Places westcoastspirit Wants to Go

This 1920s Dutch barge is now a floating bookstore.

This museum tucked below a charming cafe gives a brief snapshot of photographic history.

Where layer cakes tower above one’s head and there is never a shortage of icing.

The neighborhood shop is a sort of tiny cactus museum full of exotic specimens you can take home.

This Portland shop is brimming with natural wonders, local art, and handmade goods fashioned from recycled materials.

This small-town Connecticut restaurant gives each diner a free book from its vast library.

An easily overlooked stretch of ornate window fronts and gaslight lamps that could be right from the pages of Dickens.

Like stepping into a spooky fairy-tale, this shop carries the dark ideas of artists and other makers.

Visitors to this shop will find fossils, minerals, meteorites, skeletons, oddities, and much more.

This macabre shop, filled with art, oddities, and taxidermy is hidden in the heart of the French Quarter.

The largest earthwork effigy in the world.

A rapidly disappearing glacier filled with extinct grasshoppers, perfectly preserved in the ice.

This geodesic gallery holds a collection of painted spheres that make traditional canvases look lazy by comparison.

Just a man taking his prehistoric pet for a stroll.

An entire town preserved as a historic landmark.

A giant poultry statue immortalizes one of Alaska's more humorous town names.

This off-the-beaten-path abandoned town is a relic of Montana's silver mining boom.

This giant meditative chakra sits peacefully in the Flathead Valley of western Montana.

The deserted railroad town had a last gasp as a ghost town attraction before being abandoned for good.

This amazingly preserved Gold Rush town is a historian's dream.

Giant kites are flown during this Day of the Dead celebration in Guatemala.

For this chef, an active volcano is his oven.

On this stunning Scottish island, you can walk in the footsteps of dinosaurs.

Tracks near this Texas nature site were once thought to support the Creationist belief that man and dino coexisted.