Oddball Tours Highlight 2010 "Obscura Day"

Quirky "holiday" spotlights off-the-radar local attractions

Obscura Day is a day for special tours and visits to places around the corner, around the country or around the world that you might never even have heard of, and it falls on Saturday, March 20, this year. It was organized by the folks behind Atlas Obscura, which describes itself as "a compendium of of the world's wonders, curiosities and esoterica." It's a bit like Ripley's Believe It or Not meets the Guinness World Records meets Wikipedia. Oddities around the world are posted, and site visitors are encouraged to enhance, correct or illustrate the posting with additional images.

But back to Obscura Day. Twenty-five places in the US and 29 in other countries are offering special tours to unusual places. The tours and visits tend to be cheap or free, and space is often limited, but they are places most people are likely to miss. In fact, some are sold out and have waiting lists. There are a lot of skeletons and such, including The Bone Room in Berkeley, National Museum of Health and Medicine's collection of medical specimens dating back to the Civil War  in Washington, D.C.; and the Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. There are the mysterious stone ruins of Gungywamp Hill near Groton in my native Connecticut, and there are eerie streets of never-built housing developments, such as Everglades Unit 11 near West Palm Beach, now teeming with wildlife species, and California City, 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles with streets in the desert that resemble the Nazca Lines from the air.

And there are just plain  (OK, not plain) curiosities. They include the world's tallest treehouse in Crossville, Tennessee, the wild, whimsical Cathedral of Junk in Austin, Texas, the Newnes Glow Worm Tunnel in Australia; the Iceland Phallological Museum boasting "probably the only museum in the world to contain a collection of phallic specimens belonging to all the various types of mammal found in a single country." Probably?!?!.

Thanks to Harriet Baskas, travel journalist and Stuck at the Airport blogger, for alerting me to this, well, obscure holiday.