Unique Experiences

You come around a bend on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the kind of curve where the trees suddenly open up and the mountains fall away in blue-gray layers toward the horizon, one ridge behind another behind another until they blur into the sky itself. You pull over, because you have to, because everyone has to at this particular overlook, and you stand there for a minute doing that thing where you take a photo you already know won't capture it, and then you just look instead.

That's Asheville before you've even reached Asheville. The town itself, tucked into a bowl of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains where the French Broad River bends through it, somehow keeps that same trick going once you arrive — it is a place that feels like it shouldn't exist in quite the combination it does. Gilded Age mansion. Street drummers. Vegan doughnut shop next door to a barbecue joint that's been slow-smoking meat since before anyone in line was born. It all somehow works.

There is a moment, somewhere on the drive into Mount Rainier National Park, when you come around a bend in the road and the mountain just appears. Not gradually. Not as a shape that slowly comes into focus as you get closer. It simply fills the windshield — enormous, snow-covered, and impossibly close — and whatever you were about to say stops mid-sentence, because your brain has decided that finishing that thought can wait.

That is your introduction to Rainier. And it sets the tone for everything that follows.

There is a town in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State that decided somewhere around 1962 that the best solution to a failing economy was to simply become a Bavarian village. Not to build a theme park. Not to add a few decorative touches to an existing downtown. To fully, completely, and with remarkable commitment transform every building facade, every storefront, every lamppost and flower box into something that belongs in the foothills of the Alps rather than the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

It worked. Spectacularly.

Leavenworth, Washington is one of those places that sounds like it should feel gimmicky and somehow does not. You expect to arrive skeptical and leave charmed, because that is what happens to virtually everyone who makes the drive through the mountains and comes around the bend to find a Main Street that looks like it was lifted directly from a postcard of Bavaria and set down intact in central Washington. The mountains behind it — the actual Cascade Mountains, enormous and snow-capped and genuinely dramatic — frame the whole scene in a way that makes it look even more improbable and more beautiful than it has any right to be.

There is a moment that happens to almost everyone who visits San Antonio for the first time. You are walking along an ordinary city street, thinking ordinary city thoughts, and then you turn a corner or descend a set of stairs and suddenly you are in an entirely different world — a winding limestone river lined with cypress trees draped in lights, the sound of water and live music mixing together in the warm air, boats drifting past restaurants where people are laughing over plates of food and cold drinks. The city disappears above you. Down here, there is just this.

That is the Riverwalk, and photographs do not do it justice. You have to be standing in it to understand why people come back to San Antonio over and over again.

There are cities you visit and cities that get into your bones. Savannah, Georgia is firmly in the second category, and it does it with very little effort — just a slow river, a canopy of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, streets paved with stones that have been there since before the country was a country, and an atmosphere so thick with history and charm that you'll find yourself genuinely annoyed that you don't live there.

It is, without exaggeration, one of the most beautiful places in America. And it will absolutely ruin you for everywhere else you go.

There is a moment, somewhere between walking through a giant inflatable colon and discovering a fully functional laundromat that leads to another dimension, where you stop trying to make sense of what is happening and just decide to feel things instead. This is the correct response to Meow Wolf. It is, in fact, the only response that works. The part of your brain that wants to categorize and label and understand what it is looking at will not be helpful here. Give it the day off. It has earned it.

There are moments in life that stop you mid-thought — not because something went wrong, but because something is so unexpectedly beautiful that your brain needs a second to catch up with your eyes. Paddling a crystal-clear kayak through an underground limestone cavern while colored lights turn the water beneath you into something that looks borrowed from a dream — that is one of those moments.

Welcome to The Gorge Underground in Rogers, Kentucky. You've probably never heard of it. That is about to change.

The air feels crisp and cool. It is early in the morning, and the sleepy little town is just waking up around you. Somewhere nearby you hear the rhythmic clang of a hammer on iron — the blacksmith, already at work on something that will outlast the day. The smell hits you next, before you even see the source: cinnamon roasted nuts cooking in a huge black kettle, stirred by a woman who has clearly been doing this long enough to do it without thinking, the warm spiced cloud of it drifting through the morning air and attaching itself to the part of your memory that stores things you want to come back to.

A woman in a bonnet and an ankle-length dress and apron goes hurrying past you carrying a basket of apples, heading in the direction of the pie shop with the kind of purposeful energy that suggests the pie shop has opinions about tardiness. You are standing in the Ozark Mountains just outside of Branson, Missouri, in a place that smells like cinnamon and sounds like iron and looks like 1880 decided to stay. And then you see a sign — casual as anything, posted like it is the most normal phrase in the world — that reads: Fire in the Hole.

There is only one place in the world that sign appears. You are already exactly where you want to be.

There is a road in Arkansas that winds up a mountain in switchbacks so picturesque that the town they lead to earned itself a nickname — Little Switzerland — from people who looked at those climbing curves disappearing into the Ozark treeline and thought of the Alps.

Eureka Springs sits in the Ozark Mountains like it was placed there by someone with a very good eye for location — small, winding, unhurried, and genuinely charming in a way that does not feel manufactured or performed. It is the kind of town that has been quietly existing for a long time, doing its thing, accumulating history and character and a ghost story or two, entirely unbothered by the fact that most of the country has not yet found it. The people who have found it tend to come back. That is typically the sign of a place that is doing something right.

There is a specific moment that happens to almost every visitor at The House on the Rock, somewhere between the first room and the forty-seventh room, where something shifts in your brain and you stop trying to process what you are looking at and simply surrender to the scale of it. It is the same feeling you get when you try to genuinely comprehend the size of the ocean or the age of the universe — a pleasant, slightly humbling loosening of your certainty that you understand how things work and what is possible and what one human being with a vision and an apparently limitless commitment to that vision can actually do.

Alex Jordan Jr. built The House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin, starting in the 1940s, and the origin story alone earns it a place on your radar. He began constructing a retreat atop a sixty-foot chimney of rock called Deer Shelter Rock in the Wyoming Valley of Wisconsin, which sounds like the setup to either an architectural legend or a cautionary tale, and it turned out to be both, depending on who you ask. What began as a fascinating and unconventional house grew into something that resists every category you try to put it in. It is not quite a museum, not quite an attraction, not quite a monument to one man's obsession — except that it is absolutely all three of those things, simultaneously, at a scale that takes your breath away a little.

There is a gravel road just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee that does not look like it leads anywhere particularly significant. It is the kind of road you might drive past twice before deciding it is probably the right one, the kind that makes your GPS sound slightly less confident than usual, the kind that in approximately half of all fairy tales leads somewhere you should not go and in the other half leads somewhere that changes everything.

Follow it anyway. Wind up the hill through the trees, around the bend, and then stop — because emerging from the woods in front of you, beside an actual waterfall, is a village. A small, impossibly charming, entirely real village made of bungalows and soft light and the particular kind of quiet that only exists when you are far enough from a highway that you cannot hear one anymore. This is Ancient Lore Village, and it has been sitting up here in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains waiting for you to find it, completely unbothered by the fact that most people have no idea it exists.

We are about to fix that.