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Issue Date: May 28, 2006
Ten Out-of-the-Way Places You Should Go Out of Your Way to See
And the great thing is that you needn't travel far. Even America's largest cities boast amazing sites that many (even locals) often overlook. Journey with us and get off the tourist-beaten path.
Road trip. Are there two more exciting words in the American lexicon? With its promise of adventure, a sense of jump-in-the-car spontaneity, the concept tickles the innate wanderlust of a nation of pioneers. Another national passion: individualism. These two great themes come together in our annual summer travel issue.
Our list of destinations presents 10 out-of-the-way attractions that reward a journey of any distance. (We even included don't-miss-but-sometimes-overlooked attractions in three of the country's most-visited cities.) Diverse in substance and geography, ranging from the wonderful to the wacky, these gems are linked by a sense of outrageous individuality. Another thing these places share is an off-the-charts wow factor. Once you see them, they stay locked in your memory.
As always, our biggest challenge was limiting the featured attractions to 10. After weighing nominations from staffers, travel professionals and seasoned veterans of family driving vacations, we cut down our master list to the best of the best. We hope you get out to see some of them this summer -- and perhaps discover a few unexpected delights of your own along the way.
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Carhenge
Alliance, Neb.
According to the caretakers of this Nebraska oddity, fewer than half of the 80,000 visitors who come calling each year know it was inspired by the ancient standing megaliths of Stonehenge in England. They just see a ghostly circle of 38 gray-painted, junked cars by the side of the road and have to pull over for a closer look. For the record, a free-spirited engineer/sculptor named Jim Reinders built the singular monument as a memorial to his father, who once lived on the farmland Carhenge now occupies. With the help of about three dozen family members and friends, Reinders erected Carhenge in 1987. A backhoe did the heavy lifting; a few cases of beer helped move things along. The clan dedicated the accomplishment with song on the summer solstice.
The solstice, of course, was of critical importance to the mysterious builders of Stonehenge, which some archaeologists say was conceived as a huge astrological instrument. No one knows what future scientists will make of its Nebraska counterpart, but in the meantime, travelers will continue to be amazed and delighted by the most unexpected crop ever to sprout from the state's wind-swept prairie.
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Fallingwater
Mill Run, Pa.
"I thought you would place the house near the waterfall, not over it," Edgar J. Kaufmann said to his architect. "E.J., I want you to live with the waterfall, not just look at it," countered Frank Lloyd Wright to his client.
In 1935, Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store owner, and Wright, America's greatest architect, were discussing plans for Kaufmann's weekend home in southwestern Pennsylvania. In a conceptual leap that would forever redefine the possibilities of architecture, Wright decided to cantilever the house out over a tumbling mountain stream. The result was Fallingwater, a dramatic expression of the architect's quest to integrate the natural and the manmade. Designed as a series of jutting concrete planes, Fallingwater seems to grow from the forest's sandstone ledges. It's the only major Wright house where the public still can see his work largely as he designed it -- after 70 years, it remains essentially untouched by hands less sure than the master's.
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The Ancient Spanish Monastery
North Miami, Fla.
One of America's oldest buildings stands not in Boston or any other Colonial redoubt. Rather, it occupies parklike grounds within the glitzy envelope of greater Miami. Nevermind that Miami wasn't incorporated until 1896. The Monastery of Saint Bernard de Clairvaux rose in 1141 -- in Segovia, Spain. Scouts of American tycoon William Randolph Hearst came upon the old Cistercian monastery in 1925. The fabulously wealthy newspaperman snapped it up: None of his millionaire pals owned their own medieval cloisters. Workers dismantled the church and shipped it to New York -- a total of 35,000 individual pieces, each carefully placed within numbered crates for reassembly. Upon arrival, U.S. Customs impounded the shipment because of a hoof-and-mouth outbreak in Segovia. Agents opened the crates and burned the hay packaging material (a carrier of the disease). After the health threat was eliminated, the agents haphazardly repacked the stones in the crates, ignoring the numbering system. The monastery sat in a Brooklyn warehouse for 26 years.
In 1952, following Hearst's death, a pair of Florida entrepreneurs bought the hoard and transported it to Miami. Today, the Ancient Spanish Monastery, with its Old World colonnades and stained-glass windows, somehow looks right at home amid South Florida's native flowering shrubs and trees.
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Watts Towers
Los Angeles
"I had in mind to do something big, and I did," declared Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant who spent 33 years building the triumph of the imagination known as the Watts Towers. He set to work in 1921, spending evenings and weekends bending steel rods and slathering on mortar, until a fantastical city rose in his backyard. He plastered the whole thing with seashells, pottery shards and bits of colored glass and called it Nuestro Pueblo ("our town"). By 1955, with his masterpiece complete, Rodia simply walked away.
After the city proposed to raze the site on the grounds of public safety in 1959, a committee of private admirers arranged a structural test. The towers did not waver, and the test ended when the crane eventually broke down. Later, the towers emerged unscathed from the 1965 Watts riots. Today, the visionary site is operated by the City of Los Angeles as the Simon Rodia State Historical Park -- one of only four National Historic Landmarks in all of Los Angeles.
