Nice story! I’ve mentioned before that I met Dave Brubeck in Moscow, USSR, when I was working security for the Reagan Summit in '88. Had a nice conversation with the man, who was gracious and chatty with a 41 year old fanboy. 
On the same trip as the ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ visit, I went the Berlin Olympic Stadium where Hitler hoped to gloat in 1936.
The place was virtually empty and completely still. Even so, when I stood in Hitler’s box I could swear I heard the crowds roaring. An eerie experience for a teenager of Untermenschen roots.
Dang! Due to confidentiality, I can’t use the actual person’s name. Think…a major financial company named for the real-life person who founded it.
Anyway, I’ve been in his basement. As a matter of fact, I’ve been in the basement of two of his (many) houses.
Doing fall cleaning today and emptied out the coffee mug cabinet, which reminded me of a couple of stops that most here haven’t been to:
Buckshot Betty’s, a cafe just across the border in YT, Canada.
Chicken, AK, on the Taylor Highway heading up to the Poker Creek border crossing, which I’ve also been to. Now there’s a rough road; possibly the worst in Alaska.
Dawson City, home to the Klondike gold rush, perched on the Yukon River, which we crossed by ferry. Also went to a vintage gold dredge on the Kondike River.
Scratch this one. Someone on my wife’s Facebook feed just posted a picture from here.
Sorry I’m a little late to the game.
I’ve been in:
[ul]
[li]The palatial home of a conservative U. S. billionaire (no, not that one).[/li]
[li]The projection booths of at least a dozen IMAX theaters, including the one at the National Air and Space Museum, where I used to work.[/li]
[li]Oak Ridge National Laboratory, including the X-10 reactor, the first nuclear reactor after Fermi’s original “pile” in Chicago; the immense K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant; and the Y-12 Isotope Separation Plant. The first of these is occasionally open to the public, but the last two are not, AFAIK. [/li]
[li]The B Reactor, the world’s first plutonium production reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington state. [/li](I visited Oak Ridge and Hanford while assisting with a Smithsonian research program on the Manhattan Project.)
[li]The cockpit of the B-29 Enola Gay, and sat in the bombardier’s seat.[/li][li] The cockpit of an Air New Zealand 767 during a landing. [/li][li] Michael Andretti’s Champ Car (sitting still). [/li][li] The two-seat IndyCar racecar, running two laps around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (This one anyone can do if you pony up the bucks, so not as exclusive as the other items on this list.) [/li][/ul]
Was Mario driving you around Indy?
I have been to the very top of the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower in Baltimore.
No, Davey Hamilton.
But I have met Mario, got a picture with him, and got his autographs on the photo of us, his book, and the poster of the IMAX film he starred in, Super Speedway.
Nice, all around. Davey Hamilton isn’t quite a Mario, but doing two laps around the brickyard has to be an experience.
I would love to have seen the big, blue rotating Bromo bottle that was up there until 1936.
Am envious about your backpacking Asia. I’ve done a little. There’s a mountainous region near lake Biwa that was beautiful…piney forest, reached by an old, slow train. Really romantic, IMO.
I’ve not been to the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but I have been to the Tsukiji Fish Market…
Davey was very nice and the ride was incredible. Here’s what I wrote in a previous thread:
Awesome!! Thanks for that description, I’m sporting a broad smile as I read that.
ETA: when next I visit Indy I’ll have to check that out!
I climbed up the inside tunnel to the burial chamber at the top of Cheops. I don’t recommend it if you’re claustrophobic. It’s also a big letdown, as there is nothing there to tell you about the site. I also visited King Tut’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, which is another letdown, as it’s just a hole in the ground, again with no informational plaques or the like.
I once crawled down to the end of a 21-inch diameter torpedo tube of a submerged nuclear submarine.
Backstory: after a practice test-fire of a torpedo tube (called a “water slug” because you shoot off a slug of seawater instead of a torpedo), someone has to crawl down the tube and wipe off all of the seawater from the interior. You wipe off the seawater going down, and apply machine oil to all exposed metal on the way out. This is to prevent corrosion of the tube interior.
The tube is about 20 feet long, though, and it gets pretty lonely, cold, and claustrophobic at the far end of the steel tube. I was reassured that nobody would haze me by closing the hatch behind me, though (which I’m sure used to to happen), because doing so was now an offense that would be punished by a court-martial. (I’m sure someone had freaked out in the past when it was done to them, not to mention what would happen if someone latched the breech door and then cycled the firing mechanism. :eek:)
So anyway, I climbed in and crawled down the tube with a bunch of industrial Kimwipes in one hand, and an oil can in the other, along with a MAGLITE flashlight clamped in my teeth. It was very tight quarters – my elbows kept banging into the sides of the tube. I finally got to the far end of the tube, with nothing between me and the ocean deep but a single remotely operated muzzle door that opened out into the ocean…and found water leaking in. :eek: It was a fairly steady stream into a drain at the end of the tube. I dutifully reported this, saying, “Hey, there’s water leaking in down here at the end. Is that supposed to be happening?” Everyone back in the torpedo room started hollering that we were all going to die. :dubious: It turns out that the leak was perfectly normal for the depth we were at. 
I’ve also been in the battery well of a submerged submarine for battery charge line-up inspections (more times than I can count). I’ve laid on the reel of an antenna in a tight space behind the main ship’s control panel, then rolled forward until I was upside-down supporting my weight with my hands (again with the MAGLITE flashlight clamped in my teeth) to check seawater valve positions behind the panel. (These verifications are all required to be double-checked by an officer before a submarine submerges.) I’ve also inspected a submarine’s ballast tanks in drydock – I always imagined they’d be big and empty. Instead, they’re tight and cramped like everything else on a submarine.
All in all…a submarine is no place for someone who’s claustrophobic. 
Who hasn’t? This thread is supposed to be about places most other people ***haven’t ***been. We’ve ALL done that! Sheesh!
What, only once?
If we’re just talking places, I’ve done this as well, except we were in the four seater that just went 60 miles an hour, which was the bargain basement version of what you can do at Indy. Still, it was kind of cool.
But have you spent a night sleeping on the floor of the bar of the ferry in transit between North Sydney, Nova Scotia, and Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland?