A spiritual retreat in the heart of Los Angeles offers stunning gardens and a labyrinth to lose yourself in.

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

The one-time watch house for incoming ships at the Golden Gate now stands abandoned and hidden in trees.

Carved by a waterfall in a hard-to-reach rock formation, this heart-shaped rock has inspired romantics for decades.

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

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

This serene oasis in an affluent Los Angeles neighborhood holds some of Gandhi's ashes and got Elvis into Eastern Philosophy.

After starting as a whimsical tourist attraction that eventually found its way to ruin, these renovated canals offer a lush and exotic locale on the Pacific Coast.

This Los Angeles animation studio is keeping the wonder of stop motion puppetry alive.

Panorama exhibition hall in old silent theater with a beautiful backyard garden.

One man's vast collection of artifacts and ephemera from matchbooks and postcards to vintage neon signs and cars.

A meditative space out of a fantasy story.

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

San Francisco's newly reopened hands-on science museum.

Quite simply the largest tree in the world (by volume).

An underground mansion with fruit-bearing trees and grapes growing beneath the surface of central California.

Each year these high desert hills are absolutely covered with poppy flowers in a surreal show of nature.

The private clubhouse for the members of the Academy of Magical Arts.

This strange seaside tower got its name from a wealthy eccentric who would hide coins among its stones.

Behind this beachfront shop lies a spectacular, colorful sea cave with an equally colorful past.

The seawater playground of gilded-era San Francisco burned to the ground in 1966.

World-famous, Pink's still manages to keep its prized cult fetish status.

Scores of vintage street lamps shine along L.A.’s Miracle Mile.

A "gravitational anomaly" located in the redwood forests just outside of Santa Cruz, California.