I’ve been inside the holding cell in the small police station in Penn Station in NYC.
How about the summit of Mt. Pelée on Martinique?
And I bet I’m the only Doper who’s been in Ayn Rand’s apartment.
Sorry, I’ve there a few times for several reasons back in the day.
I’ll offer up the rooftop of the Château de Versailles outside of Paris. I installed a radio or two there.
In the late 90s I went to a week long horseback tour of Monument Valley. It was only in business a couple of years since the operating costs were so high. We had a Navajo guide take us on an 6 hour excursion one of the days to a remote/restricted area of the valley that he said was inaccessible by foot, motor vehicle, or helicopter to see some Navajo burial grounds. He claimed very few outsiders had seen the place.
Yup.
Have also gone by and missed the tour, and also used to regularly buy their beer.
Has anyone else gone to the top of Mount Pryor in Montana to see the wild mustangs?
Regarding buildings, I’ve got a few unique ones.
I regularly have worked in the behind-the-scenes collection areas and exhibition fabrication shops at the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. I work mainly in the bird collections (which at the American Museum include one million specimens and take up five floors on one wing) but have also visited the paleontology collection at the National Museum with its shelves stacked with Triceratops skulls.
I visited the Human Anatomy Lab at Cornell Medical School in New York. My girlfriend at the time was in med schools and took me after hours to see the cadaver she was working on for class (in a room with about 20 other cadavers - all covered) being worked on by other students.
Lots of people have visited the Panama Canal, but I have been on a tour that included the control rooms for the locks as well as the machinery rooms that control them.
Awesome! Love it!
Monument Valley is one of my favorite places. On my bucket list is to sleep there and wake before the sunrise, before twilight begins, and sit there quietly with a hot cup of Joe and watch as twilight begins, the stars fade away (has to be a new moon!), and the colors slowly change before the sun rises.
I might even play the soundtrack of Dances With Wolves — the french horn piece.
Awesome.
I’ve been in the equivalent room at Ohio State. At the time, I was a Medical Illustration student.
I might have one.
Years ago I went on a medical mission to New Delhi. We did several day long clinics in dumps. Actual city dumps. Each dump had a hundreds of people living and working within it.
On the same trip I visited an inpatient heroin addiction facility. I hope no other dopers have been there.
If you make it to Deadhorse, take a polar bear plunge into the Arctic Ocean. A young couple did that when we were there. I’ve been to Nome and Kotz, also Point Barrow. In fact, Kotzebue was my first trip outside of Anchorage that involved flying. It was when I was about 18 and working for the Alaska Dept. of Aviation one summer as a surveyor.
My wife recently went on a special tour of the Smithsonian’s natural history archival collection, primarily the insect and plant collections (she’s a horticulturalist). They’ve got an unbelievable collection of things; she got to handle a plant sample that was collected on a Captain Cook expedition in the 1700s, and they had preserved plant samples from 100 years earlier than that. A visiting French horticulturalist remarked her jealousy that they didn’t have anything nearly that old.
Checkpoint Charlie.
Inside Lenin’s tomb.
In 1970, when I was 15. Influenced my worldview.
Cool, thanks.
(Have I mentioned this one already? Don’t recall…) I’ve been in a gold mine where they were pouring gold bricks. It was in the Philippines in the 1980s and we had connections to the mine’s executives. It was hot in there, with all the fires melting the gold. A recently-poured brick was on a table and our tour leader said if anyone can pick it up with one hand, they can have it. I was a young stud of 24 back then and I sure tried, but could not. Of course he was joking. I was able to pick it up with two hands. Most didn’t even try but I had to. That sucker was heavy, it was significantly larger than a standard adobe brick like you see in a red brick house - maybe 40% larger.
The gold still looked dirty and the guy said it still needed to be cured (or cleaned, something like that – I’m not familiar with the process). The brick looked like a dirty bronze thing, not with a shiny gold finish. Still it was pretty cool to do that.
This was with Benguet Mines (“Beng-GET”). It was quite an experience.
Anyone else been to Cape Bird, Antarctica? It’s a New Zealand field camp on the northern tip of Ross Island.
How about Snares Island? 200km south of New Zealand’s South Island. Landing on the island is by special research permit only.
Or the Murchison Mountains in Fiordland, New Zealand - the only place where the rare Takahe can be seen in the wild
Or
I crossed at Checkpoint Charlie in the 80s when I was with Diplomatic Security, on our way to the East Berlin embassy. East Berlin was a really grim place in those days.
Anyone else been to Mercury, Nevada - base of operations for the Nevada Test Site?
I was there as a kid, when my parents took us around Amish country. Mid-60s I think.
Staniel Cay, in the Bahamas. An island so small that the placemat in the only restaurant had a map with everyone’s homes on the island marked.
We flew into the small airstrip and stayed on a houseboat.
I’ve curled at the Border Curling Club in Stanstead, Quebec.
Few people, even in Stanstead, can say that.
Or were you looking for something more profound?
I thought of one more - the basement of the UN. Back when I was in high school my father worked there, and when I visited I pushed through some doors in the lower lobby, by the vending machines, marked Employees Only. Never got stopped. Back then, no security to mention.
Just offices down there, nothing very interesting.
Cool. I’ve curled at the Niagara Falls Curling Club, in Niagara Falls, Ontario. It’s the one and only one time I tried curling. We had the whole family, wife and I, our three adult kids and my daughter’s boyfriend. Fun times!
Similarly un-profound.