Places dcowan Wants to Go

The residents at this Yellowstone wildlife park will certify your cooler as "bear-proof."

This permanent exhibition celebrates the finest of our heartless automatons both real and fictional.

The traditional houses along the coast of this charming Japanese fishing village allow people to sleep above the sea.

This gallery of prehistoric red ochre art lines the wall of a scenic segment in Utah's San Rafael Swell.

Croatia's "hairy stone" fortress is one of the most well preserved Istrian castles.

This former Texas landfill is flush with 300 million-year-old fossils, all fit for the taking.

A natural history wunderkammer in the middle of the desert.

A giant toy jack made of numerous welded-together fire hydrants.

Travelers leave tea kettles in a remote part of Death Valley as part of a mysterious, decades-old tradition.

A whimsical village of unique treehouses resides in a Washington forest.

A tiny theater hidden in an alley plays a constant stream of short silent films for anyone willing to peer through the peephole.

A raised boardwalk winds through a thicket of stunted, century-old trees no more than nine feet tall.

Franciscan monks created a facsimile of the Holy Land for North Americans who couldn’t afford the trip overseas.

These ancient sunken lanes were naturally tunneled into the soft ground by countless footsteps.

Football field-sized microalgae production tanks on the Hawaiian coast create a stunning view from space.

A remote and slightly overgrown park filled with replicas of world landmarks.

The unedited photograph called "Bliss" has graced the screens of over a billion computers.

Inside an old airplane hangar, friends and strangers alike play on a massive trampoline.

A pair of slides and a tree-lined stair corridor have been an urban oasis for nearly 40 years.

A lakeside garden in the Southern Alps full of whimsical artwork and thousands of beautiful flowers.

Exquisite wall sculptures carved in secret by an early quarryman in an obscure corner of the Paris Catacombs.

A jungle cave in Peru of unknown depths, otherworldly sounds, and strange nocturnal birds that navigate by echolocation.

Hundreds of glow-in-the-dark objects light up a museum in a historic zinc mine.

A tower-like theater in the Swiss Alps built to withstand the high winds and avalanches of the mountain pass.