine shut down in 1919. Coincidentally, the ore grade also dropped off at this point. The mine underwent something of a revival in the early 1950s, when new technology—sulfuric acid leaching of the low-grade leftovers that were still heaped around the mine site—led to renewed production. Overall, some 6.6 million pounds of copper and 24,000 oz of silver were recovered from the deposit. The deposit was hosted in a so-called "breccia pipe." Breccia (pronounced "BRETCH-uh", Italian for "broken") refers to a rock made of broken pieces of other rock. The breccia pipe formed when overlying rocks collapsed into limestone caves in the Redwall Limestone, hundreds of feet below the surface. The collapse then propagated up through the overlying strata. Such a column of broken rock can provide a conduit for metal-bearing solutions from deep in the crust, and these solutions in turn can precipitate metal deposits. There are around 1300 breccia pipes known in the vicinity, but only a few host metal deposits. Some breccia pipes host uranium mineralization, a fact of especial interest during the uranium boom of the early 1950s, but there proved to be no economic uranium mineralization at Grand Gulch. A couple of large abandoned dump trucks at the site date from this era.
Lake Bonneville was an enormous Pleistocene lake that covered much of western Utah, extending into the edges of adjacent Nevada and Idaho, during the height of the last Ice Age. It reached its maximum extent and depth about 17.5 KYBP (thousand years before present). The lake eroded what's now called the Bonneville Shoreline at this level, around 5100 feet above present sea level. At its highest point the lake then overflowed over Red Rock Pass, now in Idaho, so that an enormous flood poured down the Snake River drainage and ultimately into the Pacific via the Columbia River. As the outflowing water eroded a channel, the level of Lake Bonneville dropped, overall dropping about 410 ft to around 4750 feet above mean sea level, where the downcutting channel finally encountered resistant bedrock. This stabilized the lake level, and a well-defined shoreline, the Provo Shoreline, was eroded around this elevation. In fact, a river seems to have flowed out this channel into the Snake for about a thousand years, acting as the outflow for Lake Bonneville. Eventually, though, as the climate dried the level of Lake Bonneville dropped below the outlet level. As might be expected, a lake dozens of miles across and hundreds of feet deep could erode shoreline features at a scale more typical of an ocean than a lake, and that's what happened here. Window Rock is a large wave-cut arch like those commonly seen along shorelines today--except it's high and dry atop a ridge. But thousands of years ago this ridge was awash in surf that carved the arch. Window Rock is at an elevation of about 4839 feet, so it must have been eroded before the lake level dropped to the Provo Shoreline.
Many political boundaries in the western US, as around the world, were drawn along lines of latitude or longitude. This was convenient for politicians looking at maps, but it's much easier to draw a line on the map than to establish that line on the ground—particularly with 19th-century technology. The mutual corner of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada is a case in point. In theory the boundary of Utah and Arizona is the 37th parallel of latitude, while the eastern boundary of Nevada lies along the meridian at 114° 2' W (or 114.03333 W in decimal degrees). This point was first surveyed in 1870 by Isaac P. James, described as an "astronomer and surveyor." The juxtaposition seems unlikely now, but astronomy was traditionally important to establishing positions on the Earth because latitude could be determined by measuring the angle of known stars above the horizon. Longitude, in turn, could be determined by the time of local noon (when the Sun is highest in the sky) versus the time of noon at a reference point, such as Greenwich, England. The problem was that such measurements were difficult in a survey carried out on horseback under primitive conditions. Longitude in particular, which depended on precise measurements of time, was subject to large errors. For such reasons this point was resurveyed in 1900 and found to be in significant error, with the James monument at the 37th parallel being 111.51 chains too far north. (A "chain" is 66 feet, so there are 80 chains in a mile. In other words, the location was nearly 1.5 miles too far north.) The 1900 resurvey (monumented in 1901) was a considerable improvement over the original James survey, but over time it became clear that it was still a bit off. At a surveyors' convention in 2016, the Utah Council of Land Surveyors proposed re-monumenting the Tri-State Monument, in collaboration with the state survey societies of Arizona and Nevada. This proposal met with enthusiastic acceptance and the tri-point was resurveyed with new technology: GPS with sub-centimeter accuracy. The 1901 monument was removed (it is now on display in the Washington County Administration Office in St. George, Utah) and the current one constructed. Presumably further resurveys will not be needed!
By the 1980s the Cold War had been simmering for over three decades, and seemed likely to continue into the indefinite future. Technology had changed, however. Both sides still feared a surprise attack, but new possibilities had appeared. Instead of fleets of bombers, or ICBMs coming over the pole, an attack by low-level missiles, basically cruise missiles, loomed as a new threat. Such low-flying missiles could slink under the conventional radar net to appear without warning. This facility, formally called the Christmas Valley Air Force Station, was specifically designed to address this threat. "Backscatter" radar could see potential threats beyond the horizon by reflecting radio waves off the Earth's ionosphere. These waves could then be reflected from potential threats, and those reflections in turn could be reflected back off the ionosphere to a receiver array. In effect the ionosphere becomes a radar mirror for looking over the horizon. This installation was the transmitter array. It consisted of three transmitting stations, each enclosed by a wooden slat fence that was a square mile in area. Wood was presumably used because it's a non-conductor. The squares were arranged in an arc convex to the west, with a ~60º angle between the squares. The middle square was oriented with its northern edge slightly (about 30º) toward the southwest. The installation was finished in the late 1980s just as geopolitical developments intervened. With the Cold War winding down, the array was never used for its intended purpose. Into the 1990s it found some use in tracking suspected drug smugglers, and NOAA also used it for research on the sea surface. The installation was finally decommissioned in 1997 and put into "warm storage." In 2002 it was completely deactivated; all the electronics were removed, but the wooden perimeter fences were left behind. The site was then transferred to the state of Oregon, and it was proposed to use the area for green energy generation. This would take advantage of the enormous electrical transmission infrastructure that had been built to power the transmitters. Nothing came of these efforts, but the site is still partly used for research investigations. In about 2010 a small backscatter antenna array was built to study the upper atmosphere, the aurora in particular. This is operated by Dartmouth University and is part of a global net for upper atmosphere research. In an ironic development, in 2025 the Air Force proposed rebuilding a backscatter radar at this site. Presumably present-day technology is a significant improvement over that from the 1980s, but the fact that a backscatter radar site is again thought to be necessary must reflect the shifting geopolitical realities since the end of the Cold War.
The Grand Canyon extends for some 278 miles along the Colorado River, from Lee's Ferry (River Mile 0) to the Grand Wash Cliffs just upstream of Pearce Ferry (River Mile 280). Automobiles can reach the river at Lee's Ferry and at Pearce Ferry, and those are common put-in and take-out points, respectively, for river trips down the Colorado through the Canyon. The north side of the Grand Canyon throughout this length is nearly all included in Grand Canyon National Park. However, much of the south side of the river, to the west, is included in Native American reservations. In particular, from about River Mile 165 to River Mile 273 the south shore of the river lies in the Hualapai (pronounced "WAL-uh-pie," in the Spanish fashion) Reservation. The Hualapai Reservation includes Diamond Creek, which is the only place in the Grand Canyon where an automobile can reach the river, and many of the commercial river trips take out here rather than run all the way to Pearce Ferry. People also run short trips from Diamond Creek down to Pearce Ferry, a stretch where there are a few smallish rapids but which in any case is stunningly scenic. The Hualapai themselves run such trips in the warm season. The Diamond Creek road follows a traditional route used by the Hualapai to access the river, and it’s reported that the first automobile made the trek in 1914. In addition, a small lodging, the Farlee Hotel, was open briefly near the Colorado River in the late 19th century but had closed by 1900. All remnants of the hotel have long since been swept away by flash flooding.
Kyoto is famed for its tea, especially green tea produced in the neighboring city of Uji and its environs, and then brewed into high-quality matcha. But what is less known is that it’s also the birthplace of another kind of tea. In 1930, tea trader Heizo Fukunaga opened a tea room in the Sanjo district of Kyoto and partnered with the Sir Thomas Lipton brand. For the first few decades, the “Lipton Company Tea Salon Far East Branch” did not do too well, as black tea was not yet popular in Japan, until it had a belated breakthrough in the 1960s. In 1965, the Lipton tea room introduced its “Royal” brand, including Royal custard pudding, Royal cream puff, and Royal milk tea. Royal milk tea proved to be the most popular, establishing itself as a new kind of tea and contributing to the prominence of black tea in general. But you might be wondering: what’s royal milk tea, anyway? At Lipton, it’s made from Assam leaves brewed with milk in place of hot water, using a lot more milk than usual. It helps enrich the flavor and sweetness.
Founded in 730 AD, Kanda Myojin is one of the most revered and historically significant Shinto shrines in Tokyo, as well as a popular tourist attraction thanks to its location near Akihabara Electric Town and Jimbocho Book Town. The main approach to the shrine, though hardly a shopping street, claims "Myojin amazake" as its specialty. Today, two sellers of amazake—fermented rice drink, literally meaning "sweet sake"—remain here today, both with a long history. The younger of these two, Amanoya, dates back to 1846, and behind its founding is a rather interesting story. The founder, Shinsuke Amano, was a samurai who served in Tango Province in Kyoto, but when he heard of his brother's murder in Edo (Tokyo), he renounced his social rank and traveled east in order to avenge him. As Kanda Myojin was the capital's primary shrine, Shinsuke decided to open a shop on the street in front of it, as it saw lots of traffic every day. He completely forgot to consider one important thing, however: he did not know what the killer looked like. Eventually, he gave up on avenging his brother and his life as a samurai in Kyoto, passing on his business to his children. Now run by the Amano family's fifth generation, the shop utilizes its underground chamber, which was built before Shinsuke opened his shop. This cellar keeps a moderate temperature all year, making it an ideal storeroom for the koji mold, which is used in the fermentation of amazake as well as soy sauce, miso, and natto. Though such cellars were once common in the area, this is the only surviving one in all of Chiyoda City today. While the small shop sells traditionally made koji-based food, as well as takeout amazake in paper cups, Amanoya also runs a rustic teahouse in the adjacent building rebuilt right after it was burned down in the 1945 bombings of Tokyo. Its menu features classic Japanese fare, including shaved ice, mochi, oden, and, of course, the famous Myojin amazake.
The oldest surviving toilet in Japan can be found at Tofuku-ji, a major Zen temple in Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto. Dating back to the early Muromachi period (1336–1573), this historic restroom is over 500 years old. Known as tousu, this type of toilet is one of the seven facilities that comprise a Zen temple complex. As every act of living is part of the training in Zen, monks were required to relieve themselves here in complete silence, and had to follow numerous rules and manners even when squatting. The tousu at Tofuku-ji is not only the oldest toilet in Japan, but also one of the few surviving examples of its kind, and is designated as an Important Cultural Property. It’s not in use today, so don’t worry when you take a peek into the building.
The Humansdorp Museum preserves everyday objects from the town’s early history, some dating back to its founding in 1849, when Matthys Gerhardus Human donated part of his farm Rheboksfontein for the construction of a Dutch Reformed Church. The collection focuses on domestic life rather than grand events. Visitors can grind coffee beans by hand, type a letter on a working typewriter, and browse household items from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the highlights is a Chicago Cottage air pump organ from around 1879, which is still playable. The museum also maintains a local reputation for a resident ghost, occasionally mentioned during guided visits.
The Puppet Center is located in Alcorcón (Madrid) and began its activity in December 2021. The center is managed by the Fundación el Arte del Títere, which is made up of professionals of recognized prestige in the universe of puppet, visual and object theater, and has the collaboration of the Alcorcón City Council. The El Arte del Títere Foundation is the founder and promoter of the Puppet Center. Isis Abellán, director of Proversus, is in turn patron of the El Arte del Títere Foundation and is part of the founding team and board of directors of the Puppet Center, and Proversus also contributes production and distribution tasks to the management of the Center. The Puppet Center is a meeting space for creation, experimentation, discovery, wonder and curiosity, dedicated entirely to the art of puppetry and open to anyone interested. The center offers a wide range of activities related to the world of puppetry: exhibitions, shows, residencies, courses and research material.
Even in Japan, home of the Eight Million Gods, Oshira-sama is an oddity. A tutelary deity of silk, horses, and agriculture, the god continues to be worshipped mainly in rural villages in the northern regions and is typically represented by a pair of mulberry-wood dolls wearing rag hoods. According to the standard myth, Oshira-sama is a pair of male and female deities, the former often taking the form of a horse. Legend has it that, once upon a time, a farmer's daughter loved her horse so much that she married it, which shocked and angered her father. He killed the horse, and when his daughter wouldn't stop holding on to the corpse and crying, he went on to cut off its head. The daughter then hopped onto the horse's head and flew away, becoming the god Oshira-sama in heaven. Folk customs surrounding Oshira-sama remain largely a mystery even today, as most communities refuse to disclose details about their worship. A few taboos are known, however, including offerings of animal meat and eggs. They are also very jealous, and failure to appease them, especially the worship of other deities, is said to bring a life-threatening curse to the family. Public shrines or effigies of Oshira-sama are rare to say the least, but those curious can find a thousand Oshira-sama idols collected from all across the region at the Oshirado pavilion at Denshoen, an open-air folk museum dedicated to the traditions of the rural villages of Tono. The pavilion is covered by row after row of rustic effigies hanging on the walls, all wearing pieces of colorful cloth with wishes and prayers written on them. Though many of the figures are human-shaped, visitors may also notice horse-headed idols here and there, following the folk tale. At the center of the room stands an old mulberry tree, emanating a sort of strange sanctity. Visitors can pay an extra fee for a piece of cloth, write a wish on it and put it on one of the Oshira-sama effigies, but don't forget to pay a good amount of respect to them so as not to incite their wrath.
Oklahoma City knows how to keep families moving. One minute you’re seeing rare pigeons up close and the next, you’re playing pickleball between bites of barbecue, or discovering stories that shaped the American West. Best of all, many of the city’s biggest attractions are interactive, making it easy for travelers of all ages to stay curious. Whether you have a long weekend or a few extra vacation days, this itinerary is packed with hands-on museums, outdoor adventures, family-friendly restaurants, and unforgettable experiences that won’t stretch your budget. From beloved local institutions like the Oklahoma City Zoo to delightfully unexpected stops you won’t find anywhere else, here’s how to make the most of a family getaway in Oklahoma City. The American Pigeon Museum Most people know pigeons as city scavengers. The American Pigeon Museum is here to change your mind. This offbeat site celebrates one of humanity’s oldest feathered companions, tracing the surprising history of pigeons from wartime heroes and trusted messengers to prized racing birds and show champions. Kids can marvel at the rainbow of live breeds, admire quirky pigeon-themed memorabilia, and discover just how intelligent these often-overlooked birds really are. By the time you leave, you’ll never see these fantastic birds the same way. Chicken N Pickle Part restaurant, part recreation hub, Chicken N Pickle is the kind of place where dinner comes with a side of friendly competition. Families can reserve a pickleball court or wander the sprawling game yard, where cornhole, bocce, ping pong, giant Jenga, and even human-sized Battleship will keep everyone entertained long after the meal is over. With a menu built around wood-fired chicken, burgers, and kid-friendly favorites like cheese quesadillas and chicken strips, it’s an easy spot to spend an afternoon—or an entire evening. National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum More than a museum, this is a deep dive into the myths and realities of the American West. Wander through a full-scale frontier town, stand beneath the towering “End of the Trail” sculpture, and explore galleries filled with everything from weathered saddles and rodeo gear to masterpieces by iconic Western artists. Families will find plenty to keep young imaginations engaged, especially in the museum’s interactive spaces, where kids can step into life on the frontier and discover how cowboys, Native nations, ranchers, and settlers shaped the region. Factory Obscura Mix-Tape Housed in the former home of the Flaming Lips’ psychedelic art space known as The Womb, this immersive, 6,000-square-foot installation invites visitors to climb, crawl, push, listen, and explore their way through a dreamlike world as immersive as a good mixtape. Secret passages, glowing tunnels, whimsical rooms, and hands-on installations transform the gallery into an experience that’s as much about play as it is about art. It’s the kind of place where kids can let their imaginations run wild—and adults might just find themselves doing the same. Oklahoma City Zoo A trip to the Oklahoma City Zoo is more than a chance to see animals; it’s an all-day adventure. Founded in 1902 and celebrating its 125th anniversary in 2027, the zoo is home to thousands of animals spread across expansive habitats, from Oklahoma’s native wildlife to elephants, giraffes, and big cats from around the globe. Beyond the exhibits, families can hand-feed giraffes, meet rhinos up close during special encounters, ride the handcrafted endangered-species carousel, or hop aboard the Elephant Express tram for a leisurely tour of the grounds. Cactus Jack’s Family Fun Center Oklahoma City’s oldest arcade has been entertaining families since 1974, evolving from a neighborhood game room into one of the country’s premier pinball destinations while keeping its old-school charm intact. Today, more than 150 games fill the floor, from vintage arcade classics and Skee-Ball, to air hockey, basketball games, and an impressive collection of modern pinball machines. Whether you’re chasing a high score, winning tickets for prizes, or introducing a new generation to the joys of Pac-Man, Cactus Jack’s is the kind of place where friendly competition spans every age. Tizo’s Pops & Ice Cream For more than 50 years, the Godinez family has shared the tradition of authentic Mexican paletas, bringing their craft from Aguascalientes, Mexico, to Oklahoma City. At Tizo’s Pops & Ice Cream, everything is made from scratch, from creamy ice creams to fruit-packed paletas in adventurous flavors like avocado, prickly pear, and goat cheese. Kids can customize their treats with chocolate dips, chamoy, Tajín, marshmallow, and dozens of other toppings. More than just an ice cream shop, Tizo’s is a celebration of family, heritage, and the vibrant flavors of Mexico.