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Devils Tower National Monument
Devils Tower Wyo.
Long ago, a bear attacked seven Kiowa Indian sisters as they played in the woods. The girls climbed onto a small rock and began to pray for their lives. Suddenly, the rock rose into the sky, casting the sisters into the heavens as the seven stars of the Pleiades cluster. Enraged, the bear charged after them, but its claws kept slipping, and the animal crashed to the ground. Today, you still can see the deep scrapes the bear gouged out of the column's sheer sides. So goes, at least, the legends of the dizzying monolith known as Devils Tower.
Rising a near-vertical 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River in northeastern Wyoming, the majestic geological oddity is one of the West's unforgettable natural attractions. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt named it America's first national monument. Today, the craggy volcanic formation and the 1,347-acre park surrounding it continue to awe sightseers, rock climbers and nature lovers, not the least of which are the local Native Americans for whom the tower is a sacred site.
This summer, among the activities to commemorate its centennial are a Cowboy Festival in late July and an Anniversary Celebration in late September.
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Club Ebony
Indianola, Miss.
More than a hundred juke joints dot the Delta's back roads, much as they did in the 1930s and '40s. In Indianola, you'll find one called Club Ebony. Look for faded green clapboards and a weathered roadside barbecue pit. A historic marker tells you the nondescript club has been operating since 1945. It lists some of the giants who have gotten down and dirty there over the years -- Howlin' Wolf, Ray Charles and native son B.B. King, who was born on a plantation here in 1925. Club Ebony serves a justly famous catfish dinner, but its real specialty is hard-driving music. David Lee Durham, whom some consider to be the last genuine Delta bluesman on Earth, rocks the joint with his True Blues Band on Sunday nights. This is the real deal, a juke junket not to be missed by blues travelers or anyone interested in American culture.
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Sea Lion Caves
Florence, Ore.
You can't beat it if you're a sea lion: a remote, 100-yard-long, 12-story-tall amphitheater carved into the base of a rugged Pacific-coast cliff. Hundreds of the animals gather inside the cave's dim recesses every year to get shelter from winter storms. In the spring, they breed, give birth and generally carry on. On warm summer days, massive bulls (12 feet long and 1,500 pounds), mature cows and pups emerge from the shadows to bask on sunny ledges and frolic in the swells located at the cave's mouth. A lift whisks visitors about 200 feet down through the cliff and into the murky habitat below, where the barking of sea lions echoes against soaring rock walls.
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New Harmony
New Harmony, Ind.
This museum village on the banks of the Wabash River merits a visit on good looks alone. But what's really dreamy is its history. The first settlers were a group of German Lutheran separatists. Calling themselves the New Harmonists, in 1814 they began an extraordinary experiment in communal living. In 1825, they sold their lovely town to Robert Owen and William Maclure. Together the men tried to build a society where no one owned anything. The experiment collapsed, but not before attracting intellectual luminaries to New Harmony's tree-lined streets. The colorful story is preserved at the New Harmony Visitors Center and sites all over town.
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Panorama of the City of New York
Queens, N.Y.
New York has world-famous landmarks such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Empire State Building and Times Square. And it has locally treasured institutions: the Barneys men's sale, $34 hamburgers at the Four Seasons and umbrella vendors who materialize at the slightest hint of rain. Then there's the Panorama of the City of New York, a cultural marvel unto itself.
Housed at the Queens Museum of Art in a building erected for the 1939 World's Fair, the panorama is a huge and astonishingly detailed architectural model of New York. The sprawling display includes every single building erected in all five boroughs before 1992, when the last major alterations were done. That's 895,000 individual structures, from monumental skyscrapers and bridges to nondescript corner delis and vest-pocket ball fields. At 9,335 square feet, the model is larger than some of the structures it re-creates. To gaze upon the panorama from its wraparound balconies is to take a giddy aerial tour of the great city.
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International UFO Museum and Research Center
Roswell, N.M.
Roswell enjoys 311 days of sunshine a year, and it boasts vibrant cultural institutions and the breathtaking Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge. But what really put the place on the map are aliens. Specifically, the extraterrestrials who, in July 1947, apparently missed a turn at the Milky Way and crashed outside of town. Locals reported seeing some strange lights the night of the mishap. In the morning, ranchers reported finding bits of wreckage with weird markings scattered across their fields. U.S. Army officials in Roswell announced that the army had recovered "a crashed disk." A day later, the army retracted that and said the object was merely a wayward weather balloon. The crash site was cordoned off, and all wreckage disappeared. True believers instantly sniffed a coverup. Contemporary visitors, arriving in Roswell mostly by car, flock to the International UFO Museum and Research Center. It's a clearinghouse for information about the "Roswell incident" and UFO sightings worldwide. Every July, the UFO Encounter Festival features food, games, light shows and an "alien village."
Cover photograph of Devils Tower National Monument by Bill Ross, Corbis
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