For me, most medium-sized cities are pretty disappointing. Dublin, Portland Oregon, places like that. that might just be personal preference though. Places like Portland seem to have all the inconvenience of a large city but few of the cultural pluses.
Las Vegas was a little bit boring.
Generally unimpressed with California. San Francisco seemed to revolve around tourism a bit too much – it seemed hollow, rather than a real city.
Japanese tourist sites are boring concreted monstrosities (thinking of places like Hakone). I also think Kyoto is horribly overrated. There are some nice places there, but hidden away amongst the concrete. In fact I’d put Japan as a whole. So much of the ‘historic’ sites are concrete reconstructions.
New York was a bit boring if you didn’t want to spend lots of money. I always tell European friends if they can only visit once city on the East Coast, make it Washington.
Admittedly I went only to the east coast, during winter, but damn that’s some boring shit right there. The fucking pubs shut at 7pm in most places! And the fish and chip shops! Parochial towns in England aren’t much fun in winter either, but at least we make an attempt at a nightlife.
That said, I liked Byron Bay, and Sydney was seven shades of awesome, and I’d love to see the outback and Perth and so on - but the majority of the few thousand miles I drove through Queensland and NSW was shockingly dull.
Most disappointing site? Stonehenge. When you see it on TV, you imagine this massive monument.
The whole thing would have fit in my yard at home.
Colonial Williamsburg is also awful. It was by far the most commercialized place I’ve ever visited. I hadn’t wanted to go in the first place (my parents wanted to spend Christmas there and insisted I come along), and having to shell out for every. single. thing. to do or see didn’t help matters. That was 4 days of my life I’ll never get back.
Well, I found Athens, Greece rather underwhelming.
Maybe it was the context - it was a whirlwind tour of several famous Mediterranean sites, including Rome, Tuscany, Capri, and Santorini. Rome was amazing, and the modern architecture seemed to fit seamlessly with the historic sites. Athens was not that. It was an enormous, kind of gritty city but did not in itself seem all that remarkable. Both the Acropolis and the Archeological Museum were amazing, but the city itself just didn’t fit together aesthetically the way Rome did.
Granted, I was only there for a single day. But it was the most anticipated site i visited and the ones that truly blew me away - Santorini, Greece and Dubrovnik, Croatia - were completely unexpected.
I felt the same way, but for a different reason. I’ve read the histories of the Alamo since I’ve been old enough to read. It’s one of the more facinating stories in US history. But, when I finally got around to visit it around 1990-91, it was a big letdown. It was more of a shrine to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas than anything else. Every exhibit had a posted pedigree of which member of the DRT provided it or sponsered it. There was little information about the 200 years of history before the battle or the strategic and political importance of the battle.
The Old Stone Fort museum in Nacogdoches had a similar problem the last time I was there (over 30 years ago).
Well, now I want to go to Timbuctoo! Booking my mud hut right now…
Can it be a state? I’d been to Florida a few times as a child and had the best times of my childhood there (admittedly, I WAS a child, I was with all my cousins, and a good day was having a picnic on the beach, not looking to score blow with supermodels in Miami). Was taken when in my teens to Disney World, which I can’t say I exactly hated. I have some good memories, but it was so big, so plastic, so middle-class. We spent so much time in the killing heat waiting in lines, nothing to buy but overpriced Disney stuff for souveniers, yadda yadda, I wouldn’t put myself out to go back. Being a nature loving tree-hugging sort, I had a much more enjoyable time walking the beach on Sanibel Island. (though traffic is gridlocked on the main roads and it takes 20 minutes to drive a mile away to a restaurant).
Ha, that reminds me of the first time my Mom took me to Ohio (I grew up in Michigan.) I was so disappointed that everybody spoke English. I was expecting something more like India.
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On-topic: I’ve been lucky in my international travels. I can’t think of anything that I expected to be awesome, but wasn’t.
Domestically, I’ve gone to some places that I didn’t have enough free time to make interesting. But I’ve come to the conclusion that most places have a character of their own, if you only figure out how to tap into it.
For example - When I was 25ish, I had a month long work trip to Europe. I got to see a little slice of Belgium, Gemany, France, and England. Most of the travel time was on weekends, and it’s hard to see anything great in a short period of time. And I was new to this ‘travel’ thing. So my time in London, for instance, was a few tours, and wandering around for a few hours…then hopping on a plane to finally go home.
A few years ago, a good friend of mine went to London. He and his girlfriend were hanging out at a local pub, befriended some people, and got invited back to their house for dinner. They stopped at another pub on the way…narrowly avoided a brawl…then did the dinner thing. They got to see a very different slice of London than I did.
-D/a
I was super excited about Troy, but actually due to the many settlements that were built one right on top of another over the years it was there, and the mishandling of the original excavations, there just wasn’t much there. A bunch of crumbling stone walls and a few marble columns & ceiling fragments. I’m very glad that was the first ancient ruined city we stopped at in Turkey, instead of the last.
Mind you, I’d still recommend it to anyone interested in antiquity cities who was headed to Turkey … but for the love of God, go there first, THEN to Pergamon, then Ephesus, then Aphrodisias. That way the whole journey is heading from “there’s nothing here anymore” to “holy CRAP that’s amazing!” with no backsliding along the way.
Cancun and similar resorts aren’t for people to visit historical sites. They’re for people from frigid climates to escape to for a week every winter. We have a ridiculously small population here but we manage to fill up charter planes and resorts with people escaping the winter.
Palenque. While the archeological site was something that I thought was impossibly beautiful in Mexico, the town itself was the most boring place I’d been to in my life. There was really no point in leaving the hotel, other than to get to the sites.
(Luckily San Cristobol de las Casas made up for it. I’d never heard of the place; it was just a good launchpad for getting to the Lagunas de Montebello. But what a fun, great place!)
That trip was the first clue in realizing that my idea of a good vacation (doing interesting things and seeing new places) is not the same as many other peoples’ idea of a good vacation (lying on the beach getting drunk). I grew up in California, so I had no frigid winters to escape from, but when I was in grad school in Michigan, I took my spring breaks in Colombia and the Philippines (the latter was a school trip, and paid for). Got away from the cold AND I did something interesting, all at the same time!
Hey, if you enjoy the lazing around sort of vacation, more power to you. It’s just not what I enjoy, and I was correspondingly massively disappointed with Cancun.
You wait on unending lines and when you finally get in it’s dark, the ceiling is high so you can’t see much detail of the frescoes, it’s hot, and there are these security guards going around loudly (and vainly) trying to keep people from taking photos.
The rest of Italy was great, especially Florence. But I’d skip the chapel, and most of Rome now that I think of it.
This wasn’t my experience at all. The ceiling is too high to see a lot of detail, but all the rest sounds completely different from my own trip. It was great.