"The Messenger" is a colorful street mural created in downtown Vista by world-renowned spray-paint artist Chor Boogie (Jason Hailey), who grew up in the area. The mural features a hummingbird and an ever-seeing eye, bringing spiritual meaning and bright life to the city's streets. In spiritual symbolism, a messenger usually refers to a guide or a bearer of good news. The Hummingbird symbolizes healing, joy, and hope. It reminds people to enjoy the sweetness of life. The Ever-Seeing Eye represents spiritual awareness, protection, and inner truth. Chor Boogie (Jason Hailey) is an internationally celebrated spray-paint artist. Because he grew up in the Vista and Oceanside area, painting "The Messenger" was a special homecoming for him. His style is famous for bright colors, flowing lines, and healing themes. Three other murals created in Vista by Chor Boogie and be discovered and seen.
The Katherine Johnson Statue at West Virginia State University (WVSU) honors the legendary NASA mathematician whose brilliant calculations launched America into orbit. Unveiled on August 25, 2018—the eve of her 100th birthday—this life-sized bronze monument stands proudly at her alma mater to ensure her contributions to the Space Race are "no longer hidden". Katherine Johnson was one of the critical human "computers" at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which later became NASA. She is globally celebrated for several monumental milestones Long before Hollywood spotlighted her in the Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures, Katherine Johnson was a math prodigy growing up in segregated West Virginia. Because local schools barred African American students past the eighth grade, her family moved 100 miles to Institute, WV so she could attend the high school on WVSU's campus at age 10. She graduated high school at 15, entered the college at 14, and graduated summa cum laude with degrees in Mathematics and French at just 18 years old. She hand-calculated the trajectory for America's very first human spaceflight, piloted by Alan Shepard in 1961.
In the vast graveyard of fast food chains, sometimes there is a resurrection. Founded in Minneapolis 7 years after Taco Bell, Zantigo (named Zapato at that time) had a similar model of rearranging the same array of a few ingredients to fill out a menu of Mexican-American dishes. After growing to 82 restaurants by 1986, Zantigo's parent company merged with it's rival's and within 2 years, all remaining Zantigo locations had been closed or converted to Taco Bells. After a decade hiatus, a former Zantigo manager and his brother opened new locations around the Twin Cities. This location is housed in a former Zapata/Zantigo which was converted to a Taco Bell and converted back into a new iteration of Zantigo. Devotees of the original chain say the unique-to-Zantigo chilito and "taco burrito" are faithful to the original.
At the edge of downtown lies Sam Houston Park, a manicured green haven that doubles as a time capsule. While the park is home to the Houston Heritage Society Museum which includes several historic structures, none are older, or more resilient, than a humble, rough-hewn log structure known simply as The Old Place. Constructed around 1823, this cedar cabin is widely believed to be the oldest remaining structure in Harris County. However, It didn't start its life amidst city noise. It was originally built by John R. Harris—the early Texas pioneer and founder of Harrisburg—along the muddy, alligator-lined banks of Clear Creek, well south of the city limits.
Squeezed between the Church of Santa Marta and the Chapel of San Esteban is an architectural secret you won’t find anywhere else in Spain: a tiny, irregular stone room known as the Celda de las Emparedadas (“The Cell of the Walled-In Women”). During the Middle Ages, some deeply devout women chose a life of extreme, self-imposed isolation. Rather than being forced, they voluntarily took a "Vow of Darkness" choosing to be permanently bricked inside this tiny stone space to dedicate their lives to prayer. When you look closely at the exterior wall, you can still see the narrow barred window. This was the woman's only link to the outside world, where locals and passing pilgrims along the Camino de Santiago would leave food and water on the stone ledge. Look just above the iron bars, and you'll find a beautifully carved Latin warning: "Remember my judgment, for yours will be likewise. Mine yesterday, yours today". Inside, another tiny window allowed her to peek into the church's altar to follow Mass.
For centuries, bears have been intertwined with the identity of Madrid. The city’s coat of arms famously depicts a bear reaching up toward a strawberry tree, an image that appears on everything from official seals to souvenirs. Historians debate the exact origins of the symbol, but it likely reflects a time when forests and wildlife surrounded the medieval settlement. Today, the bear remains Madrid’s most recognizable emblem—a reminder that the Spanish capital was once a much wilder place. One of the city’s lesser-known tributes to this enduring symbol stands at the entrance to the historic Vista Alegre Estate in the Carabanchel district. Known as the Puerta de los Osos (Gate of the Bears), the structure was designed in 1987 by architect Javier Vellés Montoya as part of the estate’s perimeter enclosure. Its red-brick pillars support wrought-iron gates and are crowned by two limestone bears sculpted by Juan Cuevas. Frozen in different poses, the animals seem poised to leap from their pedestals and wander into the gardens beyond. The gate was inaugurated during the mayoralty of Juan Barranco Gallardo to commemorate the centenary of Vista Alegre’s donation to charitable institutions in 1887, during the regency of María Cristina of Austria. Although it now serves as an entrance to educational centers housed within the estate, the gateway remains one of the most distinctive features of the sprawling historic property. With its rocket-like brick pinnacles, elegant ironwork, and pair of watchful bears surveying passersby, the Puerta de los Osos is both monument and curiosity. Most visitors come to admire the grand palaces and gardens hidden behind the walls of Vista Alegre. Few expect to be greeted by Madrid’s symbolic guardians standing high above the entrance.
You’ve decided to go somewhere together. Maybe you just got married and you’re planning a honeymoon. Maybe you’re marking a decade together with an anniversary trip that actually means something. Maybe you don’t need an occasion at all, save for a wish to get out of ordinary life for a while and remember why you chose each other. Everyone expects you to go somewhere with an overwater bungalow and a fruit plate shaped like a swan. Here's our counterproposal: what if this trip gave you a story no one else you know could tell? The best couples’ trips aren’t the most expensive ones. They’re the ones where you turned a corner together and both stopped breathing for a second—because neither of you expected what was there. This guide is organized not by price tier or beach quality but by the kind of adventure you’re after. Find the entry that sounds like you. Then go. Surrender to Your Surroundings Fes, Morocco Fes el-Bali is held by many to be the world’s largest car-free urban zone. This commercial district within the historic city of Fes, largely unchanged since the middle ages, comprises nine thousand four hundred winding alleyways where getting lost amid the merchant stalls, mosques, and shops is part of the appeal. And you will: GPS navigation is notoriously unreliable on these tangled, narrow streets. Start at the Bou Inania Madrasa, a 14th-century theological college known for its intricate carved cedar ornamentation, and elaborate mosaic tilework. Walk toward the Chouara Leather Tannery and watch leather being dyed in vats of saffron, indigo, and poppy from a rooftop terrace above the stalls. The colors are medieval. The process is medieval. The two of you watching it together is not. Eat lunch at a riad hidden behind an unmarked door on a street whose name you won't be able to pronounce: order bastilla, the pigeon pie dusted with powdered sugar, and argue cheerfully about whether it’s the strangest thing you’ve ever loved. Walk to the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter, and find the brass-workers hammering in tiny ateliers no bigger than a closet. In the evening, climb to the Merenid Tombs above the city as the call to prayer echoes and the city turns gold below you. The romance of Fes isn’t in the amenities. It’s in the way the medina demands that you let go—of your plan, your navigation, your sense that you know what’s around the next corner. You don’t. This trip is about living in the moment. Stay at: A riad in the medina, not a hotel on the ring road. Riad Laaroussa or Dar Roumana both have inner courtyards where breakfast arrives as if by sorcery. Don’t miss: The Nejjarine Museum of Wooden Arts and Crafts—an 18th-century caravanserai converted into a museum of carved wood, with a rooftop café that has an incredible view of the medina. Embrace the Silence Waitomo, New Zealand Cave systems in the Waitomo region of New Zealand’s North Island hold a mesmerizing secret: their ceilings glow. Thousands of Arachnocampa luminosa—glowworms found only in New Zealand—have colonized the limestone caverns and created what amounts to a private planetarium. You float through on a small boat in total darkness and total silence, surrounded by cold blue-green constellations. It is profoundly strange. It is also one of the most beautiful things you will ever see. Beyond Waitomo, the surrounding Waikato region is full of the particular New Zealand magic of feeling like you’ve found somewhere the rest of the world simply forgot to claim. Walk the Mangapohue Natural Bridge, a massive limestone arch over a stream where you can find ancient oyster fossils embedded in the rock—this was once the ocean floor. Stand inside a crack in the earth where the walls are six stories tall and the light falls in strange columns. This trip is for couples who can sit with each other in silence and still feel completely present. If that’s you, this is your place. Stay at: Embrace the peace and quiet, and the stunning natural surroundings, by renting a cabin in the surrounding region. Favorites include Te Tiro Accommodation and Golden Ridge Retreat. Don’t miss: The Ruakuri Cave tour, which is longer and less crowded than the main Waitomo tour, includes a remarkable spiral entrance designed to honor the site’s Māori significance, and ends with a boat ride past the densest glowworm colony in the system. Travel Through Time Kyoto, Japan Kyoto is beloved by travelers for a reason, but the best way to see this historic destination is to get up early and take in the quiet moments before the rest of the city wakes up. Go to Fushimi Inari-taisha at first light, before the tour buses arrive. The shrine’s thousands of vermillion torii gates were donated by businesses over the centuries—each one inscribed with the donor's name on the back—and they tunnel up the mountain in a corridor of saturated orange-red that makes you feel you’ve slipped into another dimension of time. The hike to the summit takes about two hours. You will almost certainly have the upper paths to yourself. Sit on a bench at the top, look out over the city, and understand in your body why people have been doing this for thirteen centuries. Then go to Saihō-ji, the Moss Temple, which requires an application to visit weeks in advance and a copying sutra before entry, and has more than one hundred twenty varieties of moss carpeting its garden in every shade of green that exists. There is a quality of stillness here—the particular hush of a garden that has been tended continuously since 1339—that is unlike anything else. On your second day, walk the Philosopher’s Path along the canal in the early morning when the light is still low. Stop at the Ōtoyo Shrine, a small shrine protected by cat statues rather than the traditional lion-dogs. Eat at a counter-seat restaurant where the chef serves you one course at a time and you eat what you’re given. Drink sake from a cedar box. The Kyoto trip asks the question: What does it feel like to be somewhere ancient together? Not as tourists, but as two people who chose to show up. Stay at: A ryokan in Higashiyama—the traditional inn district—where you sleep on futons, wear yukata, and receive an eight-course kaiseki dinner in your room. Tawaraya, if budget permits. Don’t miss: Nishiki Market at opening time, before the crowds—the narrow covered shopping street known as “Kyoto’s Kitchen” where you can eat dashi-soaked tofu, tiny pickled vegetables, and skewered grilled mochi from stall to stall. Also: Kurodani Temple, a 12th-century Tendai temple where monks practice chanting in the early morning and the sound carries through the cedar forest. See the Edge of the World The Faroe Islands There are eighteen main islands in the Faroe archipelago. They rise dramatically from the North Atlantic between Norway and Iceland, and they look like something that was created intentionally with drama in mind: sheer sea cliffs, waterfalls that blow sideways in the wind before they reach the bottom, sheep grazing on grass so green it seems digitally enhanced, villages of turf-roofed houses clinging to hillsides above fjords of impossible blue. Few travelers come here. But you should. Hike to Trælanípa on Vágar Island to see a lake that appears to float above the ocean in an optical illusion that has to be seen to be believed. Walk out onto the promontory at Enniberg, the highest sea cliff in the Faroese islands, and stand two hundred seventy meters above the Atlantic with nothing between you and Canada. Go to Mykines, the westernmost island, reachable by ferry or helicopter, where a bridge over a gorge leads to a lighthouse and the bridge’s cables are occupied in puffin season by birds that appear to have escaped from a cartoon—orange beaks, dramatic eyebrows, complete indifference to your presence. In the evenings, eat lamb (the islands have three times as many sheep as people) and dried fish and Faroese butter, and watch the light on the water go from gold to pink to grey to a luminous white. Stay at: Hotel Føroyar above Tórshavn, where every room has a scenic view and the turf roof blends into the hillside. Or rent a cottage on one of the outer islands and have almost nothing around you for days. Don’t miss: Kirkjubøur, the tiny village on Streymoy that contains a 13th-century cathedral ruin, a fully operational medieval farmhouse (the oldest continuously inhabited wooden house in the world), and a population of roughly eighty people. The bishop of the Faroe Islands once kept his summer residence here. The view across the sound to Hestur island is one of the finest in the archipelago. Explore the Underworld Cappadocia, Turkey The landscape of Cappadocia looks like it was designed by someone who had read too much science fiction and not enough geology. Millions of years of volcanic ash hardened into soft tuff, and then wind and water carved it into thousands of spires called fairy chimneys, some of them thirty meters tall, some of them capped with harder basalt boulders that balanced improbably on top. Early Christians, escaping persecution, dug into the soft rock and built churches inside the spires. Then they dug deeper and built entire underground cities. Derinkuyu extends eighteen stories below the earth. It has living quarters, wine cellars, stables, a church, a school, and wells that reach the water table hundreds of meters down. Twenty thousand people could live here—and for periods of Byzantine history, they did, sealing the tunnels with enormous rolling stone doors when invaders came. You walk through it with a flashlight and your loved one and try to comprehend the determination required to hollow out the world beneath your feet in order to survive. Above ground, stay in a cave hotel (the rock has been dug into for so long that some of the best accommodation in Cappadocia is, quite literally, inside a fairy chimney) and take a hot air balloon at dawn over the valleys when the light is rose and gold and the rock formations below look like a strange lost city. Rose Valley and Pigeon Valley are both hikeable, and both lead past ancient frescoed churches carved into cliff faces. El Nazar Church, in Göreme, has frescoes from the 11th century that have kept their blue, their red, their strange archaic faces, against all odds. Stay at: A cave suite in Ürgüp or Göreme—Argos in Cappadocia is genuinely beautiful and built into a complex of ancient dwellings—but any of the mid-range cave hotels deliver the extraordinary experience of sleeping inside rock. Don’t miss: Ihlara Valley, a 16-kilometer gorge carved by the Melendiz River where more than a hundred rock-cut churches line the canyon walls, most of them with frescoes worth taking in. Walk the valley floor along the river and look up at the doors cut into the cliff face many stories above you. The Gothic American Trip New Orleans, Louisiana New Orleans is the city where the Atlas Obscura sensibility was perhaps invented, though the city predates us by three centuries. It is a place that has always understood that pleasure and death are neighbors, that beauty and decay coexist in the same building, and that a good story is worth more than a good night’s sleep. Start in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, the oldest extant cemetery in New Orleans, where the dead are buried aboveground in whitewashed plaster tombs because the water table prevents burial below it. Some of these tombs contain generations of the same family—the bones of the previously interred were swept to the back to make room for the newly dead. The tomb of Homer Plessy—of Plessy v. Ferguson—is here. So is Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, whose tomb is always marked with X’s left by visitors making wishes. Walk through the French Quarter in the early morning before the tourists arrive and look at what the city actually is: wrought-iron balconies canting slightly over the narrow streets, plaster facades in faded ochre and salmon revealing the brick underneath where chunks have fallen away, courtyards glimpsed through carriageway openings where banana trees and jasmine and a single iron fountain constitute an entire private world. Eat oysters at the bar at Casamento’s (cash only, closed in summer). Drink a Sazerac at the Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone, which rotates slowly whether you want it to or not. Go to the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum on Chartres Street, housed in the oldest licensed pharmacy in the United States, where the cases contain leeches jars, poison cure-alls made of arsenic, and the earliest known cocaine preparations marketed as toothache remedies. Go to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in Treme, the oldest African American neighborhood in the country, where curator Sylvester Francis has assembled the most significant collection of Mardi Gras Indian suits in the world—towering hand-sewn beaded constructions that take a year to make and are worn once. Stay at: The Hotel Peter & Paul, a converted 19th-century church complex in the Marigny where the rooms are in the rectory, the chapel, the school, and the convent. Sleeping in a former church in New Orleans feels exactly right. Don’t miss: An evening Second Line, if one happens while you're there. A jazz funeral. The Beauregard-Keyes House on Chartres, which has its original furnishings and a ghost-free reputation that is entirely unearned by its atmosphere. Bask in Bioluminescence Vieques, Puerto Rico Mosquito Bay on the