Places eshellenberger Wants to Go

The birthplace of Las Vegas is now preserved as a historic and natural area.

At the base of the Spring Mountains, a unique nursery packed with desert plants.

The most magnificent bottle house in a town strangely full of them.

Twelve plaster figures inspired by da Vinci's famed painting haunt the desert landscape above a real-life ghost town.

This crumbling Death Valley mining complex was known for its use of giant, 20-mule team wagons.

Millions of years of oxidation make a drive down this winding Death Valley road surprisingly colorful.

The lowest point in North America is home to an undrinkable pool surrounded by fields of geometric salt flats.

An obelisk commemorating Lincoln's role in connecting the coasts.

This massive railroad spike celebrates the 1939 premiere of the movie “Union Pacific.”

Lured here by the promise of tens of thousands in gold, Jesse James started a quintessentially American trend of robbing trains in-motion.

Chicago’s last original drive-in restaurant is a family-run hot dog joint that started in 1948.

Shop of curiosities with a dinosaur museum tucked in its basement.

The final resting place of up to 6,000 Confederate soldiers, the largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere.

An antiquated German apothecary on Chicago's North Side.

A hollow cement depiction of time's inexorable effect on the human body.

This surprising gem is a world-class archeological museum hidden at the University of Chicago.

This old-fashioned confectionary has been family owned and operated for more than a century.

A journey begins with a single step, and for many, the road-trip of a lifetime started at this Chicago intersection.

This art gallery and oddities boutique bewitches visitors with a trove of occult trinkets and eccentric antiques, work by an ever-changing roster of underground artists, and classes in tarot and other mystic arts.

A free park where visitors can learn about and collect 440 million-year-old fossils.

This hidden, women-built-and-operated Nevada temple on Shoshone Native American land is dedicated to the Egyptian lion goddess Sekhmet among other goddesses.

A cosmic pit stop just beyond the notorious Area 51.

This arid landscape was once a lush wetland. Today, it's a paleontological site filled with fossilized mammoths, sabertooth cats, and more.

Pleistocene megafauna fossils are the subject of Nevada's newest state park at the northern edge of the Las Vegas metropolitan area.