Guidebooks are annoying. Just because some editor who doesn’t know me tells me which restaurant is the best or what attraction is a must-see doesn’t make it a must-see attraction. Sightseers’ Delight is dedicated to the weird, the quirky and the fun. After all, traveling is fun.
If it’s not, you’re doing it wrong.
All of the places highlighted in this ever-growing database are great. Sightseers’ Delight has visited them all. We think you should make a point to see every one of them. But, this is not a guidebook. Just a webpage to help you plan your next adventure.
The Bullock Hotel is a historic landmark located at the corner of Wall Street and Main Street in Deadwood, South Dakota. It was built by Seth Bullock and his business partner Sol Star around 1895 for $40,000. The hotel is the oldest in Deadwood and has 28 of its original 63 rooms and a casino and restaurant. Seth Bullock began construction on the hotel shortly after the devastating Deadwood fire of 1894, which destroyed the original two-story wood-frame building. The hotel was designed in an “Italianate” and Victorian style, with the first floor featuring a grand hotel lobby, a large dining room, and several offices. The second and third stories held 63 luxury sleeping rooms with baths down the halls and two large banks of skylights for natural lighting. All rooms were furnished with iron and brass beds and oak furnishings.
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The Bunker Hill Monument was constructed to memorialize the June 17, 1775, Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first major battles between British and Patriot forces during the American Revolution. The 221-foot-tall obelisk was erected between 1825 and 1843 in Charlestown, using granite from nearby Quincy. The Bunker Hill Museum, dedicated in June 2007, features exhibits about the battle.
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The San Francisco Cable Car Museum on Mason Street in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood is the perfect museum for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the city’s unique attraction. The museum includes a number of old cable cars and exhibits about how they operate. Visitors can also see the powerhouse and the actual cables that pull cars up and down the city’s many hills.
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The Cable Car Museum opened in December 2000 in the former winding house, which operated from 1902 until 1978, at the Kelburn end of the Wellington Cable Car. The museum houses a pair of original grip cars that once ran along the line. No. 1 is in red 1970s livery and features contemporary advertising, while No. 3 was restored in 2005 to a green livery dating to circa 1905; a San Francisco Cable Car bell was also added. If nothing else, the area around the museum offers some of the best views of Wellington.
The sprawling 2,200-acre Cahokia Mounds complex in Collinsville, Ill., are some of the most impressive Native American mounds in the country. While settlement in the area may date to roughly 1200 BC (during the Late Archaic period), the mounds as they are today were settled circa 600 AD (during the Late Woodland period). The mounds were probably built during the 9th century during the Emergent Mississippian cultural. The settlement has the distinction of being the largest, most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture.
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During the Civil War, Camp Chase, named for Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury under President Abraham Lincoln and a former governor of Ohio, was home to a military training camp for Union troops and one of the largest Confederate prisons. The first occupants of Camp Chase’s prison were political prisoners, but during the Civil War, as many as 25,000 Confederate soldiers passed through the camp, which was built to house 3,500-4,000 prisoners. By the end of January 1865, the prison held more than 9,400 prisoners. Today, the only remnant of the camp are the graves of 2,260 Confederate soldiers, buried in quarters so tight their headstones nearly touch one another. In the middle stands a monument — with the word “Americans” engraved into its “memorial arch.”
The Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial opened on Feb. 22, 2017, the sixth anniversary of the 2011 earthquake that claimed the lives of 185 people. The memorial, located in a gentle curve of the Avon River in the heart of Christchurch, pays respect to those who died, were seriously injured and survivors. The memorial’s name, Oi Manawa, means “tremor or quivering of the heart.”
Julius von Haast, a German geologist, founded the Canterbury Museum in 1867. He used his collection as the core of the museum’s exhibits. The Canterbury Museum opened to the public in December 1867 and moved to its current location in October 1870. The museum is part natural history museum and part history museum. Its extensive holdings include the largest collection in the world of Antarctic objects from the age of exploration and discovery.