Places simonele Wants to Go

A tiny art gallery in Sunnyside helps keep Portland weird.

A beautiful 62-acre Catholic shrine and botanical garden.

A small gallery and shop dedicated to an ancient style of hand-printed textile.

The first island in the world designated a light-pollution-free astronomical observation point.

100 massive sculptures in the Hudson River Valley.

The best Tiki bar in Las Vegas.

An exotic wildlife habitat right off The Strip.

Lovingly nick-named the "Brick Dick" this municipal tower was winner of the World's Most Phallic Building Contest.

This beautifully deceptive waterfall is something far different from what it appears to be.

A reproduction of earth's many biomes.

See massive fossils that are over 200 million years old in northeastern Arizona.

A rare view of a preserved Victorian science museum.

World's only nuclear reactor operated by liberal arts undergraduates.

Garden dedicated to native carnivorous plants and site of huge flytrap heist.

Cougar Annie earned her nickname after shooting 60 cougars over the years as well as 80 black bears who threatened her garden.

This Italianate house was the childhood home of the prominent Canadian painter, Emily Carr.

A colorful collection of scavenged glass bells decorates this Canadian ranch.

The wreckage still sits at the exact spot the plane crash-landed in 1945, carrying 1,000 pounds of explosives.

Railways may have forged this quintet of lovely tunnels, but now they are open to hikers.

Sleep snuggled in a sphere suspended atop the forest canopy of Vancouver Island.

The famous artist couple lived and worked here, in two different houses connected by a bridge.

Neither Spanish settlers nor anyone since has been able to tell who built these strange California rock walls.

This mysterious petroglyph evokes the ancient swastika symbol but was later vandalized with the more troublesome Nazi one.

A South African bar inside a hollowed out 6,000-year-old Baobab.