With the touch of a button, you can read a randomly selected short story.

An art supply shop holds the secrets of this quiet neighborhood's raucous Barbary Coast past.

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

This contorting sculpture is the tallest in San Francisco.

The memorial to the victims of the Jonestown Massacre carries the names of 918 lost, including one name people wish wasn't there.

Bonsai garden in Oakland is curated by the first non-Japanese female bonsai master in the United States.

Once close to extinction, there is no shortage of elephant seals on the beaches of Año Nuevo State Park.

A New England-style lighthouse along California's beautiful Highway 1 gets a re-do.

The bunker where Hitler took his own life is hidden under this deliberately ordinary parking lot.

Elevated freight railway turned wildly successful urban park.

The glacier tucked within a New Zealand rainforest.

The remains of a deserted steamboat sit rusting beside an old ferry pier and an abandoned train platform.

A historic hotel in an old California railroad town with a rowdy reputation.

Where the polar bear watches over everything, and every drink is a double.

A sparse, solitary sequoia still stands as a living tribute to the famous conservationist who planted it—but it's dying.

The rusting remains of the largest assembled WWII fleet on the West Coast.

The only standing town in the United States that early Chinese Americans built for themselves.

This odd California folly seems like it was almost designed to accumulate urban legends.

A life-sized mammoth sculpture marks the spot where the remains of a Columbian mammoth were discovered in 2005.

A burnt orange monolithic dome structure perched on a hillside near Interstate 280.

Peace Park and the Atomic Bomb Dome.

An eerie reminder to the horrors of World War II.

Japanese national treasure originally built in 593 CE.

One of the best absinthe distilleries in the United States.