The randomness of this wall of lava lamps helps encrypt up to 10 percent of the internet.

A monument to the love people have for their pets.

A collection of memorabilia from the Beat era in the back of a San Francisco bookstore.

This shop and studio is dedicated to the art of the book, from letterpress to bookbinding.

San Franciscans leave gifts and messages for the magical beings that live behind the tiny, mysterious door installed on a tree in Golden Gate Park.

The tea room that pushed the boundaries of adorable straight into...we can't find the words.

Tiki luxury on Nob Hill.

A tiny theater hidden in an alley plays a constant stream of short silent films for anyone willing to peer through the peephole.

A shop full of natural curiosities, carnivorous plants, and costumed taxidermied mice.

Staircase winds down the side of Telegraph Hill through gardens, wild parrots flying overhead.

A collection of 20th-century automata, penny arcade games, and musical contraptions.

A pair of slides and a tree-lined stair corridor have been an urban oasis for nearly 40 years.

A museum befitting the city responsible for supplying the majority of the world's LSD.

Olfactory delights in San Francisco's Botanical Gardens.

Once thought to be the oldest living tree in the world, Methuselah was germinated before the Egyptian pyramids were built.

A trash dump made beautiful by nature's power.

This massive redwood tree has a hole in the base big enough to drive through.

A raised boardwalk winds through a thicket of stunted, century-old trees no more than nine feet tall.

Celebrating the transformation of trash into objects of beauty.

Experience Larry Spring's self-taught "common sense" laws of physics.

One of the most scenic stretches of road in America winds between some of the country's oldest trees.

An extraordinarily ornate museum in San Diego holds wondrous anthropological treasures.

This was once the center of the Birdman cult, and is now a World Heritage Site.

Hub for hallucinogenic Amazon religion.