Travel
Discover facts about travel. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Travel
Inside Nevada’s eerie Clown Motel
The motel’s lobby is surrounded by thousands of grinning clowns, and the building sits beside a pioneer cemetery.
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Glastonbury Festival requires a massive temporary fence
Organizers put up miles of metal barriers to keep gatecrashers out of the muddy festival site.
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The Spy Museum gives visitors a cover story to remember
At Washington's International Spy Museum, the undercover experience assigns a secret identity and tests visitors as they move through the exhibits.…
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Comic-Con in San Diego draws 130,000 costumed attendees
Elaborate foam armor and capes turn the annual convention into a costumed spectacle across downtown.
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The plastic bead problem created by Mardi Gras
Cheap plastic necklaces tossed from parade floats pile up, creating a major cleanup burden for local sanitation crews.
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Kentucky has a museum full of retired ventriloquist dummies
Vent Haven in Fort Mitchell preserves the figures, photographs, and memorabilia of ventriloquism. The performers' voices are gone, but their stage partners…
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Manila's colorful jeepneys began as troop transports
After World War II, surplus troop transports were modified into colorful jeepneys that became a mainstay of local commuting in Manila.
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Neuschwanstein hides modern engineering inside a medieval fantasy
Ludwig II's castle was designed to evoke legendary kingship, but its construction included modern technology. The ornate Throne Hall used a steel structure…
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The Empire State Building has its own ZIP code
ZIP code 10118 is reserved for the building's tenants, giving the skyscraper its own postal code.
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The Museum of Bad Art wants sincere failures, not just poor technique
Its curators look for work that genuinely tries to make an artistic statement but goes memorably wrong in concept or execution. An ordinary weak painting is…
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The mall with a roller coaster inside
The shopping center enclosed a theme park, so visitors could ride a roller coaster without leaving the mall.
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Barbed Wire Museum in Kansas exhibits 2,000 wire types
The museum’s 2,000 wire types trace how people refined barbed wire to keep others off their land.
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Clap at Chichén Itzá and hear a sacred bird
The pyramid’s stairways bounce the clap back in a way that mimics the call of a local sacred bird.
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Roswell UFO Festival celebrates an alleged alien crash
Each summer, thousands of festivalgoers celebrate the extraterrestrial story, many in tinfoil hats.
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Las Vegas gives its retired neon signs a museum
The outdoor collection preserves giant signs from old casinos, including their oversized bulbs, rather than sending them straight to scrap.
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La Boca neighborhood features brightly painted metal homes
Immigrants built them from corrugated scrap metal and painted them with leftover boat paint, giving the neighborhood its vivid colors.
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Nebraska rebuilt Stonehenge out of 39 cars
Jim Reinders created Carhenge in 1987 as a memorial to his father. Gray-painted vehicles stand upright, lie across one another, and echo the arrangement of…
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The Statue of Liberty would need car-length shoes
A casual stroll would require footwear the length of a small vehicle.
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Why the Liberty Bell cracked so soon
The first casting was flawed, and the bell cracked soon after it reached Philadelphia. Local workers tried multiple recastings to repair it.
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Cadillac Ranch lets visitors spray-paint buried cars
Visitors are invited to spray-paint the row of vintage cars buried nose-first in a field.
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The Lincoln Memorial once had a typo in stone
An engraver carved an 'E' where an 'F' belonged; workers filled in part of the letter to correct the mistake.
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A Spanish festival where men leap over babies
At El Colacho in Castrillo de Murcia, men dressed as devils jump over babies laid on mattresses during a traditional celebration. The ritual symbolizes…
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Why Graceland is America's second most visited mansion
Millions visit for the estate’s eccentric decor, including its shag carpets and flamboyant style.
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CN Tower features a glass floor holding immense weight
The panels are engineered to support the weight of multiple rhinos at once, despite the dizzying view below.
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