Roller Coaster in Your Backyard: The ​Pembles (Will Pemble/The CoasterDad Project) Forget backyard slides—these parents have mastered the great outdoors. Get ready to be jealous. We found five of the most amazing homemade playgrounds in the country. Will Pemble wanted to teach his son about engineering, physics and of course—fun! Pemble decided to build a roller coaster in his backyard with his 10-year-old son, Lyle. (MORE:World's Most Bizarre Houses) After about a year of planning and building, the Pemble family...

Tunquen, Valparaiso, Chile Architects designed the Elizabeth Home in Chile to block the winds off the cliff from the vegetation. (Photo: Nico Saieh) Florida is typically the place that comes to mind when Americans talk about retirement. But one home that's attracting retirees is 4,000 miles away from the Sunshine state. The Elizabeth House, named for its original owner, is a cliffside home on Chile's Pacific Coast which provides unspoiled views of the water and the landscape. The weather in...

Laguna Beach, California The breath-taking Villa Rockledge on a cliff along the Pacific Ocean. (Courtesy: Zillow) Wake up to the sounds of Pacific Ocean lapping outside your window. Eat brunch with the windows wide open, as cool, fresh sea air floats around you. This could be your reality if you bid on the impressive, historic Villa Rockledge. This prized Laguna Beach, California, home is on the market for a cool $30 million. The home was designed and built from 1919...

1. Japanese Garden: Portland, Oregon As summer brings more comfortable weather and longer hours of sunlight, it's the perfect time to immerse yourself and your family in some of America's most beautiful gardens. While many botanical gardens and conservancies have plots dedicated to Japanese horticulture, Portland's Japanese Garden considers itself one of the most authentic outside of Japan. The 5.5-acre grounds are divided into five distinct styles designed to bring visitors closer to the peace, harmony and tranquility of nature....

A San Diego area woman who found a camera full of wedding and honeymoon photos on the beach is closer to reconnecting the memories with the mystery couple on the photos. Marian Rogers found the camera along nearby Cardiff State Beach in September 2012. The photos were dated June 2012, and one picture showed names written in stones: Dylan and Lauren. She posted signs as well as an ad on Craigslist, trying to find the people in the pictures. (MORE:...

With summer approaching, we can look forward to warmer weather and more time outside in the sun. That means it’s time to take the sunglasses out — and it’s not just people who love them. Sunglasses are by far not the worst things people make their pets wear. They’re not dangerous, they don’t hinder movement and they might actually protect their eyes. According to the American Optometric Association, exposure to the sun’s UV radiation can cause photokeratitis — a “sunburn...

Floating Island City Concept There's only so much land on earth that we can develop for residential purposes. Should humanity's next great settlement have roots in the water? ATDesignOffice, an architecture and design firm based in London, has proposed building a Floating City Island. Think of it as the next big, sustainable metropolis— just based on water instead of land. "The project offered an opportunity to develop a new urban nucleus of world-class residential, commercial and cultural facilities," the designers...

Pictured is Trudy Price, who turned 100 years old on Monday. (AP Photo/J.D. Pooley) The long Ohio winter took its toll on Trudy Price, a Bowling Green resident who had a special request for her 100th birthday on Monday. She just wanted to get outside and cut the grass again. Six months of snow and brutal cold in the Midwest likely left many people longing for the smell of fresh-cut grass and the feeling of a warm breeze, but for...

Demolition crews set fire to a luxury home teetering precariously along a crumbling cliffside, destroying it before the home can collapse into the lake more than 75 feet below. The Hill County Sheriff's Office decided to demolish the endangered luxury cliffside home in Whitney, Texas, after the home's owners, Robert and Denise Webb, decided that would be the best course of action. The Webbs were forced to evacuate and abandoned the home a few weeks ago after the home and...

A baby swims underwater at 'London Baby Swim' in London on June 11, 2010. (Phil Shaw/Barcroft Media/Getty Images) Throwing a baby into a pool and hoping for the best might seem like the worst thing you can do. But, according to a New York Times report, the act of "self-rescue" has been taught to hundreds of thousands of infants since the 1960s, when Harvey Barnett began the program following the drowning of a neighbor's child. Nearly 300,000 babies have been...

Two U.S. colleges are awaiting the bloom of corpse flowers, a rare plant with the creepy nickname and an unforgettable — some would say putrid —smell. The corpse flower at Michigan State University is expected to bloom this week. (Michigan State University) Horticulture departments at both Michigan State University in East Lansing, and Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, are inviting visitors to get a glimpse —and a whiff —of the rare Titan arum, also known as the corpse...

(Thinkstock/JupiterImages) If you kick-start your day with a slug of caffeine, you might consider spraying some on your vegetable garden. Yes, it’s possible for people to overdose on caffeine, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, but scientists say lesser concentrations are lethal to insects, slugs and other interlopers. A USDA study published in the journal Nature found weak caffeine solutions, sprayed on plant leaves or the dirt around them, either killed or drove off snails and slugs. What’s...

(Image courtesy of San Alfonso del Mar) Florida's neighborhoods might be dotted with backyard pools, but one company has much bigger plans for the Sunshine State. Crystal Lagoons Corp. and the Metro Development Grouphave agreed to build megapools in four planned communities in Florida, according to the Tampa Bay Times. These self-cleaning pools will span the length of 15 football fields– acres of pools that resemble a small beach. The pools, which will resemble the one at Chile's San Alfonso...