island of Vieques holds one of the highest concentrations of bioluminescent dinoflagellates anywhere on Earth. On a moonless night, every movement through the water produces cold blue-green light—your arms as you swim leave trails like a comet, the wake of a kayak paddle glows, a fish disturbed from the shallows explodes in a small private fireworks display. The effect is so improbable and so beautiful that it’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there—making the shared memory all the more precious. Vieques itself is largely undeveloped—much of the island was a U.S. Navy bombing range until 2003, and the former military lands are now a wildlife refuge that contains not just Mosquito Bay but also pristine beaches accessible only by four-wheel drive, wild horses descended from Spanish colonial stock, and a remarkable herd of white cattle egrets who have figured out that the horses attract insects—and follow them everywhere with an air of complete entitlement. Spend the days on the beaches—like Playa Negra, made up of dark volcanic sand that holds the heat long into the evening—and on the old fort, El Fortín Conde de Mirasol, which was the last military fortification built by the Spanish in the New World and now houses the Vieques Museum. It has a view over the harbor and the wild horses grazing below the walls. Stay at: The small guesthouses in Esperanza, the fishing village on the south coast, are the right scale for Vieques. Inn on the Blue Horizon is a longtime local institution. Avoid the all-inclusives. Don’t miss: Explore the bioluminescent bay by kayak rather than by motorized tour—the paddle itself becomes part of the spectacle. And be sure to see Sun Bay Beach at sunrise, before the horses have moved into the shade. Embark on a Paleontological Expedition Badlands, South Dakota + Rapid City For the couple whose first date involved a natural history museum. The Badlands are geologically young and active—the striped spires and eroded tables formed only in the last 500,000 years, and they’re still actively eroding at a rate of roughly an inch per year, which means fossils are constantly being exposed at the surface. Walk the Notch Trail along the top of the canyon wall and you will almost certainly see bone weathering out of the rock. The park has found Eocene mammals, saber-toothed cats, giant tortoises, and ancient three-toed horses here. The paleontology is everywhere. From the Badlands, drive to the legendary American roadside phenomenon Wall Drug—a drugstore that started advertising in 1936 and now has six hundred billboards across the state and a population of confused tourists larger than some cities. Then drive to Hill City and the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, which is a working commercial fossil preparation laboratory that you can walk through, watching technicians with dental picks working on specimens worth millions of dollars in surroundings that look like a very disorganized workshop. Stan, one of the most complete T. rex skeletons ever found, was prepared here. Sleep in Deadwood, which is a gambling town now but was a gold rush town before that, and before that was a Lakota sacred place where the Treaty of Fort Laramie prohibited white settlement until gold was discovered and the government simply decided the treaty didn't apply anymore. Mount Moriah Cemetery is here, where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried next to each other, and where Dora DuFran, the madam of the most successful brothel in Deadwood, rests nearby. They were all, apparently, friends. Stay at: The Hotel Alex Johnson in Rapid City, a 1928 Lakota-inspired hotel that has hosted presidents and rock climbers alike since it opened, and which still feels like it knows something it's not telling you. Don’t miss: Jewel Cave National Monument, the third-longest known cave system in the world, most of which has never been mapped, where guided tours take you past formations called frostwork, moonmilk, and hydromagnesite balloons that look exactly as strange as they sound. Choosing Your Trip: The Atlas Obscura Test Whether this is your honeymoon, your tenth anniversary, or simply the trip you’ve decided to take because life is short and you have a window, skip the reviews that rank beaches by the texture and color of the sand. Ask yourselves these instead: What’s the story you want to tell a year from now? The overwater bungalow story ends quickly. The underground city story, the cave church story, the glowing bay story—those take time to tell, because there’s more to say. The best romantic trips are the ones that become part of your shared vocabulary for decades. Would you go back? The best destinations are the ones that leave you feeling you only scratched the surface. If a place can be “done” in a week, it’s probably not the right place for a trip that’s supposed to mean something. Does it require something of you? Not discomfort for its own sake, but genuine engagement—learning a few words of another language, navigating without GPS, eating something you don’t recognize. Trips that ask something of you tend to return something that package tours can’t deliver. Is there something there that exists nowhere else on Earth? Waitomo’s glowworms. Cappadocia’s underground cities. Fes’s living medieval city. Vieques’s bioluminescent bay. The Badlands’s constant fossil exposure. These are the experiences that become, over time together, the stories you keep coming back to. The good news is this: wonder is not expensive. It requires curiosity, a decent tolerance for the unexpected, and a willingness to be in a place on its own terms rather than yours. That, as it turns out, is also a reasonable description of what makes a relationship work. Go somewhere astonishing. Come home changed.
This shop might catch your eye driving along Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley, California with its bright turquoise exterior, pop of pink signage, and a front window absolutely filled to the brim with knickknacks. Upon closer look, it's still hard to pin down exactly what this shop is. A treasure trove of, well, anything, it could be described as a craft supply store, gift shop, jewelry stand, art collection, and even a museum all at once. Curiosity shops across the globe are made to be just that: a place that awakens your senses and inspires questions and ideas. A haven for crafters, the side yard is stacked with old magazines, music books, newspapers, and more — perfect scrap paper for any project. Ranging from the early 1900s nursery rhymes to recent lifestyle publications, you truly can never expect what will be found. Around the front of the shop, stands hold sunglasses and hanging wood structures dangling long necklaces with vibrant charms. There's also a bucket filled with thousands of individual links for Italian charm bracelets, which you can assemble yourself. Inside, the shop also sells stones, pins, guitar picks, bangles, taffy, stamps, and rings — you could spend hours just wandering and digging through the piles. Wandering the shop really makes you wonder about the origin of it all: was it collected purposefully, or amassed over the years as someone's personal belongings? Where does one even find all of this? It's hard to predict what you'll walk out with at the Curiosity Shop, but of course, that's all the fun.
This impressive 21 arch viaduct is on a railway line currently called the "Penistone Line" and originally built in by the Huddersfield and Sheffield Junction Railway (later to become part of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway ). The valley of the River Dearne was a major barrier to the line between Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England and the town of Penistone (NW of Sheffield) to join up with the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnsire Railway and so provide a shorter route to London via the North Midland Railway. The viaduct is 112 feet above the valley at its highest and the arches have a span of 40 feet. Overall the viaduct is around 1100 feet long. It is thus not particularly impressive even compared to other local viaducts, but the back story, and the remains of that story, is fascinating. The original (1847) plan was to build the viaduct in Stone but the local suppliers demanded such high prices that the original viaduct was built from timber (another version of this story is that the local stone masons were on strike). Building railway infrastructure from timber rather than stone was a common expedient in mid 19th century railway building, The idea was to build a cheap ,if temporary, structure then either generate revenues to pay directly for the stone replacement or use the traffic figures generated to encourage further investment. The best example of this practice was the use of wooden structures (such as the Loughor Estuary Viaduct) by Brunel on the extensions into Wales of the GWR. It is not clear whether there was an intention, from the start, to upgrade the Denby Dale Viaduct to stone but in any event the upgrade seems to have been forced upon the company by local regulators. The original wooden viaduct was, for the most part, a rather spidery trestle style viaduct which did little to inspire confidence, particularly because, during construction (in January 1847) a storm managed to collapse 27 of the 40 upright structures (this cost £5,000 to put right in 1848 prices). At each end of the wooden viaduct were abutments in the form of two stone arches and even here it seems that economy was preferred over structural stability. On the southern side of the valley the viaduct had to accommodate Barnsley Rd (now the A635) and on the northern side the Wakefield Rd (now A636) passed underneath. Instead of extending the abutment so the roads passed under a strong stone arch the trestle was weakened at each end by creating an arch in the wooden structure about 3 times wider than the normal separation of the uprights with a rather unattractive, and less than reassuring, "A frame" over it. Even from the start there was a worrying amount of movement on the viaduct when trains passed over it and this was further not helped by the fact that maintenance of the wooden structure was less than rigorous. It was reported that as late as 1860 the bridge had had neither a coat of paint or an application of preservative. The timber had already started to decay. Famously, the viaduct wobbled so much that water buckets, required to be kept on the bridge in case the wooden structure caught fire, had to be re-filled daily because of water losses caused by passing trains. The station was north of the viaduct and the local Alderman reported that many people, in fear of crossing the viaduct , would opt to travel to Wakefield (15 miles to the northwest, over bad roads at the time) rather than take the train southwards over the viaduct when travelling to London. The story of how the company were "persuaded" to replace the wooden structure is told in excellent detail by the "Huddersfield Exposed" website , involving an inspection by none other than the famous,Robert Stephenson. Work started on the stone viaduct, built alongside the wooden structure on the inside of its curve (radius about 2600 ft), in 1877 with completion in 1884. Dismantling of the wooden structure around the same time. The stone structure was built over mine workings which had to be back filled after the structure was complete. The timbers etc of the wooden bridge were sold off by auction, as were probably the masonry foundations as there is little trace on the valley floor today. The arched abutments at either end are however still visible as a lasting reminder of the wooden structure that put fear into the hearts of the locals.
"The artist must be sacrificed to their art like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give" Read the words painted across the exposed walls of the parking garage, dramatically introducing the epic mural below. The Storm is a masterpiece of swirling painted concrete figures conducted by a wild-haired maestro -- representing the chaos of the artist's process. The entire mural took two-person business team Eyecon (both graduates of nearby Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts) one year to complete by May of 1997. The mural sits on the side of 717 Leonard Parking Garage and covers 120 feet x 150 feet of vertical space. Ground level viewing requires standing nearly across the entire parking lot to consider the image in its entirety (most enjoyably with a coffee in hand). The steps of the Winspear Opera House offer another prime viewing spot. Fun fact: The conductor is modeled off muralist Chris Arnold's dad. All other featured figures are local artists.
Off the coast of Philadelphia (or more accurately, Camden County, New Jersey), sitting in the Delaware river and heavily covered in trees and brush, is a deserted island. Once home to CITGO industrial operations, the island has been overgrown and uninhabited by human life for years. Usually, it’s off limits to visitors, but thanks to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the Center for Aquatic Sciences, a conservation easement allows the occasional group of visitors for educational purposes. Cradled between two Urban centers, Petty’s Island is a beautiful greenspace made up of 500 acres of native flora and fauna. The island is home to eagles, hawks, white tailed deer, herons, and even coyotes. In the summer visitors can kayak through the island’s back channel or take a walking tour over its intermittent paths in pursuit of the variety of bat species that call the island home. It’s a perfectly balanced ecosystem, surrounded by mudflats that protect the island from incoming storms. At night you can see Philadelphia’s skyline towering brightly in the distance. The island has a long and storied history—first recorded as territory of the Lenni Lenape, later purchased by Quakers and (possibly) visited by notable figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Blackbeard (yes, the pirate). It was allegedly home to an illegal gambling operation, and a stop on the slave trade (some of these claims are less substantiated than others, we can hope with time and exposure the truth will be dug up). In its more recent years CITGO used it as a shipping and trucking exchange—transporting goods from massive ships to waiting trucks, only a single bridge between them and industrialized New Jersey. After ceasing operations, the island was left to its own devices, and nature took back its course. Today it looks like a post-apocalyptic utopia—the parking lots are overgrown, native birds have made nests atop inoperable telephone poles. Entire structures have turned into homes for bats or other curious critters. While inland it is green as far as your eyes can see, and on the edges, it is a rocky shoreline patterned by the footprints of deer (yes they can, and do, swim on and off the island). Community organizers are working tirelessly to secure the future of Petty’s Island; advocating for it to become a state park or environmental sanctuary for the many species that call it home and its human neighbors who cherish it for what it represents—the perseverance of the natural world.
In the East Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, the Perrystead Dairy Vending Machine looks like something fairies dropped in the middle of a magic garden—and to the cheese enthusiasts of the area it might as well have been. It’s surrounded by expertly cultivated native flora, bisected by a curving stone path. If it weren’t for the sound of the El train roaring by in the distance, you might think you were somehow transported far from the city limits. Perrystead is a local cheese shop unlike any other. With a small team of four, they make over 500 pounds of cheese a week. They keep their repertoire small, less than ten different cheeses, some of them seasonal, developed over time and inspired by a blend of old European techniques and American innovation. They have reached international acclaim and are world title holders; the winners of many a cheese competition. The vending machine itself is a refrigerated behemoth that holds not only the shop’s signature cheeses, but also any accoutrements a visiting lunch goer could desire—utensils, meats, and condiments. From the outside it appears to be a little red shed, with only room for one guest at a time to step inside. Within, it’s cool and music is playing. Accepting credit cards only, the machine is open 24 hours a day, and guests can even be seen late in the evening grabbing the carefully packaged cheese on their way to (or from) the local bars. Additionally, there are shaded, wooden benches in the garden for sitting to snack, and because the dairy lies only five blocks from the Berks metro entrance, it’s an easy pit stop on an afternoon adventure. If you were to peer into the glass front door of the dairy itself any given day between business hours (or even poke your head in to say hello) you may see the cheese mongers themselves bustling about—carefully checking temperatures, humidity, or another necessary metric (cheesemaking is a science and they have perfected it). The shop is spotless, the tanks so clean you can see your reflection in them and buzzing with activity. The Perrystead team pasteurizes their milk on site after it’s delivered from nearby farms, ensuring its freshness, and the same quality that will later be reflected in their final products.
Sitting at the intersection of Broad and Philadelphia’s iconic South Street (and West one block) is Bob & Barbara’s Lounge. Opened by the namesake couple in 1969, the lounge remains one of the gems of Philly’s nightlife. Featuring the city’s longest running drag show (every Thursday night with Miss Lisa Lisa), founders of Philadelphia’s infamous “Citywide” and standing host to Jazz trios every weekend, Bob & Barbara’s has been the place to be for over half a century. The bar is unassuming from the outside, snug on a block of independent restaurants, bars, and other business—but it lights up the street after dark, and when the door cracks open, music and reflected neon light flood the street. On the weekends, there are lines made up of folks of all ages, waiting for the bouncer to check IDs and wave them through. The bar is always full, and the crowd circles the spotlit band, careful not to lean on the antique organ. On Thursdays, they wait for Miss Lisa Lisa—her show the signal that the weekend has almost arrived. The Citywide, at Bob & Barbara’s known simply as “The Special,” is the signature drink of Philadelphia. From the highest-class hotel to the greasiest dive, bartenders know exactly what you mean. There’s some flexibility between places—sometimes the beer or accompanying shot changes. But at Bob & Barbara’s they stay true to the original Special; a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a shot of Jim Beam, delivered together. Bob & Barabara’s legend attributes it to Rick D, whose portrait hangs by the front door. The story goes that needed a special to keep patrons coming back; first for just one night’s show, but then again the next, and so on and so on. The rest is history. The bar has only had one other owner since Bob & Barbara’s, and the place shows no sign of slowing down. Pabst memorabilia lines the walls floor to ceiling, occasionally rotated to bring fresh merchandise out of storage where it’s been lovingly kept. Interspersing the antique signage and vintage light fixtures are records of the lounge’s history—photos of Bob & Barbara themselves, acclaimed Jazz musicians, even an old article or two about the revelation of the Citywide. It’s nostalgic in the best way inside Bob & Barbara’s, even for those who have never before set foot inside.
