Yellow Stone National Park, Wyoming

This is the grandmother of nature-loving vacation destinations. As such, expect to have to book months in advance to camp in the park and to share the great outdoors with lots of other enthusiasts, especially during the summer months. Still, planning and company are a small price to pay for the wonder of Old Faithful.

<div style="background-color: none transparent;"><a href="http://www.rsspump.com/?web_widget/rss_ticker/news_widget" title="News Widget">News Widget</a></div>

Santa Rosa County, Florida

What makes Santa Rosa such a treat for nature lovers is the variety of scenery available. You can spend a day lounging on the white beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, or head inland for canoeing and kayaking down the Blackwater River, one of the purest sand bottom rivers in the world.

Lake Mead, Nevada

The Lake Mead National Recreational Area is just a few miles outside of Boulder City, Nevada and backs up to the famous Hoover Dam. Bring your RV or a tent and enjoy fishing, boating, and hiking around the lake man made when they dammed the raging waters of the Colorado River. While you're in the neighborhood, take some time to explore Black Canyon on the other side of the dam.

Germany dos and don’ts

Do
Shake hands when you’re introduced to someone – it’s impolite not to.
Say Prost! (cheers!) before you sip your beer – and look your drinking buddy in the eye when you say it.
Feel free to have serious discussions in social settings – Germans like talking politics and philosophy. They don’t relish idle chit-chat or small talk.
Say your name at the beginning of a phone call, even if it’s followed by ‘do you speak English?’
Address people with the formal ‘you’ (Sie). If the familiar ‘you’ (Du) is cool, they’ll let you know.
Hit the ATM – cash rules in Germany and many restaurants don’t take credit cards.


Don’t
Be late – everyone else will be on time.
Send a German friend lilies – they’re for funerals. Carnations symbolise mourning, too.
Dig into that Sauerkraut before your host says ‘Guten Appetit’ (good appetite).
Stroll in the bike lane. You’ll get bruised or yelled at (or both). It’s marked red for a reason.
Jaywalk. Nobody else does, and you might get fined.
Drink yourself into a stumbling fool. We know the beer goes down easy, but public drunkenness is frowned upon.

Shugborough inscription

Look from afar at the 18th-century Shepherd's Monument in Staffordshire, England, and you might take it as nothing more than a sculpted re-creation of Nicolas Poussin's famous painting, “Arcadian Shepherds.” Look closer, though, and you'll notice a curious sequence of letters: DOUOSVAVVM — a code that has eluded decipherment for over 250 years.

Though the identity of the code carver remains a mystery, some have speculated that the code could be a clue left behind by the Knights Templar about the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

Many of the world's greatest minds have tried to crack the code and failed, including Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin.

Phaistos Disc

The mystery of the Phaistos Disc is a story that sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. Discovered by Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in 1908 in the Minoan palace-site of Phaistos, the disc is made of fired clay and contains mysterious symbols that may represent an unknown form of hieroglyphics. It is believed that it was designed sometime in the second millennium BC.

Some scholars believe that the hieroglyphs resemble symbols of Linear A and Linear B, scripts once used in ancient Crete. The only problem? Linear A also eludes decipherment.

Today the disc remains one of the most famous puzzles of archaeology.

Beale Ciphers

The Beale Ciphers are a set of three ciphertexts that supposedly reveal the location of one of the grandest buried treasures in U.S. history: thousands of pounds of gold, silver and jewels. The treasure was originally obtained by a mysterious man named Thomas Jefferson Beale in 1818 while prospecting in Colorado.

Of the three ciphertexts, only the second one has been cracked. Interestingly, the U.S. Declaration of Independence turned out to be the key — a curious fact given that Beale shares his name with the author of the Declaration of Independence.

The cracked text does reveal the county where the treasure was buried: Bedford County, Va., but its exact location is likely encrypted in one of the other uncracked ciphers. To this day, treasure hunters scour the Bedford County hillsides digging (often illegally) for the loot.