Places ambermriley Wants to Go

This gas station offers wine tastings and craft beer.

A fruit-loving town welcomes visitors with a giant melon set against the sky.

Now abandoned, this East Austin school for the disabled began as the "State Colony for the Feeble-minded."

A 24-hour vending machine restocked daily with homemade full-sized pecan pies.

The world's largest squirrel statue clutches a pecan bigger than your head.

After serving in Vietnam, Korea, and even a stint in the Turkish navy, the unique ship is now open as a museum.

This creepy, yet oddly beautiful cemetery is home to one of the founding fathers of Lake Charles.

Witness to many historic moments in early Texas history.

The pit stop from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" now serves beef and pork barbecue, not people.

A Texas landowner spelled out his name with three miles of trees, a giant signature that's been used by NASA to evaluate satellite imagery.

The 19th-century ruins hide deep in an overgrown forest.

Twenty churches beautifully painted by 19th-century Czech and German immigrants in Texas.

A 19th century family buried their dead among the pines, beneath gravestones styled after ancient Scottish cairns.

Nestled in the heart of a Texas town is a dreamy secret garden dating back to the 1940s.

Decades of discarded bottle caps line this alleyway, a fixture of Texas A&M.

Campus tradition says couples who walk beneath this enormous oak will stay together forever.

Resting place of the Texas A&M canine mascots, who watch the game from the grave with their own miniature scoreboard.

Hidden within a Gulf Coast port city is a wonderfully eclectic museum whose beginnings were housed in a bank window.

Inmates dig the graves at the largest prison cemetery in the U.S., the final resting place of both cowboys and Indians.

The world's tallest statue of an American hero.

A medieval castle in the middle of rural Texas.

This tiny, hurricane-resistant house in Galveston is one of the city's most notable architectural oddities.

A decaying concrete oil tanker served as a disposal location for bootleg hootch.

This huge repository of local history housed in an old J.C.Penney's is home to the largest model train set in Southeast Texas.