At the base of Japan’s Mount Fuji, there is a fascinating cave with several stories to tell. Located by the Kawaguchiko Field Center and part of the Mount Fuji World Heritage Site, the Funatsu-Tainai lava tree mold is one of the smaller and quieter caves of the Kawaguchiko area. The straight and narrow shape of this cave is due to a process known as lava tree molding. In the year 937, eruptions from Mount Fuji created the Ken-Marubi lava flow on the mountain’s northern slopes, engulfing a series of fallen trees. While the lava cooled around them, the trees were burnt away, leaving a uniform tube in the ground. The undulating inner surface of the cave, caused by the burning trees, is reminiscent of a human womb. When adherents of the Fuji-ko folk religion found this cave, the womb-like appearance was not lost on them. They believed that entering and exiting the womb of Mount Fuji was a type of spiritual rebirth, and they could then be pure as babies before climbing the mountain. Expecting mothers would visit the cave as well, to pray for a safe delivery. Legend tells that the goddess Konohanasakuya-hime, patron of Mount Fuji, once gave birth here. Today, the entrance to the cave is marked by a shrine to Konohanasakuya-hime. The goddess has had several of her shrines burned over the centuries by eruptions from the mountain. While the volcano is still active to this day, the last confirmed eruption was over 300 years ago. Today, the cave is open to all visitors.
Tucked away past Anguilla’s famous natural stone arch, this hidden coastal path was recently mapped and documented by local explorer Michael Enloe, bringing well-deserved attention to one of the island's most dramatic geographical features. The trail leads adventurous hikers across sharp limestone terrain and sea spray toward a sheer cliffside that thrusts abruptly over crashing turquoise waters. From the right vantage point, the razor-sharp rock formation bears an unmistakable resemblance to the doomed bow of the Titanic cutting through the Atlantic swells. Visitors navigating the coastal route should exercise extreme caution: the ocean-sprayed limestone slopes become slick and slippery, making proper closed-toe hiking shoes or sturdy sandals essential for safe exploration.
In a ski town two hours from Los Angeles, in a bistro serving cocktails and bar snacks, hangs the largest Tiffany-style stained-glass dome west of Chicago — and it didn't start out anywhere near a mountain. The 57-foot dome was originally installed in a Parisian tango house during the city's so-called "Golden Age of Brothels," a period when clandestine dance halls and pleasure houses commissioned lavish decorative glasswork to match their reputations. At some point after that chapter closed, the dome was carefully disassembled panel by panel and shipped across the Atlantic, eventually finding its way to Chateau Big Bear, a French-inspired hotel built in 1987 in the San Bernardino National Forest. Look closely at the glass today and you can still find small pockmarks and imperfections — said to be the scars of champagne corks popped underneath it during its Parisian nightlife days. The hotel's owners have since put roughly $500,000 into restoring the dome, and it now sits above the tables of Tiffany's Bistro, the hotel's in-house restaurant and live music venue, doing exactly what it always did: presiding over a room full of people having a good time, just several thousand feet higher up and several thousand miles from home.
If you like design museums and are a fan of industrial design, you must make a pilgrimage to the Braun Sammlung. This gem is hidden away on the second floor of what is essentially a German strip mall. It is managed by a dedicated non-profit association (Förderkreis BraunSammlung e.V.) in close collaboration with the Braun brand, headquartered around the corner. Today, you can still buy a Braun shaver (now owned by Procter & Gamble) or a Braun alarm clock, but back in the 1980s, a household could be completely outfitted with Braun's incredibly stylish and user-friendly consumer electronics: TVs, audio equipment, watches, cigarette lighters, epilators, toothbrushes, hairdryers, mixers, coffee makers, film cameras, projectors, and food processors, to name just a few. William Gibson even selected Braun as one of the few brands worthy of surviving into the future in his genre-defining Neuromancer cyberpunk series. The collection is curated and displayed on par with any top museum in the world. Housed in an airy, modern space, it showcases Braun's entire product history, from wood-cabinet radios to present-day items. Each piece is meticulously annotated in both English and German with model number, designer, and historical notes. Renowned designer Dieter Rams made an outsized contribution to hundreds of these products. Numerous items are specialty demonstration pieces—likely created for trade fairs—housed in clear plastic enclosures. Even more fascinating are a few dozen products cast inside solid blocks of clear plastic and sliced in half, revealing their intricate inner workings with vivid clarity. In one of the back rooms, the display cabinets feature glass backings that reveal a true working archive complete with movable library shelves, a small photo studio, and a workspace for the archivists. Design professionals and educators may even be able to arrange for private access to these archives. The facility also offers comfortable seating areas, an array of design books to peruse, excellent restrooms, and a state-of-the-art meeting room suitable for hosting workshops or conferences for up to a few dozen people. A small gift shop stocks an impressive collection of books on Braun products and their designers, all at reasonable prices.
Perched more than 4,000 feet above sea level at the northern edge of Dolly Sods, Bear Rocks is one of the most unusual landscapes in the Appalachian Mountains. Its broad sandstone outcrops overlook the Allegheny Front, while stunted red spruce, blueberry and huckleberry heath, and open barrens create an ecosystem more commonly associated with Canada than West Virginia. The combination of elevation, exposure, and cool climate has allowed northern plant communities to persist here long after the last Ice Age retreated. The rocks themselves tell an even older story. The flat-topped plateau is a textbook example of how ancient mountains gradually transform over millions of years. After the Appalachians were thrust upward by continental collisions, erosion slowly wore them down, leaving behind the broad, sandstone-capped plateau visitors see today. In recognition of its exceptional geology and ecology, Bear Rocks and the surrounding Allegheny Front Preserve were designated a National Natural Landmark in 2021. Despite its dramatic appearance, Bear Rocks remains easily accessible. A short walk from the parking area leads directly onto the weathered sandstone ledges, where uninterrupted views stretch for miles across the Monongahela National Forest. Sunrise and sunset transform the cliffs into one of West Virginia’s most photographed vistas, while autumn paints the surrounding heath barrens in vivid reds and oranges. Beyond the overlook lies Dolly Sods Wilderness, one of the East Coast’s most distinctive backcountry landscapes. Nearly 50 miles of trails wind through bogs, windswept plains, streams, and recovering red spruce forests, offering hikers a glimpse of an ecosystem unlike anywhere else in the region.
Long before boutique “retro” hotels became fashionable, the Koolwink Motel was serving up charming roadside Americana in small-town West Virginia. Opened in 1936 as the Koolwink Tourist Home, the property started off renting rooms in a family residence, as well as a pair of cottages for motorists exploring what is now U.S. Route 50. When married couple Wallace and Pauline Mauk purchased the business in 1955, they didn’t replace it with something new. Instead, they slowly expanded it while preserving its personality. Wallace personally designed many of the additions, completed much of the plumbing and electrical work himself, and oversaw the motel’s gradual growth through the 1950s and 1960s. Today, the Koolwink remains family-owned, making it an increasingly rare survivor from the heyday of America’s roadside motor courts. Wood paneling, private entrances, breezy porches, vintage furnishings, and a cheerful mascot named “Mr. Koolwink” evoke an era when family vacations unfolded on two-lane highways. The West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History has even featured the Koolwink among the state’s historic lodgings, recognizing its place in the region’s roadside heritage. The Koolwink also makes an excellent base for exploring West Virginia’s Potomac Highlands, a region where scenic drives, Civil War history, and mountain landscapes intersect. Romney, the state’s oldest chartered town, is home to historic buildings and museums, while nearby attractions include the South Branch Potomac River, the Potomac Eagle Scenic Railroad’s eagle-watching excursions, and the expansive Monongahela National Forest.
Long before Fiesta became one of America’s most recognizable dinnerware brands, it was simply an ambitious idea from a pottery company determined to brighten the nation’s tables. The story begins in 1871, when brothers Homer and Shakespeare Laughlin established a pottery in East Liverpool, Ohio, a city that would become known as the “Pottery Capital of the World.” As demand grew, the company crossed the Ohio River into what would become Newell, West Virginia. In 1902, company leaders purchased farmland there, laid out streets, installed utilities, built a suspension bridge and trolley connection, and transformed the site into a purpose-built company town centered around pottery production. By 1906, the new Plant No. 4 was considered the largest pottery factory in the world, capable of producing roughly 300,000 pieces of ware each day. The company’s most iconic creation arrived in 1936. Designed by English-born ceramic artist Frederick Hurten Rhead, Fiesta combined streamlined Art Deco forms with bold, solid colors that stood apart from the floral china patterns then filling American cupboards. Introduced at the Pittsburgh China & Glass Show, the collection became an immediate success, with more than one million pieces produced by its second year. Over the decades, colors have come and gone, but the concentric rings and mix-and-match philosophy have remained unmistakably Fiesta. Today, visitors can browse the Fiesta Tableware Retail Outlet beside the factory where the pottery is still made. Shelves overflow with every imaginable color, while bargain hunters dig through bins of “seconds,” pieces with tiny cosmetic imperfections that are often difficult to spot. Unlike many iconic American brands that long ago moved production overseas, Fiesta dinnerware continues to be manufactured in Newell, making this one of the few places where visitors can purchase the company’s signature pottery directly from its source.
With lush forests, dramatic waterfalls, and unparalleled mountain vistas, West Virginia rewards those who make the time to take in the views—with no shortage of accommodations designed to help visitors do just that. Across the state’s small towns and mountain valleys, these lodgings turn an overnight stop into the heart of the journey. Bunk down in whimsical cabins and treetop hideaways, pitch a tent beneath the looming fins of Seneca Rocks, check into a century-old schoolhouse reborn as a boutique retreat, or unwind at a tiny roadside motel with a surprisingly spirited social scene. Each one pairs inventive design with a genuine sense of place—from the pastoral southern borderlands to the rugged high country. Choose Your Own Woodland Adventure Four Fillies Lodge in Monroe County Spread across nearly 100 acres near the Virginia border, Four Fillies Lodge feels like a collection of fanciful hideaways gathered on one wooded estate. Guests can choose among antique Appalachian cabins, glass-fronted retreats, glamping pods, bohemian-style wagons, and an elevated safari treehouse, with select accommodations adding hot tubs, fireplaces, or creekside settings. The playful range makes the property especially appealing to families, couples, and groups who want more personality than a conventional hotel room offers. Rustic materials and pastoral surroundings set the tone of escape, while thoughtful modern comforts keep the experience inviting rather than overly rugged. Camp Beneath a Legendary Skyline Fourth Moon Camp in Seneca Rocks Fourth Moon Camp places guests close to one of West Virginia's most dramatic natural landmarks, where the sheer rock formation of Seneca Rocks rises above a quiet rural landscape. Open across all four seasons and accessible by reservation only, the private campground offers primitive sites like Creekside Hollow and North Peak, vehicle-accessible spots such as Spearmint Patch, and elevated tree-net campsites like Moonshine. The emphasis is on an intimate outdoor experience rather than resort-style development, making it a natural fit for climbers, hikers, and travelers who prefer sleeping close to the landscape. Events and recreational experiences add a communal dimension to the camp's secluded mountain setting. Go to Bed in a Beloved Old School The Schoolhouse Hotel in White Sulphur Springs Built around the historic cornerstone of a 1912 school, the Schoolhouse Hotel gives a familiar civic landmark an imaginative second chapter. Its 30 boutique guest rooms draw inspiration from classroom subjects such as art, English, band and geography, creating an atmosphere that's playful without sacrificing polish. The fully accessible property also includes a restaurant, rooftop bar and flexible gathering spaces, and its location places guests within easy reach of downtown White Sulphur Springs. Original history and contemporary hospitality coexist throughout the building, making the hotel feel both nostalgic and forward-looking—a memorable base for exploring the shops, restaurants and mountain scenery of the Greenbrier Valley. Check Into a Mountain-Town Cult Classic The Billy Motel & Bar near Davis With just 10 rooms and a lively bar at its center, the Billy Motel & Bar transforms the classic roadside stay into a stylish mountain-town gathering place. The pocket-size property sits between downtown Davis and the entrance to Blackwater Falls State Park, positioning guests for waterfall walks, Canaan Valley adventures and evenings in nearby Thomas. Inside, a fireplace, cocktails and French-press coffee encourage guests and locals to linger, while the retro exterior gives the motel an instantly recognizable personality. The result is intimate, convivial and refreshingly unpretentious—a character-rich home base for travelers who like their outdoor escapes paired with good design and conversation. Sleep Among the Treetops Country Road Cabins in Hico This wooded New River Gorge retreat offers far more than traditional cabins: guests can book treehouses, yurts, glamping tents, a geodesic dome and an Airstream. The round Holly Rock Treehouse is reached by a 37-foot canopy bridge and includes a private elevated hot tub. Just minutes from the New River Gorge Bridge, the property puts guests within easy range of whitewater rafting on the New and Gauley rivers, along with hiking, fishing and nearby state parks. Each accommodation comes with a fully equipped kitchen, making it easy to settle in for a multi-night stay in the gorge. Check Into an Art-Filled Hideaway Lafayette Flats Boutique Vacation Rentals in Fayetteville Four individually designed flats occupy a historic building in the center of Fayetteville, steps from the small town's restaurants, shops and public art. Each accommodation combines the independence of an apartment with the careful styling of a boutique hotel, including original West Virginia artwork and details inspired by the surrounding New River Gorge. It's a fitting choice for travelers who want a downtown base with more room to spread out and settle in. Step Into a Collector’s Country Inn The General Lewis Inn in Lewisburg Built in stages across 1834 and 1928, the historic General Lewis Inn pairs individually decorated rooms with antique furnishings, refinished original floors, Persian rugs and a mix of classical and contemporary style throughout. Its 23 rooms, tranquil garden and courtyard, farm-to-table restaurant and atmospheric Thistle Lounge give it the layered character of a grand old house rather than a conventional hotel. The inn takes its name from General Andrew Lewis, a noted figure of the French and Indian War, and its East Wing began as an 1834 residence before a West Wing addition turned the property into a hotel in the 1920s. Its downtown location also makes it easy to explore Lewisburg's walkable historic district, antique shops, galleries and independent businesses. Stay Inside a Living-History Village The Town’s Inn in Harpers Ferry Occupying two pre-Civil War stone residences dating to approximately 1820 and 1840, The Town's Inn places guests directly within Harpers Ferry's Lower Town. Rooms are furnished in a style influenced by the historic boarding houses preserved nearby, while rivers, museums, trails and the train station are only steps away. Little about the experience feels updated for modern travel, which is exactly the point for guests seeking an unfiltered sense of the town's 19th-century past.
After nearly 50 years, the Bavarian Inn has become a beloved fixture in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. In the spring of 1977, the Munich-born chef Erwin Asam and his English wife, Carol, from Sheffield, purchased the former Greystone Manor. They had previously run the Piccadilly Restaurant in the capital, but hoped to open something smaller and more personal: a restaurant serving food from Erwin's homeland. Erwin became the chef, Carol the hostess, and the pair got by using the mansion's living room as the restaurant's dining room. According to one account from son David, the setup was lean at the start — their father cooking out of a modest two-car garage, one waitress on staff, and the family living upstairs. The setting made this grand experiment particularly curious. The manor sits high above a bend in the Potomac River. Originally known as Greystone Manor, it was built in 1930 as a private residence and converted into a country inn in 1962, before the Asams took it over and gave it an extensive renovation. Shepherdstown already had deep German associations: the town's original name when it was incorporated in 1762 was Mecklenburg, and its main thoroughfare is still called German Street. But the Asams spun that historical thread into something far more impressive. As the restaurant prospered, the property began sprouting its own miniature Alpine settlement. In 1981, Alpine-style chalet buildings were added, each with a balcony overlooking the Potomac River bend. The Schwarzwald Haus, named for Germany's Black Forest, followed in 1994, bringing the property's total to 72 rooms. The inn has continued to expand its German theme in other directions. In 2019, the Asams opened the Bavarian Brothers Brewery, converting a former garden patio and part of the fine-dining space into a brewpub. The beer names double as a family scrapbook: one flagship brew, Carol's Royal Stout, honors Carol's English heritage and her role as "Queen of the Bavarian Inn," while a Mecklenbrau German pilsner nods to the town’s old name. The combination of half-timbered facades, steep roofs, German cooking, a working brewery, and Potomac views can feel like a geographical mix-up — Bavaria by way of the Eastern Panhandle. Yet the place is not a prefabricated theme resort; it is a family-run hospitality business. Erwin and Carol's sons, Christian and David, grew up on the property and gradually took over its operations, continuing the grand Bavarian experiment into a second generation.
Kawran Bazar is a massive wholesale market located in the center of Dhaka, and one of the largest wholesale markets in South Asia by some accounts. While it technically operates 24/7, some of the liveliest times are in the middle of the night and wee hours of the morning. 2 am fruit auction, anyone? Kawran Bazar serves as a wholesale hub for Dhaka's essential food commodities. According to one source, the market handles a whopping 57% of the city's daily vegetable supply, not to mention the masses of fruits and other products. There’s an entire section dedicated to meat, with livestock waiting to be slaughtered upon purchase and fish being descaled by hand. Train tracks run alongside part of the bazar, with vendors peddling goods on the tracks only to remove and replace them each time a train moves through. It is not uncommon to see Bangladesh’s infamous “train surfers” atop the cars as the trains whizz by. Kawran Bazar clears out by mid-morning, when the area transforms into a central business district, supporting commerce of a different source. Stalls are replaced by parked cars and vendors by businessmen; the area is home to several Bangladeshi newspapers and television channels, as well as a university campus, hospital, and mall. Kawran Bazar dates back to the 1780s, when it was established by the Marwari trader Kawran Sing. Sing migrated from India to Dhaka during the early years of British colonial rule in Bengal, and was a prominent merchant expanding trade routes during the change in rule. Today, Kawran Bazar is still a vital commercial center for Bangladesh. The Dhaka Metropolitan Development Plan even designated it as a prime commercial business zone, slating it for urban renewal and structured expansion in its 1995 plan.
Back when public displays of affection were more taboo, covered bridges popped up in every corner of the province of New Brunswick. Built mostly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the wooden, roofed structures helped farmers and travelers get safely from one side of a river to the other, even in the snowy, harsh winters of yesteryear. But in their heyday, “covered bridges” wasn’t the only term people used to identify the river-crossing spans. In popular parlance, “kissing bridges” became the go-to expression instead. Especially among young couples. The reason for the colourful, smooch-worthy nickname isn't hard to figure out: shielded from the gaze of onlookers, horse-and-carriage riders could enjoy a few brief moments of glorious privacy while passing through, which meant a quick chance for some kissy-kissy action with your main squeeze before reaching the other side. You didn’t even have to get a room. Once upon a time, New Brunswick boasted hundreds of these rather fragile, lumber-heavy marvels. Today, only about 62 remain in service. A fine example of these engineering throwbacks is the ever-so scenic, 50-metre-long Burpee Covered Bridge at Gaspeareau Forks. Set back just enough from the main highway to feel hidden, the site is 10 minutes from the nearby village of Chipman and about an hour from the provincial capital of Fredericton. If impossibly picturesque rural scenery is your thing, consider a visit. Fair warning though. Arriving at the Burpee Bridge feels like stepping through a time portal to the days of a bygone era. It wouldn’t seem out of place if a character from a Lucy Maud Montgomery novel suddenly sprang to life on the two-lane Gaspereau Road. But this is Atlas Obscura, not Goodreads, so we’ll have to discuss the creator of Gilbert Blythe and Anne Shirley some other time. As for the Burpee Covered Bridge, how long has it stood in the New Brunswick countryside? The question is an interesting one for history nerds. Signage at the site today clearly dates the bridge to the year 1913. Old newspaper clippings, however, suggest the bridge was already in use by the summer of 1912. So there’s that. By the way, the span’s double-b name relates to a prominent family, the Burpees, that owned plots of land in the vicinity at the time when the bridge was put up. In 2026, colourful markings on the vaulted interior point to a new moonlight tradition. High school grads have clearly taken to decorating the rafters and wooden walls, graffiti-style, with their names and other vivid symbols of their impromptu imagining. Fear not though, the artwork scarcely detracts from the bridge’s charm and appeal. The quaint days of horse-and-carriage travel are gone. But kissing is still a thing. When you get here, drive through the darkened bridge a couple times. In your pickup, EV, or hatchback, lean over to that special someone and show some affection. You’ll be re-enacting what generations before you did on the kissing bridges of New Brunswick.
Santa Monica isn't just pretty, it's absurdly long — somewhere between 11 and 18 kilometers of white sand, depending who's doing the measuring. What makes it genuinely rare, though, is what's not there. One beach shack. One aborted hotel. That's it. The shack is real and it works, tucked at one end for a cold drink and some shade. The hotel is a different story. Back in 2015, developers broke ground on White Sands Hotel & Spa, the first of six planned resorts meant to turn this stretch into 835 rooms, six restaurants, a beach club branded as world-famous before a single guest had checked in. It never got there. What's left is a raw concrete shell sitting on one of the best beaches on the planet, doing a decent impression of a ruin twice its actual age. It's proof that even developers with six-resort ambitions couldn't out-stubborn this stretch of coast. Getting here means off-road driving through dunes that eat regular cars alive, and this has done more to protect Santa Monica than any conservation policy ever could. Enjoy the version with no Wi-Fi and no infinity pool, and let's hope it stays this empty forever.
Bray Road looks like just another unassuming stretch of concrete surrounded by farmland in rural Wisconsin, and to some people, it is. To others, it’s home to the most famous werewolf in the United States. The beast is described as having shaggy, black or greyish-brown fur with pointed ears, sharp claws, and a sloping weakness to its back legs. Witnesses report seeing it walk upright on two legs, reaching a height of seven or eight feet, as well as on all fours; though, it’s specified to look unlike any other four-legged animal when it runs in this position. It has been observed to eat in a way more similar to humans and apes than canines, with the creature holding prey in it’s paws and bringing it to its mouth to eat rather than bending its head to its food. The first known sighting of a creature fitting this description on or near Bray Road was reported in 1936 by Mark Schackelman, a night watchman for an assisted living facility for developmentally disabled individuals. He described the creature to his son as being over six feet tall, with black fur, pointed ears, claws, and smelling like decay. Schackelman saw the beast again the next night, when it reportedly attempted to speak to him in a growling, near-human voice. It “spoke” one word - ‘gadara.’ Reports of encounters with the beast were made again in the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and even the early 2000s. Sometimes it was “peaceful,” only staring witnesses down from a distance. Other times, it was seen running across the road or eating roadkill. Two particularly unlucky eyewitnesses were chased down in their vehicles, with claw marks on their trunk to corroborate their story. Linda S. Godfrey, a reporter for Walworth County’s “The Week” was the first person to dig deeper into these sightings. She followed the story for 40 years, interviewing countless witnesses and sharing their stories first in “The Week,” then in numerous books on the Beast of Bray Road and other Wisconsin cryptids and legends when the newspaper ceased its operations. Witnesses of the Beast of Bray Road are diverse and largely reported to be very credible individuals, which makes brushing off this creature as an attempt at garnering money or fame more difficult. Because of this, one theory about the Beast of Bray Road is that it is in fact a real animal - but instead of a supernatural creature or even a new species, it might just be a black bear suffering from mange. Mange is a disease that causes hair loss and emaciation in animals. A black bear in this condition can look similar to a wolf, especially at a distance or in nighttime conditions. Black bears are also more likely to scavenge roadkill than wolves, they hold food in their paws and bring it to their mouths to eat rather than bending their head to their food like wolves, and black bears can walk and even run on their hind legs whereas wolves cannot. While this theory is not flawless, many amateur cryptozoologists find it to be more compelling than other proposed explanations.
This Minnesota State Recreation Area is an island in Lake of the Woods. For most of the year, you can only get there by boat. In winter, snowmobiles and other vehicles safely traveling on the frozen lake will take you there. The island is uninhabited, and most people go there to fish, relax, or hike. A picnic area is included, and a shelter with an emergency phone if you get caught in bad weather. Not sure if you can count on the emergency phone! Most visitors go for the scenery, the fishing, or to enjoy nature, or because they are visiting all the state parks and state recreation areas in Minnesota. While traveling on the lake, be aware that you can drift into Canada, and international borders require reporting to the country you are entering. You must carry a passport, passport card, or enhanced driver's license when crossing over, and report again when crossing back.
Saintes is a Belgian village located 30 minutes' drive southwest of Brussels. It lies between the towns of Enghien and Hal, home to the famous Blue Forest of Hal. Everything in this small village is connected in one way or another to Renelde of Saintes, a devout woman who lived there in the seventh century. She was elevated to the status of a saint, and the village church is dedicated to her. Her reliquary is paraded on a horse-drawn cart every year. The most unusual feature associated with her, however, is a well in the countryside to the south of the village. To understand this well, we must first talk about Renelde of Saintes. She was the sister of Saint Gudula, the patron saint of Brussels. When their parents separated to enter religious life, Renelde wanted to follow her father to Lobbes Abbey, but was refused. She then set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Upon her return, she settled on a farm south of the village of Sainte with her two faithful servants, Grimoald and Gondulphe. It is most likely that she chose this location because her family owned land there. “Laubecq Farm”, also known as “Sainte-Renelde Farm”, is believed to be located on the site of Renelde's farm: it is situated 100 metres west of the well. Renelde and her two servants were murdered there by the Huns around 680. She was considered a martyr and was canonised as a saint. According to legend, Renelde struck the ground with his staff on a sweltering day, causing a spring to gush forth so that his servants could quench their thirst. It is not surprising that water can be found here, given that the valley bottom and the confluence of two streams are the location in question. Nevertheless, this spring has become a place of pilgrimage. It is believed that the water has curative properties for stroke, paralysis, ocular maladies, and ulcers. At an unknown date (perhaps in the 17th century), a limestone well was built. On the front, there is a depiction of Saint Renelde. She is holding a pilgrim's staff in her right hand. In her left hand, she is holding a martyr's palm. Saintes was where Father Steen was appointed in 1851. Since the well had fallen into disrepair, he restored it. The stone well was raised by 70 cm and topped with a canopy supported by six columns that hold a statue of the saint. This cast-iron statue weighs 233 kg. It is a copy of a wooden statue (circa 1490–1500) that is preserved in the village church. The jug of water from the well can be raised by pulling on the chain hanging from the canopy. The water is not officially considered potable (i.e. it is not tested regularly as required by Belgian law). However, even today, it is not uncommon to see people drawing water from it to pour over certain parts of their bodies (or even to drink it).
Deep in the spectacular Lake District National Park sits the tiny hamlet of Wasdale Head, located in the shadow of England's highest mountain, Scafell Pike, and near the shores of England's deepest lake, Wastwater. Within the hamlet, the minute Saint Olaf's Church of England, at just 142 cubic meters, is England's smallest active parish church. Originally equipped with merely a few seats and an earth floor, the church now has enough pew seating to snuggly accommodate a maximum of 39 people. Wasdale Head was originally a Norse settlement, with the name derived from the Norse 'Vanstdair', meaning 'valley of the water'. Legend says that the ancient timber roof beams were taken from Viking longships. The veracity of this story and the true age of the timbers, which have never been carbon tested, are up for debate, but the beams are believed to be original to the building. The rural location of the church, and the agriculture nature of the area, are reflected in the churchwarden’s staves. One stave is adorned with the intricately carved head of a Herdwick ram, the other with the head of a ewe, a nod to this hardy species of sheep, a Cumbrian icon that thrives on the Lake District's harsh high fell environments. While it was likely that there were earlier churches on the site, the first record of the church was in 1550. Nameless and referred to simply as Wasdale Head Church for most of its existence, the church only became St. Olaf's in 1977, after Norwegian friends of the rector at the time suggested the name. Also that same year, the church finally joined the electrical grid, having been lit by oil lamps up until that point. St Olaf's also has a long association with mountaineering, as Wasdale Head is regarded as the traditional center of UK rock climbing. Several climbers are interred in the churchyard having perished on nearby fells. A memorial dedicated to Lake District Fell and Rock Climbing Club members who died in World War I, sits on a stone plinth in the churchyard, repositioned from its original place on the nearby fell Great Gable. Further solidifying the link to the mountains is an etching of Napes Needle, a rock formation on Great Gable, depicted on one of the church's diamond windows. The church is surrounded by a ring of yew trees, that shield it from view until approached. Combined with the impressive mountains surrounding Wasdale Head, and the dramatic views across Wastwater and the Wasdale Valley, St Olaf's Church exudes a truly mythical and holy ambience, in one of the most incredibly picturesque locales in all of England.
At the confluence of the Esopus Creek and the Hudson River in Saugerties, NY you will find the charming Saugerties Lighthouse. Built in 1869 it has guided ships away from the shallows and into the Esopus Creek for 157 years. Today the lighthouse is maintained by the Saugerties Lighthouse Conservancy and functions as a living museum and bed & breakfast. Visitors can access the lighthouse via a half mile walk through the Ruth Reynolds Clunt Nature Preserve. It is recommended that you check the Saugerties Lighthouse Tide Chart before venturing out to the light house as high tides can submerge parts of the path. The walk is easy and provides beautiful views of the Hudson River and surrounding freshwater tidal wetlands in the Esopus Estuary. The nature trail is well maintained and open year round from sunrise to sunset. There are a few spots along the trail to walk out to the edge of the Hudson River which provide stunning views looking north and slightly east up the Hudson. Docent led tours of the interior of the lighthouse are available in the summer on Sundays from 12:00pm-3:00pm for $10.00 (adult) & $5.00 (child). The lighthouse is also available as a bed & breakfast for overnight stays.
A string of small islands stretch from the northern tip of Door County, where the warm waters of Green Bay meet the icy waves of Lake Michigan. The shoals surrounding these islands, combined with the unpredictable currents and weather patterns, have given this infamous passage the title of Death’s Door. While the origin of the title is shrouded in folklore and fish tales, the seriousness of the sobriquet is under no such dispute - hundreds of ships have succumbed to this passage over the centuries. To combat these dangers, and provide aid to the burgeoning maritime commerce on the Great Lakes, a lighthouse was erected to mark the mouth of the Door on a minuscule, 3.5 acre island. Built in 1858, it was only the third lighthouse in the region, and the very first made out of Cream City brick imported from Milwaukee. It was accompanied by a foghorn - taking up another entire building - which was said to be so loud that it shook the entire island, killed bird embryos, curdled milk and threw china out of the cabinets in the lighthouse. The remoteness of the post led to several reported cases of insanity, and at least one assistant light keeper committing suicide by a self-inflicted blade to the throat. Both structures were continuously manned until the 1960s, at which point the foghorn was abandoned, the lighthouse was automated, and the island was handed to USFWS to serve as a wildlife refuge. Despite these aids, many ships continued to be driven upon the shoals of Pilot Island (and indeed continue to this day). Three of the most famous happened in a single year, with the Forest wrecking on October 28, 1891, joined by the JE Gilmore on October 17, 1892, and the AP Nichols on October 28, 1892 - in a daring rescue by lightkeeper Martin Knutson, the crew of the Nichols was dragged through a storm by their literal hair, down a ladder to the decks of the other abandoned vessels. These three wrecks now rest less than 100 feet off the island, 25 feet deep, stacked on top of each other like cairns - a warning to other sailors not to underestimate the dangers of Death’s Door.
The Sauratown Mountains are known as the “mountains away from the mountains”; separated from the nearby Blue Ridge and once as tall as the Rockies, over hundreds of millions of years they have eroded to their present state. Moore’s Knob is the highest point in this range at 2,579 feet above sea level. Hard quartzite rock protected the Sauras from eroding as much as the surrounding piedmont terrain, which averages 800-1,200 feet above sea level. Much of the Sauratown Mountains are protected by Pilot Mountain State Park and Hanging Rock State Park. Hidden within Hanging Rock is a fascinating treasure: a natural cave known as Tory’s Den. The name comes from a supposed connection to backcountry loyalists who, legend has it, used the cave as a hideout during the American Revolution until they were driven out of the area by a local Patriot militia. The cave is easily accessible via a short hike.
