Places MikeInSanFrancisco Wants to Go

The real faces of Venice beach captured on Romanesque columns.

Hollywood's oldest hotel is the site of the first Academy Awards, the birthplace of Marilyn Monroe's career, and the home of Montgomery Clift's ghost.

This stockpile of junked electronic and mechanical gadgets is a favorite among Hollywood prop masters.

Two men, two visionaries of Venice Beach, one little hotel that smells like cookies.

Where the line between entertainment and aerospace blurs.

Hidden above a drug store on a nondescript corner of Lincoln Heights is a private clubhouse for intrepid explorers.

Small museum packed with artifacts recovered by the man rumored to be the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones.

Space program, pneumatics and more, bits and pieces, for movie sets or the common man.

This star-studded Old Hollywood restaurant is where fettuccine Alfredo made its United States debut.

After starting as a whimsical tourist attraction that eventually found its way to ruin, these renovated canals offer a lush and exotic locale on the Pacific Coast.

It should come as no surprise that the best view of the Hollywood sign is from Batman's lair.

Jail from the 19th century that was built by inmates.

A former gold rush boomtown has managed to stay in business for over 100 ramshackle years.

Despite his legacy of work in Spain, Cuba, and Florida, the larger-than-life writer's grave is a simple affair tucked in an Idaho cemetery.

A legal loophole makes it possible to get away with murder within this 50-square-mile section of Yellowstone.

Inside this library turned museum, the history of Modesto and Stanislaus County is on full display.

This perfectly preserved Chinese medicine shop was untouched for decades before being reopened as a museum.

A vertically floating hemlock controls the waves and weather at Crater Lake.

Massive crater in central Oregon.

The world's last remaining store of its kind.

Around half a million years ago, these magnificent columnar basalt cliffs were formed from cooling lava.

This Yellowstone geyser may not shoot as high as the nearby Old Faithful, but it erupts for considerably longer.

The tale of a strong-willed woman who stood her ground when the commercial world came rumbling in.

This tiny home built on revenge appears to be scarcely wider than a Volkswagen.