A hotel and restaurant serving as the mecca of kitsch.

Gift shop offering toe tags and chalk body beach towels tucked into a coroner's office.

The only theatre in the world constructed specifically for sound movement.

A trash dump made beautiful by nature's power.

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

Established in the '60s, a family-owned tropical drink bar founded by Ray Buhen, bartender to the stars.

An old-timey medicine shop that once served Chinese laborers during the Gold Rush is still open for business to this day.

Celebrating the transformation of trash into objects of beauty.

A working model of the entire San Francisco Bay and much of the Sacramento River Delta, complete with regular tides that change every 14 minutes.

Get up close to emus and ostriches, or buy their tasty meat.

Gold Rush-era tombstones line the park's paths.

Visible below the waves are memorials to the city's Gold Rush dead.

The oldest lighthouse on America's west coast no longer needs keepers, yet they maintain the site anyhow.

The oldest burial ground in the city, final resting place of city founders, Ohlone natives and murderers alike.

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

Life in this isolated, hilltop lighthouse was lonely, but it sure was lovely.

One of the best absinthe distilleries in the United States.

An old vending machine serves up unpredictable beverages from its seemingly magical insides.

The only visible piece of San Francisco's most famous shipwreck.

This sailor's boneyard was lost under a parking lot for decades before being rediscovered.

A century and a half of research in the sciences and natural history, still going strong.

A winding path built in secret on the edge of the continent.

Nuclear waste dump site now an environmental sanctuary.

The final resting place of a space program monolith.