Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. In 2016, while in between jobs, I did a whole tour of East Africa. While there were a lot of tourists there, the Serengeti is so vast it did not feel crowded (unlike some US national parks). It’s really hard to describe the feeling of seeing lions, and cheetahs, and elephants, and giraffes, and a whole bunch of other animals I’d previously only seen in zoos if at all, out roaming the wild, in their native habitat. And I didn’t just see them laying around, but I actually got to witness a pack of lions hunting their prey. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t watching a nature documentary on TV, but I was actually seeing it all in person.
The Amtrak California Zephyr. Last year I took the train from Sacramento all the way to Chicago, in a sleeper car. They say it’s Amtrak’s most scenic route, and I wholeheartedly agree (Although the Coast Starlight comes close). There’s spectacular scenery at every turn. The Sierra Nevadas and Donner Lake, the red rocks of Utah, the Colorado River, Glenwood Canyon, and the Rocky Mountain vistas. Even riding the train through the farmland of Iowa and Illinois, while not as spectacular as the rest, still had a certain relaxing charm to it. And the whole experience of riding in the sleeper car and eating meals in the dining car. Amtrak has some really good food on the western routes. I documented the experience in this thread. And so did @Mama_Zappa, who coincidentally was traveling the same route one day ahead of me.