Places joparkman Wants to Go

This quirky outpost and gallery inside a former church is an unexpected trove of handcrafted art.

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

The highest point in Texas is capped by a big silver pyramid.

A wacky, UFO-shaped house in a suburban neighborhood.

Foragers once flocked to this big beautiful bayou to hunt for pearls.

An unrealized Taoist palace left abandoned in a Houston suburb.

Abandoned railroad tunnel is home to a colony of three million Mexican free-tail bats.

Over 100 million years ago, beach-bound dinosaurs left permanent marks on San Antonio's landscape.

Three hundred years of preserved Spanish colonial history in San Antonio.

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

This beautiful grotto is one of those places where you can't believe you're just outside Austin.

This sacred cavern, 400 feet deep, is home to millions of bats and an ancient burial ground.

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

This crumbling UFO is one of only a few remaining "moveable ski chalets" of its kind.

Visitors can walk over the largest concentration of Columbian mammoths to have died from one event.

A Texas cave network is home to some of the world's most spectacular-looking and bizarrely named mineral formations.

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

Self-sufficient greenhouse floating on the Hudson River.

A riverfront park that both remediated and preserved its industrial past.

Despite not growing anywhere near New York City, bananas are ripened in a pressurized room in the Bronx using precise banana science.

This plot of old-growth forest is the largest surviving remnant of New York City's original woodland.

The end of the 4 Line is also the end of the line for 300,000 souls in one of NYC's most illustrious cemeteries.

The first and only carousel with a lineup entirely of insects.

The warmth and creative kitsch of a quilt engulf every patron who visits.