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A Visit to the Museum of Sex

Why should you visit the Museum of Sex? It’s the museum of sex!

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Lotusland:
Ganna Walska’s Garden of Dreams

The 3,000 rare and exotic species in Lotusland are organized into enchanting chapters

Ninety minutes north of Los Angeles in the manicured town of Montecito is a sprawling and surreal site—the 37-acre private botanical garden of a visionary eccentric.

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Wine Avec Design

At most of the world’s wine bars there’s a direct correlation between the quality of the decor, the quality of the wine and the snootiness of the clientele. At Chicago’s Avec Restaurant & Wine Bar high design and highly delicious wine have been refreshingly paired with a friendly, informal, atmosphere.

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Ice Bars In Warm Places

At almost any bar in the world you can get a drink with ice. At a few you can get a drink in ice. While sitting on seats made of ice. At a table made of ice. Surrounded by walls made of ice.

The concept of the ice bar originated, logically enough, in Sweden where both water and freezing temperatures are abundant. These icy drinking establishments soon became popular around Scandinavia, partly because they combined two elements Scandinavians tend to embrace (cold and alcohol) and partly because these bars’ LED lighting, artworks of frozen water and and intimate settings made them great places to chill out. (Pun. Sorry.)

Today, there are more than two dozen ice bars around the globe including ones in Amsterdam, London, Poland, Canada and Alaska. Not all of these frozen saloons are in places with cold climes. Hence this Spot Cool Stuff overview of ice bars in warm places.

For the purposes of this review, a “warm place” is anywhere it doesn’t snow in the winter and regularly gets hot in the summer. So, the ice bar in Beijing doesn’t count. The one in Shanghai would have had it not recently closed.

All of the selections on this list, like most of the ice bars anywhere, charge an entrance fee to get in. Usually this fee includes one free drink and use of cold-weather clothing that is designed as much to protect patrons from the bar’s sub-freezing temperatures as it is to protect the bar itself from the patrons’ body heat. To help keep their establishments below freezing, ice bars also have strict limits on the number of people allowed in.

And with that, let’s kick back with a cold one and tour the world’s ice bars in warm places . . .

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The Safari B&B in Deepest, Darkest California

At night you fall asleep listening to the roar of lions and tigers through the canvas walls of your tent. In the morning you wake up to an elephant bringing you your breakfast, carried in a picnic basket he’s holding by his trunk.

It may seem like you are in Africa or in some brought-to-life children’s story. You are not. You are at the Vision Quest Ranch, an unusual B&B in Salinas, California, about an hour south of San Francisco.

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Wedding Hells Are Ringing

Weddings are bliss but marriage is hell a saying goes. But some couples in Las Vegas are taking the opposite approach, indulging in their dark sides when they get hitched in the hopes that the rest of their lives will be wedded bliss, all rainbows and kittens.

Gothic weddings are the new in thing in Vegas.

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(Legally) Spend The Night In A Museum

Do you usually find the experience of visiting a museum:

    A) so dull that you want to fall asleep; or
    B) so interesting that you don’t want to leave at the museum’s closing time.

Either way, you could benefit from a museum that provides visitors a place to sleep. Here’s our rundown of five museums where you can spend the night among the art galleries and science exhibits:

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Yurt “Camping” on the California Coast

You like camping but your partner prefers more glamorous travel. The solution? Glamping. Glamorous camping. Like that on offer at the The Treebones Resort.

Treebones, located on California’s scenic Big Sur coast, is a resort that offers the perfect romantic getaway for you both. Accommodations here are in yurts, large circular tents originally the domain of Central Asian nomads and made of sheepskin.

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