Places Samir S. Patel Wants to Go

This small Catskills village has six independent bookstores and more bookshops than restaurants.

This giant roadside fruit is home to an array of apple-based treats.

A quaint medieval millhouse hovers surprisingly above the waters of the Seine.

This whimsical castle of grottoes was the labor of love of a French postman, and one of the greatest achievements of outsider architecture.

The "Mona Lisa" of funerary art.

Complete town of 5,000 living out at sea on the world's first offshore oil platform.

Jimi Hendrix's legendary recording studio in Greenwich Village.

This subterranean necropolis holds three floors of antler-dug grave caves.

A newspaper editor turned this abandoned island into a tortoise nature preserve that's now the world's smallest national park.

The world's only above water sand volcano, believed to once be the bathtub of a priest.

One of the highest Roman forts in Britain is set amid dramatic scenery on a notoriously difficult road.

Grotto replete with mystical designs laid out in glued shell mosaics.

Geometry and mystery come together in an epic show of octagonal masonry.

The oldest living organism in New York City. Maybe.

The oldest known university in the world is in Fez, Morocco.

An architectural experiment in the Lower Ninth Ward, this row house is capable of floating as high as the Katrina floodwaters.

Religious dwelling in a Spanish volcano.

A piece of outsider public art accompanied by a strange urban legend.

Famed architect Antoni Gaudi built this generous thank you gift to a friendly host who housed him during a job.

The bizarre visions of H.R. Giger, tucked away in a Swiss medieval city.

A stone circle on the slopes of a Caribbean volcano commemorates the leader of an anti-slavery uprising.

Bell tower juts out from a village buried under a lake.

The largest self-built castle in the U.S., six decades in the making.

This impressively complicated radioastronomy research center was once a tool of Soviet spies.