The Champion Lodgepole Pine, located near Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains, is considered to be one of the largest of its kind in the world. Estimated to be over 440 years old, this massive, 110-foot-tall natural wonder is an incredibly rare survivor in Southern California. The U.S. Forest Service officially recognizes it as the largest recorded lodgepole pine in California, and its massive volume (9,300 board feet) and age (over 440 years) safely rank it among the top giants of its species worldwide. Mind-Blowing Tree Facts Ancient Roots: The tree germinated around 1560, more than 50 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Massive Proportions: It reaches over 110 feet in height with a trunk circumference of 22 feet. Its bulbous base measures a staggering 36 feet around. Tons of Timber: It contains an estimated 9,300 board feet of timber, which is enough raw lumber to build a 1,300-square-foot house. A Southern California Anomaly: Lodgepole pines rarely grow in Southern California, and when they do, they usually reside at elevations above 8,000 feet. This grove is a unique remainder from a time when the local climate was much cooler. Fun Facts About the Hike Easy Access: The trail to the tree is a 0.5-mile gentle walk through the lush Bluff Mesa area. The Journey In: The drive to the trailhead is an adventure of its own. Located south of Big Bear Lake Village, the route transitions from pavement to a rocky forest road (FS Road 2N10) where a high-clearance vehicle is highly recommended. Historical Landmarks: If you look closely at the pine, you might notice old notches or "blazes" carved into the wood. These were used as trail markers by early wagon trains.
If you’re looking to liven up your weekend plans, we’ve got you covered, with unique event listings around the world. Find exciting events in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. In New York, you can dive into the world of thrift and vintage fashion at ThriftCon NYC, where hundreds of vendors bring together curated streetwear, designer pieces, and nostalgic collectibles waiting to be unearthed. Each visit holds the promise of unexpected discoveries, from limited-edition drops to rare finds that tell stories of eras gone by. After hours, the California Science Center in Los Angeles transforms into an unexpected backdrop for an evening of craft beer exploration at the LA Brewsology Beer Fest. Dozens of local brews await discovery among the museum's exhibits, turning a familiar institution into something altogether more surprising. Sample your way through the offerings, uncover new favorites, and connect with fellow enthusiasts in a setting that makes the experience feel like anything but an ordinary tasting event. Each summer, London becomes a stage for one of the most vibrant celebrations of Ghanaian culture in the diaspora. Ghana Party in the Park draws thousands of attendees into a world of pulsating music, bold fashion, and a marketplace brimming with unexpected finds. Performers, artisans, and food vendors come together to offer a genuine window into the living traditions and contemporary energy of Ghana. Whether you're deeply familiar with the culture or encountering it for the first time, this annual gathering is an invitation to explore, connect, and celebrate. Each summer, Prague transforms into a vibrant hub of LGBTQ+ celebration, advocacy, and culture during its annual Pride Festival. A lively parade winds from Wenceslas Square to the sweeping Letná Plain, accompanied by concerts, workshops, debates, and theater performances that illuminate the diversity and layered history of the LGBTQ+ community. As one of Central Europe's largest Pride events, the festival draws thousands of participants and visitors united by a spirit of inclusion and a shared commitment to equality and human rights. Every August, San Francisco pays tribute to one of its most legendary native sons at Jerry Day, an annual celebration held at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater in McLaren Park. The event draws thousands of devoted fans for a full day of live music performances from local and national artists, all in honor of the Grateful Dead frontman whose spirit remains deeply woven into the city's cultural fabric.
Via Vittorio Emanuele II is one of Catania's main thoroughfares, running east to west through the city center and several notable piazzas. Near the road's midpoint, through the front doors of a nondescript two storey building is the Teatro Romano di Catania, a Roman theater dating from the 1st century AE. The theatre was constructed over an old Greek theatre, that was likely the setting for Alcibiades’ speech to Catanaeans in 415 BC, persuading them to ally with Athens against Sparta and Syracuse during the Peloponnesian Wars. The entire venue consists of two theatres, there is the Odeon, a smaller, more intimate semi-circular venue, on the upper west side. The main theatre consists of 21 rows of seats built into the hillside in a classic half bowl pattern. The stage was decorated with marble columns and designed to utilize the waters of the Amenano River running beneath it, in live performances. With the downfall of the Roman Empire, the theatre was no longer used, and the decorative marble was removed and used to build the nearby Basilica Cattedrale di Sant’Agata. While the expansion of the city led to many of the main theatre's terraces and underground corridors being built over by the buildings of Catania’s now UNESCO world heritage listed Baroque city center. After the great earthquake of 1693 damaged most of the overlying structures and much of the city, it wasn't until 1770 that the site was excavated. Under the orders of the Prince, Ignazio Paternò di Biscari, the buildings constructed inside the theatre were demolished, allowing the monument to somewhat brought back to its original splendor and appearance. A cross section of the city's history can be seen from the top of the main theater. The ancient theatre and baroque building facades, contrast with visible modern home amenities, such as TV antennas, plumbing and air conditioning. It is not unusual to see residents in the neighbouring buildings through their windows, or relaxing on their balconies. From street level, the banners on the entrance building's exterior, and a plain white stone plaque engraved 'Teatro Romano', are the few hints of this magnificent structure's existence. Unlike other Roman theatres which stand isolated in prestigious locations, Catania's theatre is unique in being surreptitiously blended in amongst the city's hilly roads and buildings. Tourists walking along Via Vittorio Emanuele II could be easily forgiven for strolling past, without realizing the 7000 capacity Roman theatre lurking mere yards away.
Located between Worcester and Springfield, much of Central Massachusetts is marked by rolling hills, river valleys, and deep wilderness. Filled with farmland and small scenic towns, it’s a completely different atmosphere compared to the urban bustle of the eastern part of the state. Although quiet and peaceful today, over 350 years ago, the area around Brookfield was the site of a fierce battle. One of the earliest in a devastating conflict which would profoundly shape American history but has almost been completely forgotten by the passage of time. When Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag Confederacy and Governor John Carver of the Plymouth Colony signed a mutual peace treaty in 1621, the European settlers and the Indigenous community were able to coexist for over 50 years. However, by the 1670s, tensions had been building for decades and were reaching a boiling point. English colonists were expanding rapidly, and numerous aspects of the peace treaty were being violated repeatedly by the settlers. After three Wampanoag men were executed by Plymouth Colony officials in 1675, the son of Chief Massasoit, Metacomet known as "King Philip" by the English, gathered a coalition of tribes to resist European expansion and war began after a native attack on Swansea, Massachusetts on June 24, 1675. Soon after many villages and settlements across Massachusetts were being raided with colonial militias launching counterattacks. One of the first English settlers in central Massachusetts near Worcester was Ephraim Curtis, who spoke the local languages and was very familiar with native diplomacy. He had to leave the area once hostilities broke out, and later commissioned as a Lieutenant by the colonial government and dispatched to get assurances of loyalty from the Nipmuc tribes. Curtis met with Chief Muttawmp but unbeknownst to Curtis, the Nipmuc had already joined Metacomet, but Muttawmp feigned an alliance and friendship. Muttawmp promised to show himself in Boston for negotiations, but the colonial government didn't believe him and instead dispatched Captain Edward Hutchinson, Captain Thomas Wheeler, around 30 mounted militia, and a handful of Christian Praying Indian scouts from Natick to force terms on Muttawmp directly. On August 2, 1675, as the group got closer, they discovered numerous abandoned Nipmuc villages, and the native guides from Natick advised turning back, but the militia pressed onwards. Soon after, Muttawmp's warriors ambushed them with bows and guns killing eight militia members and wounding many including both Wheeler and Hutchinson with the latter succumbing to his injuries a couple weeks later. The colonial forces were completely disorganised, unable to retreat or return fire and would've been wiped out completely if not for the Natick scouts who were able to guide them to safety. Once out of immediate danger, the surviving militia members retreated to Brookfield and the Quabaug Plantation where Nipmuc warriors laid siege to the small, isolated village. The militia joined with the residents to fortify the defences and in total around 80 people were trapped. The house of Sergeant John Ayers who had been killed in the ambush was the largest building in the village so that became the headquarters for the colonial defenders. Muttawmp's men tried to break the siege multiple times including lighting a wagon filled with dry hay on fire and pushing it towards to the house to burn it down. On August 4, the chief military officer of Middlesex County, Simon Willard, arrived with around 48 troops and multiple Mohegan allies lifting the siege and relieving the defenders. Muttawmp's warriors retreated and set up an encampment nearby which was later joined by Metacomet and his troops who rewarded the Nipmuc chief. The Siege of Brookfield was one of the earliest battles in King Philip's War which would absolutely devastate New England with dozens of settlements and villages destroyed and pushed many of the indigenous tribes to the brink of extinction. Today, the memory and history of this brutal conflict have been almost completely forgotten, but remnants and echoes can still be found by those who know where to look. Along West Road in New Braintree, MA, a stone marker can be found describing the initial ambush in the approximate area where historians believe it occurred. It reads, “Somewhere within a half mile, along the base of this hill, Capt. Edward Hutchison, and his company, were attacked by Indians, lying in ambush, Aug. 2, 1675, and he and more than one half his men, slain or wounded”. On Hardwick Road east of Winimusset Brook is another stone marker which indicates the location where Metacomet and Muttawmp had their campsite which reads, "Site of King Philip’s Camp, August 1675.” Although it may not look like much and most people probably don't realise it exists, these stone markers are one of the few remnants left of a chapter in Massachusetts history that has fallen into the pages of obscurity. If you have an interest in the history of King Philip's War, it's definitely worth taking a look if you're in the area.
The Pont Mac-Racken crosses the Mayenne river, in the town of Mayenne, itself in Mayenne, France - because apparently, once you find a good name, why stop at one use. Beyond the naming overkill, the bridge itself has gone through more names than most bridges manage in a lifetime. Construction started in May 1824 and wrapped up a decade later in 1834, and for a while it was simply the Pont Ambroise-de-Loré. Then it became the Pont d'Orléans, then the Petit Pont, then the Caisse d'Épargne bridge, drifting through identities the way old bridges sometimes do when nobody's quite sure what to call them. It's the last name that stuck, and it comes with a story worth knowing before you cross it. On the night of August 5, 1944, as German forces retreated from Mayenne, they packed the bridge with 125 explosive charges, intent on blowing it before the advancing Americans could use it. Sergeant James Dougal MacRacken, of the 315th Engineer Combat Battalion, 90th Infantry Division, went in and defused them. He didn't survive the operation, but the bridge did, letting his division cross the river and take the town's left bank that same day. Two years later, on August 5, 1946, the town put up a plaque on the bridge itself, in French, roughly translating to: "Here, to save this bridge, James Mac Racken of the 315th Bn., USA, sacrificed himself on August 5, 1944." It's a small, easy-to-miss marker on a stone bridge that otherwise looks like dozens of others across provincial France, which is sort of the point: nothing about it screams battlefield, and that quiet is exactly what makes the story land when you read it standing there.
You can now find exciting and unique events around the world on Atlas Obscura in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C.! From quirky festivals and behind the scenes museum tours to food experiences, performances, lectures, and seasonal celebrations, AO’s new Events listings help people find experiences that are as unexpected as the places themselves. The feature debuts in 14 cities, with plans to expand to additional destinations over time. For nearly two decades, Atlas Obscura has inspired millions of people to explore hidden wonders through its community driven database of remarkable places and award winning storytelling. With the addition of Events, that spirit of discovery now extends beyond destinations to experiences happening every day around the world.
In Wisconsin's Northwoods, nobody ever went "to the cabin" — they went to the camp, whether that meant a canvas tent, a camper, or the family cottage on the lake. A resort on North Twin Lake has turned that whole tradition into America's first living history museum of camping — a museum where the exhibits have beds, and guests are encouraged to sleep in them. The collection spans a century, one decade per unit: two Prohibition-era luxury tents named for Al Capone and John Dillinger, who genuinely vacationed (and hid) in these woods — Dillinger's famous FBI shootout happened one lake chain over. The oldest known surviving Jim Dandy camper, hand-built by a couple on a Model T chassis, still has their itemized build receipt hanging inside. There's a 1952 Lighthouse Double Decker — one of only eight left in existence, complete with patented central staircase and a martini-ready lower deck — and a gleaming 1965 Airstream. Every cabin on the property carries its own exhibit on the Northwoods family vacation, and a central hall holds nearly two hundred artifacts, from a still-working 1960s crockpot to twenty-foot timeline banners tracing camping from canvas to glamping. The commitment runs to the details: every unit comes with cocktail and recipe cards researched from primary sources for its decade, so visitors can eat and drink like 1952 before falling asleep in it. The exhibit hall is free to walk on weekends; the rest of the museum rents by the night.
This (more gray than) "black tower" is part of a whole series of picturesque viewpoints constructed in and around the small town Mödling commissioned by Johann I., Prince of Liechtenstein. It was built in 1809 and 1810 according to the plans of the architect Joseph Hardtmuth. It was most likely originally intended as an observation tower and was later also used as a forester’s residence. From here you can see over Mödling and the Vienna Basin.
The museum has over 100 video game consoles on display. Dating from the 1970s, when video games were in their baby shoes, all the way to the early 2000s where we can see how much these games have grown, just like how you have done over the years. There is also an interactive section where you can get hands on with and play with many of the systems.
Most visitors experience Saint Agatha in February, when hundreds of thousands of people flood Catania's streets for one of Europe's largest religious festivals. Hidden beside the cathedral, however, is the place where the city's devotion quietly waits for the rest of the year. The Museo d'Arte Sacra is less an art museum than a journey through the objects that have shaped Catania's religious identity for centuries. Rooms filled with silver reliquaries, sculpted saints, icons, paintings, liturgical treasures, and elaborate ceremonial objects reveal how deeply the story of Saint Agatha is woven into the city's history. Among the highlights is the magnificent silver fercolo used during the annual procession, allowing visitors to admire its craftsmanship from only a few feet away—something impossible during the crowded festival itself. One of the museum's greatest surprises is its atmosphere. Even in the heart of Catania, the galleries are remarkably quiet. Some rooms feel almost theatrical, while others resemble forgotten church treasuries where extraordinary objects have simply been waiting to be rediscovered. Rather than presenting sacred art as distant history, the museum reveals it as something that still shapes everyday life in Sicily. The visit ends with panoramic terraces overlooking Piazza del Duomo, Porta Uzeda, the rooftops of Catania, and Mount Etna. After exploring the objects that define the city's most important traditions, the view offers a fitting reminder that these centuries-old rituals are still very much part of the landscape below.
Towering high beside the Border Village Roadhouse, situated on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain is Rooey II. This large kangaroo sculpture is one of many 'Big Things', found around Australia as something of an unofficial national tradition. Rooey II sits in South Australia, only metres away from the Western Australia border. It holds a tub of Vegemite, a savoury spread popular with local Australians. In 1987, the sailing event the America's Cup was being held in Perth, and the owners of the roadhouse decided to build something to attract passers-by to stop to use their services. The sculpture was designed by Bill Metherel and local legend tells a story of the naming going to a competition, where the name Rooey was chosen. Unfortunately this name was already taken as the nickname of one of the roadhouse owners so the statue got the name Rooey II.
Tenerife is a versatile island with beautiful nature, lively party locations, state-of-the-art telescopes, and amazing beaches. Most tourists stay on land or close to it, some go off shore to watch whales or dolphins, but unbeknownst to most some also go under the sea in a submarine. Submarine safari is a local company running one of the few submarines open to the public. These subs started production in the 90s with the factory being in Finland, with the first being launched in Lanzarote. Several years later, one was brought to Tenerife and operations began in 2007. The sub can hold over 40 people and dive up to 100 meters deep, although they never go deeper than 30 with civilians on board. A tour on board goes past several shipwrecks, and lively rock wall filled with different maritine life. There are also several manta rays that stay close to the ship as they enjoy playing with the bubbles of the divers and getting belly rubs.
