10450 Best Sights in USA

At the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 19th- and 20th-century photographs and American and European paintings, along with a core collection of works on paper, are focal points.

Located in the heart of the famed Griffith Observatory, the 290-seat Samuel Oschin Planetarium may be on the modest side as far as planetariums are concerned, but the shows held here are no less epic and electrifying. This state-of-the-art theater has an aluminum dome and a Zeiss star projector that plays awe-inspiring multimedia exhibitions that address the mystery of the cosmos. There are typically three 30-minute ticketed shows in rotation, so be sure to allow time to catch one while spending a day at the park.  Sit in the back for the best experience.

Stroll through 38 acres of formal gardens, wildflower-spangled meadows, native Texas vegetation, fascinating historical structures, and diverse sections designed to educate and delight nature lovers at the San Antonio Botanical Garden. You can walk the Texas Native Trail, which represents three distinct regions of Texas. The garden's stunning centerpiece is the 90,000-square-foot Lucile Halsell Conservatory, with five futuristic glass structures exhibiting plants and flowers found in worldwide environments from the desert to the tropics.

Other highlights include the Zachry Foundation Culinary Garden and Chef Teaching Kitchen, which promotes healthy food choices and encourages visitors to participate in planting, harvesting, and preparing fresh fruits and vegetables. The Kumamoto En, a gift from San Antonio sister-city Kumamoto, is a serene, authentic Japanese garden with stone walks and water features. The Family Adventure Garden encourages kids to run, climb, and splash in 2½ acres of nature space.

Exhibits on Apache history and culture are displayed at the San Carlos Apache Cultural Center, along with explanations of cultural traditions, such as the Changing Women Ceremony, a girls' puberty rite. Crafts are sold here as well.

Even if you don't know a choke from a chassis, you're bound to admire the sleek designs of the autos in this impressive museum. On rotating display are gems from the museum's core collection of vintage motorcycles and cars—ranging from a pair of Steve McQueen's dirt bikes and an extremely rare Bizzarrini (only three were ever made) to a 1981 silver DeLorean (remember the time machine in Back to the Future?)—as well as a series of visiting special exhibits. Be sure to see the Fabulous Car of Louis Mattar, which was ingeniously kitted out to set the cross-country endurance record in 1952 (6,320 miles nonstop from San Diego to New York City and back, refueling from a moving gas truck); a video display shows highlights such as Mattar and his codrivers changing the tire while in motion and pouring a glass of water from the onboard tap. There's also an ongoing automobile restoration program and an extensive automotive research library.

Check the calendar if visiting in December, as the museum has varying early closing hours during the holiday season.

More than 5,300 rare, exotic, and endangered plants are on display on 37 landscaped acres. Displays include plants from Central America, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, Madagascar, and more; the most diverse collection of bamboo in North America; California native plants; and subtropical fruits. The park contains the largest interactive children's garden on the West Coast, where kids can roll around in the Seeds of Wonder garden, explore a baby dinosaur forest, discover a secret garden, or play in a playhouse. An Undersea Garden displays rocks and succulents that uncannily mimic an underwater environment.

The San Diego Historical Society maintains its research library in the basement of the Casa de Balboa and organizes shows on the first floor. Permanent and rotating exhibits, which are often more lively than you might expect, survey local urban history after 1850, when California entered the Union. A 30-minute, Emmy Award-winning film, Balboa Park: The Jewel of San Diego, plays hourly in the museum's theater. 

When the exhibits at this 27,000-square-foot museum are in operation, you can hear the sounds of chugging engines, screeching brakes, and shrill whistles. Local model railroad clubs built and maintain the four main displays, which represent California railroads in "miniature," with the track laid on scale models of San Diego County terrain. Out back, the Centennial Railway Garden features replicas of the streetcars and scenes of Balboa Park during the 1915 Exposition. The Toy Train Gallery has an interactive Lionel exhibit and whimsical vignettes.

There are 8 million fossils, dinosaur models, and even live reptiles and other specimens under this roof. Favorite exhibits include the Foucault Pendulum, suspended on a 43-foot cable and designed to demonstrate the Earth's rotation, and an Allosaurus fragilis dinosaur skeleton made from casts of original fossil bones. Permanent exhibits highlight citizen scientists and the regional environment, and traveling exhibits also make a stop here. Films shown at the museum's giant-screen theater are included with admission. Check the website for information about films, lectures, and free guided nature walks.

