Rode that a couple of times myself - once before the accident and once after. After the accident they switched from having the driver narrate the tour to having a separate driver. I think covid had more to do with it folding than the accident, because they were still doing pretty brisk business when they reopened afterward.
I grew up just on the other side of the river from Sea World and saw the orca shows often. It’s a shame they don’t do them anymore, but it’s better for the animals. Honestly, the penguin exhibit was my favorite part of the place.
I was awestruck by Mission To Mars when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure that one went away decades ago.
Quite a few of the places on the Vegas Strip that I’ve visited in the past are gone now. The Riviera was demolished to make way for the convention center. The Stardust is still an empty lot that I think they use for outdoor festivals. They’re building a baseball park for the A’s where the Tropicana used to be. The Siegfried & Roy dolphin & tiger habitat at the Mirage was shut down when the Mirage was turned into the Hard Rock. Frankly, it’s amazing that Circus Circus still exists, because the Strip has constantly been in flux for its entire existence and most of the golden age resorts have long vanished, but it just sits there unchanging, this bizarre relic of a time when Vegas meant dodgy motor courts and neon signs and 99-cent shrimp cocktails.
In 2014 I was in the Los Angeles area and decided to drive down to the Queen Mary in Long Beach. When I got there, somehow I didn’t visit the ship itself (it was near closing time, I think), but there was an old Soviet submarine nearby (advertised as the Scorpion), and tickets to that were cheap. So in I went.
It was interesting to imagine those 15-20 minutes stretching into months without sunlight or fresh air in this cramped space. Things were generally pretty run down and decorated in a tacky way for a Western audience, with a fake Russian guy telling bad jokes in a loop over the loudspeakers. The captain’s tiny cabin was behind glass but its bulb had burned out, etc. The periscope worked! On the way out, the souvenir shop looked more like a warehouse of mysterious spare parts.
Later I found out that the sub had had a rat infestation and some episodes of flooding. They stopped admitting people on board the following year.
I visited Marineland in Saint Augustine in about 1993. I also got to be part of the dolphin show! i got to hold up fish for them to grab. (It was a very low crowd day and I was the first one they asked who said yes.)
Sounds like the U-505 in Chicago! It’s no longer in the water and they’ve made modifications to make it easier for small tour groups to move around inside it, but it’s still very small and cramped. It’s been 70 years since it last went to sea and the engine room STILL reeks of diesel. Hard to imagine 60 men packed in there for months at a time with no showers. The ship’s kitchen was so tiny that having to cook three meals a day in there for that many people ought to have earned you a medal in and of itself.
The 3 Gorges on the Yangzi River. The Gorges was terrifying because they were very narrow and the Yangzi is a mighty fast flowing river. Once the Gezhouba Dam was completed and water level rose behind the dam, then the gorges were not as narrow and not overly spectacular.
I suppose that was the downtown store. I sure don’t remember that, but then we never went downtown any more once Lloyd Center opened.
One place we used to go in the summer was Jantzen Beach park, which, IIRC, had amusement rides and other amusement park stuff like food booths.. I think as kids we used to go there on the bus during the summer, you could enjoy the beach part without going on the rides. It wasn’t a tourist attraction that brought people in from other cities or states, just for us locals.
I saw that at the science museum in Seattle when I was a kid. I remembered it well. I was disappointed when it went away, and then pleasantly surprised when I moved to Boston and found it at the Museum of Science here.
At some point I searched the web and found out more about it. Turns out there are multiple copies, and I saw two different ones. If you want to get nostalgic, it’s still on display in Boston, and another copy (according to Wikipedia) in Dearborn, Michigan.
The USS North Carolina in Wilmington, NC, used to have a night time show where they would illuminate parts of the ship as they told the story of her torpedoing in WWII. Her guns would shoot flame as they were deployed and the show culminated with a big explosion as she took a torpedo (the resident alligator beat a hasty retreat before the BOOM!).
The show doesn’t play anymore — I was informed by a fellow Doper that residential development in the area was probably the culprit.
I remember when the Science Centre opened in 1969. Promotional materials emphasized how hands-on the exhibits were, that it was not a traditional museum, and “please touch” meant exactly that. It was the destination of many school field trips.