The Canary Islands are celebrated for their volcanic landscapes, lush forests, and dramatic Atlantic coastline—not for bullfighting. Unlike much of mainland Spain, the tradition never gained deep roots in the archipelago. That makes the story of José Mata all the more remarkable. Born in the small village of Las Tricias on the island of La Palma, Mata became the only Canarian matador to achieve lasting national prominence. For a brief period during the 1960s and early 1970s, “El Canario” was among the most recognized figures in Spanish bullfighting. His path to fame was anything but conventional. Like many islanders seeking opportunity abroad, Mata emigrated to Venezuela, where he worked various jobs and even appeared on television before discovering his calling in the bullring. Returning to Spain, he advanced steadily through the profession’s ranks. In 1965 he received the alternative from the legendary Manuel Benítez “El Cordobés” and later confirmed it at Madrid’s prestigious Las Ventas arena. While many of his contemporaries relied on spectacle, Mata earned respect as a refined and classical stylist, renowned for the precision and elegance of his final sword thrust. His career ended tragically on July 25, 1971, when he was gored during a corrida in Villanueva de los Infantes. Complications caused by inadequate medical facilities and delayed treatment proved fatal, and he died two days later at the age of 31. The incident sparked national debate about safety standards in smaller bullrings. Today, a bronze statue of José Mata stands in Santa Cruz de La Palma, honoring a local boy who rose from a remote Atlantic island to become a legend in one of Spain’s most enduring traditions.
While not very well known in western culture, Admiral Yi Sun-Shin is a major figure in Korean and Asian history. Admiral Yi’s accomplishments on the battlefield, as a leader and a naval tactician, stymied Japanese efforts to invade Korea in the late 1500s and revolutionized maritime warfare. Admiral Yi was born in Seoul, Korea in 1545, to parents of modest means. While he was a good student, at the age of 22, Yi made the unexpected decision to pursue a military career. Initially, Yi studied horsemanship, archery, swordsmanship, and military tactics. At the age of 32, Yi passed the rigorous physical and academic examinations to become an officer in the Korean army. His first assignment was to an outpost on the northern border of Korea. Several years later he received his first posting to a naval command in southern Korea (at the age of 36). Unfortunately, his career took a negative turn after Yi refused to follow his superior’s orders, which he felt were improper/corrupt. As a result, he was reassigned to a staff position in Seoul. Not to be deterred, in 1583, Yi accepted a posting on Korea’s northern border to deal with incursions by Manchurian (Jurchens) forces. It was a long campaign, but Yi distinguished himself in combat, being wounded in several battles, and eventually repelling the enemy. In 1589, he was re-assigned and took command of the Cheulian Naval Station in Yeosu, Korea. The principal maritime threat to Korea at the time was Japanese piracy, which was but a precursor to Japan’s larger ambitions to conquer Korea and eventually China. At this time, the Korean navy was in a poor state of affairs, with lackluster discipline and morale, minimal training and supplies, and outdated equipment. Admiral Yi recognized the situation and immediately began to address these deficiencies, while at the same time considering how to address the growing threat from Japan. The “Turtle Boat” (or geobukseon) was not a new concept at the time, but Admiral Yi determined it to be critical to the future defense of Korea, so he committed his limited resources into building a fleet of these vessels. The turtle ships designed by Yi held 11 cannons on each side of the ship, with two at each the stern and the bow. The sides of the ship had smaller openings for arrows, guns, and mortars to be fired. The top of the ship was covered with thick planks and spikes. There were two masts for sail power, but the ship was steered and powered by 20 oars (10 on each side). Admiral Yi recognized the Japanese navy’s strongest tactic at the time was to board enemy ships and engage in hand-to-hand combat. With lighter and faster vessels - and fewer cannons - the Japanese relied on speed to engage the enemy. The Japanese also relied on musket volleys to clear enemy decks in advance of boarding. The Korean vessels were sturdier and carried a large number of long-range cannons. The Korean approach - promoted by Admiral Yi - was to maintain distance from the enemy and rely on superior firepower to disable and destroy the enemy vessels, a more modern, distanced type of warfare. In less than two years, the Japanese launched their invasion in April 1592, with a force of 160,000 soldiers and 9,000 sailors on about 700 vessels. The invasion was initially a success for the Japanese, however, Admiral Yi launched a counterattack the following month, with a fleet of 85 vessels, 24 of which were turtle boats. The Korean forces were able to surprise the Japanese forces and they destroyed most of the fleet, while suffering minimal losses. During a succession of follow-on battles, Admiral Yi engaged and destroyed additional Japanese forces, culminating in the Battle of Hahsnan. In this battle, Admiral Yi lured the Japanese fleet into open water and then proceeded to use his superior firepower to destroy over 73 enemy vessels, one of the great naval battles of history. The victory stopped to Japanese invasion efforts and led to peace talks. The peace talks eventually failed, but in the interim, Admiral Yi had fallen into disfavor within the Korean government due to infighting, political intrigue, and his unwillingness to compromise with incompetent and corrupt leaders. The Japanese took advantage of Admiral Yi’s departure and rebuilt their fleet and military forces, and in January 1597, they launched another invasion. After some initial successes, the Korean government brought Admiral Yi back into service as the Supreme Naval Commander. Despite having a limited number of ships and sailors, Admiral Yi was once again able to restore discipline and confidence, and by 1598, the Japanese invasion force had been largely destroyed and the remnants retreated to Japan. During the Battle of Noryang in November 1598, Admiral Yi was fatally struck by a bullet, which he kept hidden from his sailors until victory was assured. Japan did not invade Korea again for over 300 years (1910). While commonly celebrated as one of the greatest naval commanders in history, Admiral Yi’s brilliance extended beyond his mastery of topography, tides, weather, and tactics. He was also a charismatic leader, who was able maintain his soldier’s morale despite trying circumstances and frequently demonstrated his loyalty to his soldiers and Korean civilians. Among naval historians, Admiral Yi has been compared to Lord Horatio Nelson of the British Royal Navy, and Japan’s World War II Admiral Heihachiro Togo once refused any comparisons between him and Admiral Yi, saying Admiral Yi “had no equal.” The statue and replica boat are located in the parking lot of a large premier Korean day spa that opened in 2021. The spa offers a traditional Korean spa (jimjilbang) experience with saunas, body scrubs, a restaurant, and a roof top hydrotherapy pool.
If you’re looking to liven up your weekend plans, we’ve got you covered, with unique event listings around the world. Find more exciting events in Amsterdam, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. Flevopark becomes an unlikely stage for the unconventional when No Art Festival takes over the Amsterdam green space with a lineup of boundary-pushing performances and pioneering sounds. Hosted by the independent No Art label, this is less a party and more a curated provocation, designed to challenge what art and music can be when freed from traditional constraints. Each summer, Chicago's Chinatown Summer Fair comes alive with one of the city's most spirited street celebrations, drawing over 40,000 visitors into the heart of a neighborhood with deep cultural roots. Lion dance processions wind through the streets, kung fu demonstrations command attention, and stage performances offer a window into living traditions that stretch back generations. Each summer during Seattle’s Seafair Weekend, the waters of the Pacific Northwest transform into a roaring arena where hydroplane racers push the limits of speed and engineering, drawing crowds to the shores of Lake Washington for one of the region's most beloved annual gatherings. Seafair Weekend is a multi-day spectacle that layers thundering boat races with breathtaking aerial performances, waterfront activities, and a festive atmosphere that has defined Seattle summers for generations. Beyond the adrenaline of the races and airshows, the event unfolds as a living portrait of Pacific Northwest culture, where locals and first-time visitors alike find themselves swept up in something that feels genuinely irreplaceable. Otakon is a major annual celebration of Asian pop culture, anime, and music, drawing thousands of fans to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Attendees can immerse themselves in a dynamic atmosphere filled with cosplay, panels, concerts, and a bustling dealer’s hall. The event is known for its diverse programming, special guest appearances, and opportunities to connect with fellow enthusiasts from around the world. Along the Meguro River in Nakameguro, the Washu Festival transforms one of Tokyo's most beloved springtime settings into a celebration of Japanese sake culture. Thousands of visitors gather each year to sample offerings from renowned breweries, with the blooming sakura overhead lending the event an almost otherworldly atmosphere. Stage performances and the warmth of Japanese hospitality round out an experience that goes far beyond a simple tasting.
During the construction of the Panama Canal hundreds of thousands of workers were imported from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands and were settled in tenement housing on the outskirts of Panama City. Each house was constructed as small as possible, often no more than a wooden shack raised on posts to keep the insects out, with communal bathrooms and a zinc roof. It was in one of these tenement neighbourhoods, known then as Guachapalí, today as El Marañón, that canal workers constructed the Cristian Mission Chapel in their off hours, from 1909-1910. Countless church services, weddings, funerals and baptisms were performed there, and those worshiping inside would have experienced and withstood the post-canal deportation schemes, denials of citizenship, and attempts at cultural erasure imposed on their community, as well as the eventual governmental recognition of their rights and way of life.
Tuam Railway Station opened in 1860 as part of the Waterford, Limerick and Western Railway, becoming one of the most important railway hubs in the west of Ireland. Passenger services ended in 1976 as part of a nationwide rationalisation of the railway network, although freight trains continued to use the station until 1993. Since then, the station has stood largely abandoned, with its Victorian buildings gradually falling into disrepair. Despite this, many original features—including the distinctive wrought-iron lattice footbridge, platform canopies, goods facilities, and water tower—still survive, making Tuam one of Ireland's most complete surviving historic railway stations. There have been proposals to restore the railway as part of the Western Rail Corridor, but the station remains closed today.
The medieval practice of strip forming is similar to the "strip cropping" practices carried out in some midwestern states of the USA, except that the origins come from a need to equitably divide land resources around a settlement (strictly managed by the lord of the manor and his officials) rather than having the specific aim of soil conservation and crop management which seems to drive strip cropping in the USA. Medieval strip farming did achieve such aims but it was secondary to the resource allocation issue during the feudal medieval period. In England, the evidence of the strip farming (also called open field farming) having taken place over long periods of time, in the past, is very common. As farmers were allocated long narrow strips of land, in various parts of an open field system (to ensure fair distribution of soil types) the land would be ploughed in such a way that soil would pile up to form a ridge at the centre of a ploughed strip and lower lying furrows at either side. When such arable holdings were put over to permanent pasture the "scars" of the practices were left behind in the form of alternating ridges and furrows that persist throughout the year. In the UK this farming system has largely died out except in a few localised places but the ridges and furrows of old practices are common. The two places in England which practice open field strip farming in its most authentic sense are Laxton in Nottinghamshire (which still has its own manorial court to administer it) and Braunton in N Devon. In Wales the practice carries on only at the village of Laugharne. The survival of the practice around Haxey on the isle of Axholme is less well known. It stems from the fact that until the surrounding marshland was drained, by Vermuyden in the 17th century, the isle of Axholme really was an island of dry land surrounded by water (at least for for much of the year). The intermittantly wet lands could be used for pasture but for crops the higher land on the island was at a premium. When drainage took place and large enclosed fields became the agricultural method of choice in the drained areas (because individuals now owned large tracts of land) the former dry, island, parts of the district retrained the original system. There is a possibility that around Haxey this was encouraged by the need to have a sufficient area of commonly held land to allow the annual historic proto-football game, the Haxey Hood, to take place. Over the years, land ownership on the "island" has changed considerably and the areas where strip forming persists has gradually reduced. The practice is, however, common enough for the local authority to have designated a cycling route in the area to reveal the extent of strip farming on the island.
Built in 1863 by a small group of German-speaking Jewish families, this Romanesque Revival structure has served many roles over the decades, including a sanctuary, a dentist's office, and a campaign headquarters. When threatened with demolition in 1971, the community rallied to save it, famously rolling the 200-ton building through the streets to its current lakefront home in James Madison Park, where it now serves as a cherished public venue for weddings and community events. The synagogue was originally commissioned by a small congregation of 17 German-speaking Jewish families. Over the decades, the building has served a surprising variety of uses, including: A First Unitarian Society meeting space The headquarters for the Women's Christian Temperance Union A funeral home and a dentist's office A government records warehouse during World War II Designed by German immigrant architect August Kutzbock, the building is a notable example of Rundbogenstil, a 19th-century German variant of Romanesque Revival architecture. Its distinctive features include: Rounded arches and decorative parapets A prominent circular window centered in the gabled front A striking interior ceiling originally painted blue with silver stars
The Kingdom of Fife has a rich mining history, but nowadays, most of it is gone. The concrete frame of the No 2 Pit at Mary Colliery, informally known as "Big Mary" (to differentiate from "Wee Mary", a nearby competitor), remains one of only two reminders of the coal mines in this area, standing 80 foot high. Adjacent to the structure is a small outdoor exhibit which showcases equipment from the time, such as coal-cutters, hydraulic roof supports, and carts (both for coal and for miners) that were used in the pit. The 'cage' that lowered miners into the pit is also displayed. Additionally, there is a preserved locomotive steam engine, Andrew Barclay Works No 2259 No 30 0-4-0ST, present which can be explorer. It is typical of the National Coal Board engines that were used in collieries like this. A noticeboard nearby also details the known deaths and injuries that occurred during the operation of the pit, sourced from historic newspapers, of which there were sadly many.
At the edge of the forest in Altadena, a payphone. Not just any payphone, a working payphone. A relic like this would be easy to miss anywhere in Los Angeles. But here, at the edge of the Angeles National Forest, she stands out, a metal box of human nostalgia set against brush and trees. Emergency-minded—intended for people coming on and off the rugged trail—it’s become a beloved part of the local landscape over time; the kind of object people notice, photograph, and review online (yes, it has Google reviews). But look closer and there’s something else: a sticker inviting visitors to say goodbye. This is The Goodbye Line, a guerrilla, participatory art project and human archive created by Adam Trunell and Alexis Wood. The project uses working payphones as physical portals where strangers can leave the goodbyes they never got to say. Some calls are for loved ones. Some are for former selves. Some are for pets, dreams, places, or strangers who left before anything could be said. The line does not answer back. It just listens. The project has since overtaken payphones across the world, but the Altadena phone was its first. A place where a throwaway hunk of human interaction became something softer and stranger: a portal to our deepest humanity. If you find yourself at the edge of the forest with a lingering goodbye, pick up the phone and leave it there.
The fuel tank mural at Palmer Station is one of the most recognizable landmarks at this remote Antarctic research base. Painted on the station’s large fuel tank, the mural features a leaping orca and adds a unique piece of public art to the otherwise industrial scenery. Visible from the water as ships approach the station, it has become a familiar symbol of Palmer Station for residents and visitors alike. The mural stands out against the surrounding Antarctic landscape and serves as a reminder that even in one of the world’s most isolated workplaces, people bring creativity and personality to their surroundings.
Set on one of the best streets in Washington, DC, this neighborhood gem has the perfect mix of an impressive film selection and delicious cocktails. Affordable tickets to see a big variety of movies screened almost daily make this spot worth visiting. Independently run, the owner David Cabrera shows films he likes that range in topic, format, and style. The place is decorated with some nods to movies such as the zebra wallpaper behind the bar (Margot Tenenbaum from “The Royal Tenenbaums”), geometric carpeting in the hallway (“The Shining”), and flamingo wallpaper in the bathroom (Pink Flamingos”).
Isaac "Ike" Towell was born on November 25, 1849 and died, by suicide, on February 22, 1934 at the age of 83 in Columbus, Texas. Ike was the city marshal of Columbus in 1885 and a lifelong "infidel". He was known as a man of unwavering principals and had many friends near and far. An outspoken atheist, he was recognized for his uncompromising honesty, his opposition to alcohol and tobacco, and his fearless, courageous nature. About a year before his death, he arranged for a headstone to be placed at his future gravesite. A few days before he passed away, he purchased his own coffin and left detailed instructions regarding his funeral arrangements. The service consisted of a final message written by Mr. Towell and was directed to be read by someone "not afraid that lightening would strike during the service". Over 100 people were present at his service to hear the following message: "Especially do I want to impress the fact upon the people that one child was born, passed through the years of youth, grew to manhood, lived a tolerably respectable life, reached old age, died and could be buried without the assistance of the clergy." "It is my will and I so direct that my funeral be the cheapest possible. I do not hold with carrying a person from county to county for the sole purpose of burial. "My religion consists of doing right and loving justice. I affirm that all men should tell the truth and pay their debts. I do not believe in any God, devil, ghost or savior and I have opposed tobacco, whiskey, gambling, lying and stealing practically all my life. If any one of the clergy ever calls my name after death I insist that he speak the truth about me, a thing I have never known a preacher to do about a dead disbeliever. The clergy have never been able to bribe me with the promise of a beautiful home in a fictitious heaven nor bluff my by their everlasting punishment in a hell of fire and brimstone." Headstone Inscription: "HERE RESTS IKE TOWELL AN INFIDEL WHO HAD NO HOPE OF HEAVEN NOR FEAR OF HELL WAS FREE OF SUPERSTITION TO DO RIGHT AND LOVE JUSTICE WAS HIS RELIGION"
What makes the Serpentello House truly special is its unique artistic character. The façade and many of its decorations are entirely covered with handcrafted ceramic tiles, each one unique and personally designed and created by the owner, Luciano Serpentello, in 1925. This remarkable attention to detail transforms the house into a true work of art, giving it a distinctive and unforgettable atmosphere. Non v'è arte né simmetria, Unico pregio la fantasia. In pochi anni di mia vita Da me quest'opera venne compita. Se non bella è originale Ed è difficile trovar l'eguale. Un contadino vi ha posto mano, Tal Serpentello signor Luciano. Translated by Google: No art or symmetry is found here, Its only merit is imagination. In but a few years of my life, I brought this work to completion. If not beautiful, it is original, And its equal is hard to find. A farmer set his hand to it— Signor Luciano, known as "Serpentello." As the inscription above suggests, the Serpentello House is often regarded as a "visual encyclopedia" of rural life and the boundless imagination of its creator.
