Just wait until you are stuck in traffic behind one.
This will initially sound weird, but the Grand Canyon. Yes, we all see the pictures and the films and such showing how big it is, but until you’re standing on the rim looking out it really doesn’t impress you just how HUGE it really is.
Okay okay. I meant TALL. Sheesh.
Yepper, they are indeed huge. There’s a lot of windmills hereabouts, and a lot of windmill construction, so I’m seeing the trucks more and more frequently. There is actually a huge stack of “windmill parts”, blades and the base sections, in a railway yard near a road I drive on to go to work. You think one blade is big, try a stack of 40 or so.
We have a Saint, but she’s on the small side, only about 125 pounds. That still makes her heavier than our 11-year-old daughter. And she does have a head like a big ol’ bear. But she’s so so sweet and gentle. Owning a Saint skews your perspective in the other direction: my father-in-law’s 75-pound golden retriever seems tiny to us when we visit.
Once, when we were driving past one that was spinning at a good clip, I did some mental math, based on how long I figured the blades were (having seen them on the ground). That gives you the radius of the circle, which you double and multiply times pi to get the circumference. So traveling that distance in say three seconds, more multiplying…anyway, I figured that, roughly, the tips of the blades were moving about 94 miles per hour. Not as fast as the one in the link, but still impressive.
If you really want to know how big the Grand Canyon is, try hiking from one side to the other.
The Grand Canyon for me is too big to see. I feel like my brain just sort of says “Yep, that’s pretty big” but without really allowing me to understand the scale of it. I may, however, just be very weird.
Not all locomotives are as big as the Canadian Pacific 5468 which you saw in that museum. Especially in movies, because there aren’t many functional steam locomotives available to use as movie props, and most of them are on the small side.
Also, American/Canadian locomotives were bigger than European locomotives - the rail width (gauge) is the same, but the loading gauge (max size of the train) is bigger, so the locomotives could be wider and taller.
A different breed, but along those same lines: when our lab mix was doing obedience training, the trainer had a pet Irish Wolfhound. I thought I had seen some big dogs in my time, but the size of that guy was astonishing.
I had no idea until recently how big a draft mule can get (yes, I’m sure the lady with him isn’t so big, but still). I guess it makes sense if you’re going to be bred to pull stuff.
This. No picture can prepare you for standing on the rim. And like RA mentions, hiking rim to rim really brings it home. North to south in one day.
My SO and I reacted the same way. “Hmm, let’s make the biggest bomb we can manage, strap a couple of people on top, and light the fuse!”
The command module for Apollo 11 is 10’7" by 12’10", and weighs 9130 lb.
The Saturn V stood 363’ tall and weighed 6,540,000 lb.
That was kind of my impression as well. I couldn’t really get an appreciation of it just by looking from the rim; had to go down and back up, get all my senses involved, and feel what it did to me.
One day is impressive, I don’t think I could have managed that. I did south to north (which gains 1000’ in elevation) in two days. Finished around midnight and could barely walk for the next ten days.
When Daisy was still a puppy, I took her to obedience classes. We were in the same class as a Leonberger and a bloodhound. The trainer called us her “giant dog” class.
Similarly, Clydesdales.
Horses are big. Clydesdales are huge.
The cross country jumps at the Kentucky Horse Park. If you are behind the line as an observer, they are big jumps. But I had the chance once to walk the course, and those things are intimidating! I am 5’6" and could walk UNDER some of them, plus they are not the lightweight show jumps that will come apart if you hit one. They are made of LOGS. Imagine for a moment galloping full speed- 30-40 MPH- on a horse and clearing those things. No. Thank. You.
Due to an unlikely series of events, mizPullin actually got to hold Challenger on her arm. (Trained bald eagle. Link is video of the bird at a game. 1:00 mark for closeup of the bird’s size)
She said it’s shocking both how large the bird is, and how little it weighs.
My entry to the thread would be most airplanes. Due to my job(s), I frequently get to walk up to them on a ramp, and even small fighters seem huge when you’re up next to them. Ditto for average sized airliners, like a 737.
Segovia’s acqueduct. The pictures always show the same part because the rest is either hidden from a long-distance view by buildings, up the hills or both.
Re: The Grand Canyon
We flew over it going to Vegas one time and you can really appreciate its size from that far above it, being able to see just how long the damn thing is.
Ditto for the Grand Canyon.
But a little northeast, up the Colorado River, is the Glen Canyon dam. Standing at the base of the dam, looking up at it, it’s HUGE!!!