The museum space is housed in a New England–style, wood-frame house prefabricated in the Eastern United States that was shipped around Cape Horn in 1851. The building has been restored to replicate the newspaper's offices of 1868, when the first edition of the San Diego Union (now known as the San Diego Union-Tribune) was printed.

Founded in 1965, this nonprofit promotes water-based media through workshops, exhibitions, and an impressive collection of work by talented plein air painters. With over 700 members, it is one of the most active watercolor societies in America.

Four habitats across 6,000 acres make up this underwater park and ecological reserve. When the water is clear, this is a diver's paradise with reefs, kelp beds, sand flats, and a submarine canyon reaching depths up to 600 feet. Plunge to see guitarfish rays, perch, sea bass, anchovies, squid, and hammerhead sharks. Snorkelers, kayakers, and stand-up paddleboarders are likely to spot sea lions, seals, and leopard sharks. The Seven La Jolla Sea Caves, 75-million-year-old sandstone caves, are at the park's edge.

Although you can explore the park on your own, the best way to view it is with a professional guide.

The park maintains several hiking and walking trails in the Escondido area. These are part of an intended 70-mile-long Coast to Crest Trail that will eventually link the San Dieguito Lagoon near Del Mar with the river's source on Volcan Mountain, north of Julian. Among the existing trails are three that circle Lake Hodges: the North Shore Lake Hodges Trail; the Piedras Pintadas Trail, which informs about native American Kumeyaay lifestyles and uses for native plants; and the Highland Valley Trail, the first mile of which is the Ruth Merrill Children's Walk. Three trails in Clevenger Canyon lead to sweeping views of the San Pasqual Valley.

Visit the website for a list of upcoming free guided hikes and pay attention to signs warning against leaving valuables in your car.

One of the best picnic spots in a very picnic-friendly park, the 55-acre arboretum specializes in plants from areas with climates similar to that of the Bay Area. Walk the Eastern Australian garden to see tough, pokey shrubs and plants with cartoon-like names, such as the lilly-pilly tree. You don't have to go to Muir Woods to see the largest living things on earth: the botanical garden boasts a 4-acre redwood grove in the heart of the city. Kids gravitate toward the large, shallow fountain and the pond with ducks, turtles, and egrets.  Free public tours are given Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at 1:30, with an additional tour Saturday at 10:30. No reservations are required.

Night and day, the center hosts many social activities, from mixers and youth game nights to holiday parties and slam poetry performances.

You'll feel as if you're out to sea when you step inside this sturdy, ship-shape (literally), Streamline-Moderne structure, dubbed the Bathhouse Building and built in 1939 as part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration. The first floor of the museum, part of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, has stunningly restored undersea dreamscape murals and some of the museum's intricate ship models. The first-floor balcony overlooks the beach and has lovely WPA-era tile designs. A short walk from the museum (past the cable car turnaround) is the national historical park's Visitor Center ( 499 Jefferson St.), whose fun, large-scale exhibits make it an engaging stop for learning more about San Francisco's fascinating maritime past in a building that was a Del Monte cannery warehouse. If you've got young kids in tow, the museum makes a great quick, free stop. Then pick up ice cream at Ghirardelli Square across the street and enjoy it on the beach or next door in the grassy Maritime Garden, where you can watch the cable cars turn around.

Topped with a swirl like an art-deco nautilus, the library's seven-level glass atrium fills the building with light. Local researchers take advantage of centers dedicated to gay and lesbian, African American, Chinese, and Filipino history. The sixth-floor San Francisco History Center has fun exhibits of city ephemera, including a treat for fans of noir fiction: novelist Dashiell Hammett's typewriter.

A labor of love from the same vintage-transit enthusiasts responsible for the F-line's revival, this one-room museum and store celebrates the city's streetcars and cable cars with photographs, models, and artifacts. The permanent exhibit includes the replicated end of a streetcar with a working cab—complete with controls and a bell—for kids to explore; the cool, antique Wiley birdcage traffic signal; and models and display cases to view. Right on the F-line track, just across from the Ferry Building, this is a great quick stop.

