Places bleachedrhodopsin Wants to Go

This beautiful system of tunnels built into natural rock serves as a centuries old plumbing system.

The pits used to load the nuclear bombs onto the aircraft that dropped them over Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

The world's largest collection of intentionally useless inventions.

Over 20,000 sets of spice shakers reveal the surprisingly telling history of our most basic spices.

This Czar-funded, onion-domed, lavishly muraled Orthodox Church played a starring role in "The Deer Hunter."

35,000 grape hyacinths flow like water down a garden hill.

A stone arch leads to a cavernous 1930s spring house tucked away in the Pennsylvania woods.

Martin Bricelj Baraga's monolithic sculpture measures the blueness of the sky, and changes color to match it.

When zealous marijuana enthusiasts kept stealing the "Mile 420" highway marker, the State of Colorado got creative.

Roots and stumps that lay inundated for two millennia are on display in Japan's city of three mysteries.

Thirteen trees representing the original thirteen colonies were planted with soil from historic Revolutionary battlefields.

Pompeii's less famous neighbor is still revealing her secrets.

This remarkable checkered church on a Corsican hilltop is fabled to have been built by angels.

One of the largest festivals of flowers in North America takes place, appropriately, in the Flower City.

Small teepee-like houses built for TB patients have become sheds, studios, and bus stops around Colorado Springs.

A Himalayan monastery claims to have a piece of a centuries-old abominable snowman.

This poor little statue is the most vandalized memorial in Washington.

The most gigantic, swoony, intimidating trio of fingers in all of antiquity.

Activists are fighting to preserve these unfinished highway ramps as a tribute to the citizen revolt that halted their construction decades ago.

Five ancient libraries, little changed for centuries, preserve a medieval archive of Quranic lore and civic documents

A futuristic temple of light uses prisms and rainbows to create an atmosphere of peace.

The artist James Turrell is repurposing an extinct volcano crater as an observatory to experience the cosmos.

An earthwork sculpture built by Robert Smithson in the Great Salt Lake only reemerges during drought.

The world's largest wooden trestle stretches across this desert canyon in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.