Stressful assignment, nagging family member, that one chore that just won’t go away, even after you’ve just finished it: Everyone, at some point, needs to get away. Far away. But we can’t do that right now. Right now, home is the safest place to be. Even though we’re isolated from one another, somehow the most isolated, remote locations around seem somehow, cruelly, all the more seductive. The farther you are from everything, the less you have to worry about anything.

From the tiniest church in the world, to a solitary Douglas fir in Canada, to temples perched in seemingly impossible places, here are some sites that might represent loneliness, but at this moment represent that kind of escape that many of us are looking for—and looking forward to.