Angel Island State Park
Tiburon, California
You can’t get any more off the beaten path than Angel Island State Park since it’s on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. To get there you have to take a ferry from San Francisco or Tiburon—unless you happen to have your own boat. But the challenge to getting there is more than made up for by the magnificent views offered in every direction, which include the Golden Gate and Bay bridges and the San Francisco skyline. From 1910-1940 the processed hundreds of thousands of immigrants, mostly from China, and is often called “the Ellis Island of the West.” It is now a museum you can tour. The hilly island is also a fantastic place to hike, bicycle and picnic, with every turn of a corner revealing incredible panoramas, particularly from its highest point: 788-foot-high Mount Livermore.