I'm a Culture Snob, Part 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.

During family trips we would sometimes go to the Santa Cruz Pier and hang out at the beach.  It's where my father taught me how to body surf and where my sister and I once decided it would be a good idea to pile all the kelp in one place.  My mother later totally punked us by telling us that the lifeguard had said we had to put it all back.  I have to give her credit, I totally fell for that one.

Every time we were driving around, everyone had a Mystery Spot bumper sticker on their car. 

To be fair, almost everyone also had a Wild 94.9 sticker as well, but for some reason these stuck out to us growing up, and we found ourselves joking about going there during our recent trip.  Suddenly we realized we didn't even know what the Mystery Spot was.  It turns out it is a gravity hill illusion.  Long story short, we keep our balance with our sight, and when the natural horizon appears skewed, it really messes with how our body processes things.  Okay, I know that sounds science-y and nerdy, but guys, it's really fun to walk into a shack on a hill and feel like you are in that tunnel at Universal Studios.

To steal a line from our tour guide, we all looked like a bunch of smooth criminals.  You walk up a super steep hill to the shack that slipped down the hill, and once you can't really see the natural horizon through the trees, then it starts becoming mysterious.  This video explains perfectly how you are being fooled into thinking there is anything weird about this spot, but it is still a 45 minutes tour of fun times and hilarious photos.

There are 2 different rooms in the shack, the first one just contains a table you can balance crazy from, and the doorway between the two rooms has a bar hanging from the ceiling that you can balance from.  The second room has a latter on the side you can walk up without touching anything, like this guy in the picture.

For $5 parking and $5 a person, there is no way you should NOT go.  It's 45 minutes of the kind of sensation you can't get anywhere else.  And at the end of the tour you can get the bumper sticker for free!  I ended up putting it in my cubicle at my real job, but got a license plate border in the gift shop.  I'm sure I'm the only one in Vegas who has that, and I could've care less, I had the best time there than anywhere else.  Just writing about it makes me want to go back.