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The museum was established as a place where medical students could study specimens. Shown here is a 3-D image of a male skeleton from a recent exhibition.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine

This Silver Spring, Maryland site scares and educates, with displays of prosthetic eyes, amputated limbs and incomplete skeletons

Whimsy runs riot at Harvey Ladew's Maryland estate, from a library with a shelf that swings open to reveal a secret entrance to the gardens to the topiary hedges, featuring a fat man walking a tiny dog, and a rider and hounds in hot pursuit of a fox.

Ladew Topiary Gardens

Clipped hedges and a house full of antiques are the main attractions for this museum north of Baltimore, Maryland

Brad Penka can't say enough about barbed wire's winning of the West.

The Kansas Barbed Wire Museum

With more than 2400 variations of barbed wire, this La Crosse, Kansas, museum has a lot to teach the non-farmers out there

Quack medicine? Inhaling the breath of a duck, according to the exhibit, was once used to cure children of thrush and other disorders of the mouth and throat.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

A throwback to the private museums of earlier centuries, this Los Angeles spot has a true hodgepodge of natural history artifacts

The surf is always up at this "way cool" California museum, which celebrates the sport and its legends.

The California Surf Museum

Learn about the evolution of the surfboard from 1912 through 2008 in this small gallery in Oceanside, California

Visitors to the missile museum may touch a Titan II, which stands 103 feet tall.

Titan Missile Museum

In Sahuarita, Arizona, in the midst of a retirement community, tourists can touch a Titan II missile, still on its launch pad

The Voodoo Museum "is an entry point for people who are curious, who want to see what's behind this stuff," says anthropologist Martha Ward.

The New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum

Wooden masks, portraits and the occasional human skull mark the collections of this small museum near the French Quarter

Kenko had little trouble living with the idea that things were getting worse. "The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty," he wrote.

The Timeless Wisdom of Kenko

A 14th-century Japanese essayist’s advice for troubled times runs the gamut from quirky to prescient

As a child, Agatha Christie spent countless summer weekends at Beacon Cove, at the northern edge of Torquay, a resort town in the county of Devon, in southwest England.

The Picturesque Torquay, England

The seaside town beckons vacationers and Agatha Christie pilgrims alike

Christie purchased Greenway in 1938. Years later, she recalled the spell that the estate had cast on her: "a white Georgian house of about 1780 or '90, with woods sweeping down to the Dart...the ideal house, a dream house."

Where Agatha Christie Dreamed Up Murder

The birthplace of Poirot and Marple welcomes visitors looking for clues to the best-selling novelist of all time

Springtime visitors to Yosemite National Park are treated to sweeping views of lush landscapes.

Springtime Splendor in Yosemite

As the winter snows thaw, visitors flock to the popular national park to see frazil ice, moonbows and other seasonal sights

The Ahwahnee Hotel was built in 1927 to draw affluent and influential tourists into the park and give them a Ritz-Carlton experience amid Yosemite's wilderness.

Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel, Finally Restored

Interior designers spared no detail in bringing this historic lodge back to its luxurious origins

Cape Coast Castle is one of several Ghanaian colonial-era compounds in which captured Africans were held in dungeons during the slave trade era.

Ghana’s Monument to Sorrow and Survival

At Cape Coast Castle, visitors walk in the footsteps of African slaves

Siegfried's Mechanical Music Cabinet displays 350 or so automatic musical instruments—prototype jukeboxes, hand-cranked carnival machines and monstrous pianolas—all in working order.

The Offbeat Museums of Europe

Lost souls, music boxes and shoes fill some of the continent’s most peculiar collections

Recalling vistas created in the 9th to 12th centuries for Japan's aristocracy, islands are connected by a graceful bridge. Landscape architect Hoichi Kurisu's intention was to express "ancient wisdom."

Florida’s Lush Japanese Gardens

A thousand years of Japanese landscape designs unfold at the Morikami Museum in Delray Beach

The missions—built between 1769 and 1823 and extending in a chain of 600 miles from Sonoma to San Diego—stand as symbols of California's Spanish colonial past. Pictured is San Miguel's bell tower.

A Tour of California’s Spanish Missions

A poignant reminder of the region’s fraught history, missions such as San Miguel are treasured for their stark beauty

Northern Michigan's rocky coast, shown here is a Presque Isle cove, has long beckoned as a summer playground. The picturesque region, wrote American naturalist Edwin Way Teale, is "a land of wonderful wilderness."

The Wonderful Wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

Immortalized by Longfellow, the Midwest’s preferred vacation spot offers unspoiled forests, waterfalls and coastal villages

A view of Lake Superior and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.

A Michigan Museum of Shipwrecks

On the shore of Lake Superior, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum details the history of boats lost in the deep waters

Baklava, a pastry called tulumba, Bosnian pita stuffed with potatoes, and Turkish coffee at Berix.

Visiting Bosnia via St. Louis

A burgeoning community in the Gateway City is the place to find lepini, cevapi and other Bosnian treats

"Capi has always existed as un mondo a parte, a world apart," says one resident. That sentiment is demonstrated in the Faraglioni pinnacles off southeastern Capri.

The Lure of Capri

What is it about this tiny, sun-drenched island off the coast of Naples that has made it so irresistible for so long?

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