Stepping into Leroy's Place is like stepping through a portal into a whimsical monster world, right in the middle of the Historic French Quarter. A 10 foot tall, hot pink, puppet cat (named Casual Carl) greets you as you walk inside under huge fabric trees. And the surprises don't stop there! The colorful collection of art is pun-filled, nostalgic, and monster-forward. Highlights include a needle felted ghost holding a "Ghost" VHS tape (Rachel Eaton), a colorful sculpture of a "Blub" with an eyeball and a butt (Quinn Curtin), and a gorgeous knit artwork of a pineapple with muscles ( "Pineapple Hunk" by Kate Jenkins) . The forced perspective installation, "Ghost TOURtellini" by Jacques Duffourc is an masterful transformation of cardboard, and is worth a visit in itself. And did we mention the trees can talk ?! The rotating collection of handmade art and gifts range in price from funky souvenirs to art for your walls, so there is truly something for everyone in this delightfully quirky store. It feels like a toy store for grown-ups !
On the corner of Traction Avenue and 4th Place in Los Angeles’s Arts District sits a gray utility box. Big deal, right? Actually, yes. Measuring roughly six feet tall and three feet deep, the city street cabinet is not that at all, even in the slightest—it’s the creation of Downtown LA artist S.C. Mero, and it’s (not literally, but still) electric. Welcome to the home of the Electrical Box Theatre, possibly the smallest performance space in all of Los Angeles, if not the world. No tickets, seats, nor guest lists. The show starts when the door opens. By day, it’s a forgotten piece of urban nothing; at night, with its door open to a typically unsuspecting audience, the box becomes a hub for artists and performers, and all the street’s a stage. “Not to be corny,” Mero says, “but you just don’t know what’s in something unless you look inside it. A person, or even ourselves. I think there’s kind of a beautiful message in that.” Inside, the theater’s lined with velvet wallpaper and theatrical details, including a clock and photos of the theater itself (even a fake utility box in Los Angeles needs headshots). Mero is known for public art that transforms overlooked parts of the city into moments of surprise. Some of it’s impossible to miss (like a 13-foot tall mailbox); others, like the Electrical Box Theatre, reward curiosity. Since opening, it has hosted neighborhood musicians, a clown, a mime, burlesque performances, and even a vampire with a banjo. Performers coordinate with Mero in advance and receive access instructions on the day of their show. At its street-smart historic corner, the theater also takes a bow to the Arts District’s storied lineage of art and artists, who have long called this block home before slowly getting pushed out by the churn of city real estate reality. And that’s part of the magic: how temporary it all feels, and the discovery that lives therein. Claiming a piece of the city back for the people, Mero has devoted this patch of sidewalk to the artists who make all things beautiful last.
The key to success for toy companies is their product but also their IP. Bandai Co. excels in both, as they have some of the best-known characters in their roster. Characters that you can now meet. The head office of the toy company is mostly serious business, but in this case they have a large museum in their lobby showing the evolution of their toys, as well as their most popular products. Outside of the building is a row of characters including Godzilla, Goku, and Shin Chan, exhibited as life-sized polymer statues.
Street art is ubiquitous in Rotterdam, coming in all shapes and sizes, covering a vast array of topics in its own unique way. The canal vulva is one such piece that has fascinated passersby for over a decade. Not much is known about this piece, apart from the fact that it is a female reproductive organ that was fastened to the wall close to some space invader mosaics. Locals call it 'Kutkunst' and believe that it's a feminist statement. They are generally quite fond of it, and have helped keep it free of vandalism for over a decade.
When driving around a country you will find signs telling you the distance to surrounding places. People use these signs without much thought, but of course such a measurement needs to be based on something. In the case of Osaka, it is a shiny golden pin. The Datum was installed in 1922 after the installation of the 1919 road act. It was at the start and end of seven national roads. The current marker dates back to 1957, but its granite plate dates back all the way to 1919.
If you own a mule and it happens to be named Cal, Gal, Hal, Pal, Val, or preferably Sal, grab your towrope and head over to Delphi, Indiana, to check out the Wabash and Erie Canal Park and Museum. Opened in 2004, the museum features twelve interactive galleries tracing the history of the Wabash and Erie Canal from its inception and construction to its use and eventual closure. The park grounds have an extensive trail system and an 1850s pioneer village, where craftsmen ply their trades during canal season (mid-May through mid-September). The Wabash and Erie Canal connected the eastern side of Indiana, near Fort Wayne, to the state's southwestern corner at Evansville on the Ohio River. Construction began near Fort Wayne in 1832, and when completed, the canal stretched 468 miles from Toledo, Ohio, to Evansville. Construction reached Delphi in 1840, and reports indicated that three mules pulled canal boats at speeds of 5 to 6 miles per hour. At the peak of construction in 1837, approximately 1,000 immigrants, primarily Irish, worked on the canal. Using only hand tools, they endured disease, snakes, and frequent accidents. Many were buried along the towpath they had helped create. The canal had a tremendous impact on the growth of Indiana. When it began operating, the state's population was approximately 350,000. By 1840, it had grown to nearly 1 million. Ironically, canals are believed to have helped bring about their own demise by transporting the rails used to build the expanding railroad network across the United States. The last boat to travel the Delphi section of the canal was the Keystone State in 1874. The state then auctioned off the canal lands, and Indiana's canal era came to an end.
Children of the 1980s will remember this street from the finale of this beloved classic, when the main character, Elliot, and his friends escape with E.T. from the clutches of government agents on bicycles and fly to safety. Officially filming in 1981, Steven Spielberg shot many scenes of this cherished movie in suburban areas of Los Angeles county, such as the San Fernando Valley. Porter Ranch and Granada Hills were heavily featured. The flying bicycle scene specifically was filmed with the children riding north and taking flight just before the intersection of White Oak Avenue and Tulsa Street. Along White Oak Avenue, the just over 100 towering deodar cedar trees, featured in the movie scene, are recognized as a Los Angeles Historic Cultural Monument, declared in 1966. The marker for the trees is located on Chatsworth Street, one street south of Los Alimos Street, where an unassuming local business wears a mural celebrating the movie. Fans of the movie can snap a picture of a commemorative mural on the intersection of White Oak Avenue and Los Alimos Street. In celebration of the movie's 40th anniversary, Phillip Leonard, legendary valley muralist, and his crew created the art piece, depicting the kid's bicycles flying into the sunset, with Elliot and E.T. leading the way.
Situated within the Jardin Emotions of the Jardins d'Étretat, one can find the "Drops of Rain" sculptures by Samuel Salcedo, that pout, grin, and stick their tongues out at visitors. These sculptures are nestled into bushes in a way that is supposed to resemble oyster habitats, as an homage to Marie Antoinette's oyster farm by this garden. They display the range of human emotion with a sort of lightheartedness and absurdity that makes Étretat feel even more magical.
The house is nothing special, and the neighborhood even less so. Flanked by a tattoo parlor and a physiotherapy clinic, the entrance to Hauptstraße 155 is an archway made of cast cement stone—a common feature of the Gründerzeit (Wilhelminian era)—featuring a massive oak door decorated with cast-iron floral ornaments. The door lock has two keyholes set at a 90-degree angle to each other, designed for the "pass-through" keys of the early 20th century, which were intended to force the residents of these tenement blocks to lock up. The beautiful door is defaced with several hastily sprayed tags, the sidewalk is dirty, and the surrounding area is shaped by a high proportion of immigrants. Real roses have been tucked into the metal flowers of the door; now, in late February, they are already withered. They are dedicated to the house's prominent former resident and were placed in his memory either on January 8th (his birthday) or January 10th (the anniversary of his death). David Bowie lived in a seven-room apartment on the first floor of this house from 1976 to 1978. This period was marked, on one hand, by a turning away from the drugs that had previously dominated his life in Los Angeles and, on the other, by extreme creativity; the iconic albums Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger—the so-called "Berlin Trilogy"—were created here. In 1976, Bowie was a wreck: emaciated, surviving only on milk, cocaine, and cigarettes. Depression came along, and the marriage with Angie wouldn't work. The strange, isolated location of the divided city, his fascination with the Weimar Republic, Bertolt Brecht, and the Brücke painters, as well as the creative input from avant-garde bands like Can, Kraftwerk, and Neu!, were the deciding factors in his move to Berlin. After the landlady, Rosa Morath, evicted a lawyer involved in the APO (student protest movement) who had painted all seven rooms black and wanted to start a commune, an agent reached out to rent the apartment for a British artist. The condition was that he be allowed to paint the apartment white at his own expense. Permission was granted, and thus David Bowie became a Berliner. He also brought along Iggy Pop, who initially lived with him but was eventually evicted from the main apartment and banished to the rear building for raiding the fridge (specifically, expensive delicacies from KaDeWe). This did not harm their friendship or creative partnership; in 1977, Bowie composed and produced what are arguably the best albums of Iggy Pop’s career: The Idiot and Lust for Life. Contemporary witnesses report that Bowie’s apartment was furnished rather sparsely, while Iggy’s place was appropriately "shabby." In photos from this period, Bowie usually looks unremarkable, which allowed him to evade public attention in Berlin; furthermore, his fame continued to grow later due to the music composed here. He is said to have often cycled to Hansa Studios, with a view from the window directly onto the Berlin Wall. The sight of a couple kissing in front of the VoPos (border guards) inspired him to write the song “Heroes”—the ultimate West Berlin anthem. Other Berlin haunts for him included the Dschungel, Schwarzes Café, Chez Romy Haag, and, just a few steps from his front door, the gay bar Anderes Ufer, which still exists today as Neues Ufer. To the right of the house entrance is a lovely piece of graffiti from his Ziggy Stardust / Aladdin Sane phase, and above it, a Berlin commemorative plaque has been mounted since August 2016. There were considerations to rename this part of Hauptstraße to David-Bowie-Straße, but so far, these plans have faltered due to the slow-moving wheels of Berlin's bureaucracy. We can be heroes, just for one day...
Yakima (pronounced "YAK-uh-maw") Canyon, where the Yakima River traverses a water gap through Manastash Ridge, is an obvious thoroughfare and was used by Native Americans for thousands of years, and then by Euro-American trappers and settlers into the 19th century. It was also an obvious route for a railroad, and the Northern Pacific Railway was built through it in the early 1880s, along the west bank of the river. (The railroad is still in active use and is now part of the BNSF system.) Railroading was an extremely labor-intensive business well into the 20th century, and camps were built along the right-of-way to house the trackwalkers, signal men, section gangs, and other workers. In 1885 one such camp was built here at Umtanum Creek, where the eponymous creek joins the Yakima. The camp even boasted a school and a post office by the early 20th century. When in 1925 the automobile highway was built through the canyon on the east shore of the river, cable suspension bridges were built across the river from the railroad camps to provide highway access. Evidently the original bridges were wide enough to be passable to Ford Model As. In the 1960s, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Bureau of Land Management took over the day-to-day management of the bridge, but only in 1987 was the bridge deck narrowed to make it accessible to pedestrians only. With the continuing rise of automotive travel, it proved no longer necessary to station crews on the railroad right-of-way, and by the 1970s the last of the camps had been removed. The cable suspension bridges were also removed, with the sole exception of the Umtanum Creek bridge. It was still used by recreational users to access the west side of the river, but because of age-related deterioration concerns were being raised about its safety. Meanwhile, efforts were underway to have the bridge declared a national historic site. Finally, Umtanum Creek Bridge was restored in early 2021, with attention paid to preserving the structure's historic values.
In the southern Madrid neighborhood of Carabanchel, a monumental mural has been unveiled, now holding the title of the largest in Spain. The Palacio de Vistalegre Arena, originally conceived as a bullring, was inaugurated in 2000 to replace an earlier structure from the early 20th century that was demolished in 1995. With a capacity of 14,000 people, it has hosted concerts, political rallies, and other large-scale events. In an effort to transform this vibrant neighborhood into a hub for urban art, the municipal government has designated the Vistalegre Arena as the centerpiece of a future "Art Route", a cultural tour dedicated to muralism and street art. This initiative includes direct artistic interventions on facades, walls, and public spaces, featuring works by renowned national and international artists. Among them is Madrid-based artist Sfhir, the pseudonym of Hugo Lomas, who created the striking "Musa de Vistalegre" (Vistalegre Muse). Measuring 18 meters high and 66 meters wide (59 x 197 ft), this mural transforms the gray façade of Vistalegre Palace into a vast canvas becaming the largest in Spain . This colossal painting is part of a series of "muses" who play musical instruments using architectural elements as part of the work. One of these muses, "The Cellist" in Fene, Galicia , was named as the "Best Mural in the World" by Street Art Cities in 2023 and has even been featured on a postage stamp.
La Casa del Mendrugo occupies an old colonial mansion in Puebla. Its name, Mendrugo, refers to the crumbs or charity that the Jesuits received from the parishioners in order to support their ministry. In 2010, an excavation in the building's courtyard uncovered a burial site from more than 2,000 years ago. The skeletal remains of at least three people were found, including a woman who was approximately 60 years old and buried with an offering from around 3,500 years ago. That skeleton, which archaeologists dubbed "Chuchita," lived in the area long before the city of Puebla was founded in the 16th century. The discovery gave rise to a small museum on the first floor of the building where these remains are on display, along with an unusual collection. When the space was opened, a local resident, Mr. Jorge Roberto Ortiz-Dietz, shortly before his death, offered a collection that he had been keeping as a gift to be exhibited. Until then, few knew his story, which, when it came to light, was impressive. Hidden in the mountains of Oaxaca there was a town called Alteca, which maintained ancient customs until well into the 20th century. Its government was made up of a small group of men known as amos who dispensed justice and presided over the rituals of the community. The amos were chosen as children by the oldest amos on their deathbeds. Children had their skulls deformed to distinguish them from ordinary people. When the amos died, their skulls were taken and scenes of life were carved with obsidian. The skulls were guarded by the community for ritual use. Ortiz-Dietz was revealed to have been the last amo around 1985 and kept the skulls of his predecessors with him before moving to Puebla, where he became a notary. Before he died in 2012, Ortiz-Dietz gave the collection to the museum where all the carved skulls and bones are displayed along with profuse explanations of their meaning. Another display that you can enjoy is a collection of beautiful ancestral Talavera pottery. This pottery and its manufacturing process have now been included on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Even centuries after the development of this pottery process, local artisans are still producing this traditional craft, and it has become a defining characteristic of Puebla. The museum building also includes a restaurant, a gift shop, and a coffee shop. In the restaurant, you can sample traditional Poblano food such as mole poblano, pipián, and chalupas.
Beloved toys around the world, teddy bears are icons of childhood wonder. These plush effigies put soft paws and friendly faces on one of nature's most dangerous creatures. Normally, they're tiny, confined to bedrooms and car backseats — except in Stillwater. The 'Birthplace of Minnesota' houses a park bristling with some of the only teddy bears in the world that are larger than their animal namesakes. The park, a five-million-dollar investment featuring over half a dozen teddy bear statues that range in height from two to over ten feet tall, was given to the city as a completely anonymous gift in the mid-2000s. The identities of the benefactors have since been revealed: former Dell executive Tom Armstrong and his wife, who also committed millions of dollars to other local parks. The resolution of that mystery has robbed the park of none of its magic, however. The person-sized teddy bears are posed enjoying the other amenities of the park, such as the amphitheater and some of the rides. The park also features a two-story building available as an event venue, a playground area with a miniature of the historic Stillwater Lift Bridge, a climbing wall, and more.