Occupying prime oceanfront property, the San Francisco Zoo touts itself as a wildlife-focused recreation center that inspires visitors to become conservationists. The zoo was last accredited in 2022, though recent reports have criticized it as outdated and potentially unsafe for its animals. Integrated exhibits group different species of animals from the same geographic areas together in enclosures that don't look like cages. More than 2,000 animals and 250 species reside here, including endangered species such as the snow leopard, Sumatran tiger, and grizzly bear. The zoo's superstar exhibit is Grizzly Gulch, where orphaned grizzly bear sisters Kachina and Kiona enchant visitors with their frolicking and swimming. The Mexican Gray Wolf grotto houses the smallest gray wolf and the most endangered wolf subspecies in the world. The Lemur Forest has seven varieties of the bug-eyed, long-tailed primates from Madagascar and is the country's largest outdoor lemur habitat. African kikuyu grass carpets the circular outer area of the Jones Family Gorilla Preserve, one of the most natural gorilla habitats of any zoo in the world. Other popular exhibits include Penguin Island, Koala Crossing, and the African Savanna exhibit. The 6-acre Children's Zoo has about 300 mammals, birds, and reptiles, plus a huge playground, a restored 1921 Dentzel carousel, and a mini–steam train.

As you approach Cuchara Pass, several switchbacks snake through rolling grasslands and dance in and out of spruce stands whose clearings afford views of Monument Lake. You can camp, fish, and hike throughout this tranquil part of the San Isabel National Forest, which in spring and summer is emblazoned with a color wheel of wildflowers. Four corkscrewing miles later you'll reach a dirt road that leads to Bear Lake and Blue Lake. The resort town of Cuchara is about 4 miles from the Route 12 turnoff to the lakes.

Alfred Finn, a Houston architect, designed this 570-foot-tall monument, which rises over the site (in nearby La Porte) where Sam Houston triumphed over General Antonio López de Santa Anna in the final battle of the Texas Revolution of 1836. The cenotaph, built between 1936 and 1939, is made of concrete and 100-million-year-old Cordova shellstone quarried north of Austin. At its top rests a nine-point, 35-foot-tall star weighing 220 tons. The park also includes the San Jacinto Museum of History; The Jesse H. Jones Theater for Texas Studies, which shows a movie about the battle called Texas Forever!; the Battleship Texas; and the Albert and Ethel Herzstein Library, covering Texas history.

With the low-slung, colonnaded Mission San Juan Bautista as its drawing card, this park 20 miles northeast of Salinas is about as close to early-19th-century California as you can get. Historic buildings ring the wide green plaza, among them an adobe home furnished with Spanish-colonial antiques, a hotel frozen in the 1860s, a blacksmith shop, a pioneer cabin, and a jailhouse. The mission's cemetery contains the unmarked graves of more than 4,300 Native American converts.  On the first Saturday of the month, costumed volunteers engage in quilting bees, tortilla making, and other frontier activities, and sarsaparilla and other nonalcoholic drinks are served in the saloon.

You'll find a wide gravel beachfront at this park 10 miles west of Friday Harbor, overlooking waters where orcas often frolic in summer, plus grassy lawns with picnic tables and a small campground. Amenities: parking (free); toilets. Best for: walking.

This museum in an old farmhouse presents island life at the turn of the 20th century through historic photography, documents, and buildings.

Housed in a sleek, contemporary building, SJIMA presents rotating art shows and exhibits with an emphasis on island and Northwest artists, including the highly touted Artists' Registry Show in winter, which features works by nearly 100 San Juan Islands artists.

At this serene 20-acre park near Roche Harbor, you can stroll along five winding trails to view more than 150 colorful—and in many cases, large-scale—sculptures spread amid freshwater and saltwater wetlands, open woods, blossoming fields, and rugged terrain. The park is also a haven for birds; more than 120 species nest and breed here. It's a great spot for picnicking, and dogs are welcome.

A remodeled 1895 schoolhouse serving estate-grown wines, this picturesque winery is worth a visit for the scenery and its award-winning Siegerrebe and Madeleine Angevine varietals (the winery belongs to the Puget Sound AVA, the coolest-climate growing region in Washington). The vineyard's wines show up on many local menus.

Founded in 1851, San Luis is the oldest incorporated town in Colorado. Murals depicting famous stories and legends of the area adorn several buildings in the town. A latter-day masterpiece is the Stations of the Cross Shrine, created by renowned local sculptor Huberto Maestas. The shrine is formally known as La Mesa de la Piedad y de la Misericordia (Hill of Piety and Mercy), and its 15 stations with bronze statues illustrate the last hours of Christ's life. The trail leads up to a chapel called La Capilla de Todos Los Santos.

Activities at this facility geared to children under age 10 include an "imagination-powered" elevator that transports visitors to a series of underground caverns. Kids can pick rubber fruit at a farmers' market and race in a fire engine to fight a fire.