7. Did You Know America Has its Own Stonehenge?
England doesn’t have the cornerstone on mysterious rocks. There’s a perplexing man-made stone arrangement in America’s New England too. The Merrimack Valley region of New Hampshire has a collection of free-standing rocks, cairns, caves and chambers estimated to be more than 7,000 years old. Nobody knows who built this archeological site or why. Like the Stonehenge in Wiltshire, some of these stones are in astronomical alignment. Whoever built them had some pretty sophisticated understanding of the stars. Theories of origin have involved the Celts, Irish monks or Native Americans, but the mystery remains unsolved. The Georgia Guidestones, a mysterious granite monument in Elbert County, are also sometimes referred to as America’s Stonehenge. They were erected in 1979, but nobody knows who commissioned the stone structure with the multilingual message. A few millennia from now, this might be as big a tourist draw as England’s Stonehenge.
8. Experience Bavaria’s Oktoberfest in Leavenworth, Washington
No need to go all the way to Munich if you’re hankering for some Bavarian brews. Just head to Leavenworth, Washington for the next best thing to the real Oktoberfest. The small town was modeled after a German village, complete with the Cascade Mountains as a substitute for the Alps. Each October it hosts a lively Oktoberfest celebration, featuring keg tapping, parades, oompah music, lederhosen and dirndl. It’s a fun celebration of German heritage right in the USA.