Even outside of school, it was worth visiting. For some years in the early 1980s, it ran its Friday Night Film Festival in summers, where for something extremely reasonable (maybe $1), you could watch a film. There would be a monthly theme, so May might be concert films, June might be science-fiction, July might be rom-coms, and so on. There was always a brief talk from a film critic before the film, and once or twice, the director of the film of the evening would introduce it. My then-girlfriend and I, being poor students, saw Friday night films at the Science Centre as a great opportunity for a date that wouldn’t break the bank; and for a movie and pizza afterwards, it fit well within our budgets.
I was last there in 2019. I was in Toronto for a conference, and the venue wasn’t far from the Science Centre, so I used the “spare tourist time” built into the conference schedule to pay it another visit. It had changed a lot, but was just as fun and interesting as I remembered. Sad to hear that it has closed.
Thought of another one. It wasn’t exactly touristy, though it would attract some tourists: Greenwood Raceway in Toronto. A horse race track. In spring and fall, it had a lot of night racing on weekdays, so I could get there after work. I was, at some point, everywhere there, from the cheap seats to the dining room with the dress code. It was an unusual track, and it took me a while to figure out how to play it. I finally did—and then they closed it. The site is now a housing development.
I just thought of another one, although I don’t know if it counts as a touristy thing: The Hippo Restaurant in San Francisco had all kinds of wild hamburgers. The only ones I remember are a hamburger sundae, complete with ice cream and hot fudge (or coulda been chocolate sauce), and a peanut butter burger. My 7th grade English teacher took a field trip to San Francisco every year and brought the class to Hippo. It’s been gone for probably 30 years or more.
The two things I remember most fondly about the Ontario Science Center:
– They were one of the few places to do “conversation pits” right. Conversation pits in an average home are more of an obstruction to interaction than an inducement since they are only more useful than regular chairs when there is a legitimate party going on which even the most outgoing person doesn’t have happening more than once a week or so. Whereas there were several conversation pit type places in the Ontario Science Center that worked out well, since large groups could gather there and take full advantage of the pits combination of intimacy and openness.
– It had the biggest and longest acoustic mirror I’ve ever seen in person. One of the halls was as big as the average convention hall, i.e. it would take a minute or so to walk from one end to another. And they put gigantic reflective mirrors on both ends of the hall and had a display where you could stand next to both mirrors and talk to each other from hundreds of feet away like you were right next to each other.
I’m always surprised if something I saw as a kid that seemed like it couldn’t afford to sustain itself is somehow still thriving today. For example, the Te Anau Trout Observatory, which when I saw it in the late 70s was basically a tiny pond with a glass observation deck down some dank stairs.
Anyways, the one touristy thing that I remember which has disappeared is a picturesque valley that was flooded for the sake of a Hydroelectric Dam. Orchards, rock formations, raging rapids, bridges, 19th century gold mining huts. It was incredible, but now all buried.
Gosh yes. Great choice. I’d completely forgotten about Vegas as one big Tourist Trap.
I lived there roughly 1984-1994. I hardly recognize the place now. Fremont Street remains mostly recognizable, but the Strip today is utterly different.
And yes, Circus Circus somehow perseveres despite all odds. The last bastion of trailer trash Vegas.
In Mexico, the Pre-Columbian archaeology sites — Mayan, Aztec, Zapotec, etc. — are still there, but you can no longer climb around on as many of the great structures (pyramids, etc.) as you could before around 2005.
As a child, my parents would take me to a game at the Kingdome and we’d stop at the Iron Horse restaurant, which delivered food on model trains, until it closed in 1999, followed by the imploding of the Kingdome in 2000.
I remember riding the Bubbleator to the rabbit warren of shops in the basement.
A few years ago we attempted to tour the Grand Coulee dam, but missed the start time. When we talked to the person at the museum, we found out that the tour doesn’t go into the dam, like it used to. So I’ve been in part of the Grand Coulee dam that is now restricted.
I just want to reiterate that Action Park is still there. It’s not called Action Park any more and some of the attractions are different, but the waterpark is still there - including most if not all of the attractions that have killed people*. The most noticeable difference is that the Alpine Slide has been replaced with the Alpine Coaster. Motor World is also gone (replaced by a zipline park).
(okay, the Alpine Slide killed one person, but it was an employee riding it at night after the park closed)