The only thing about Death Valley that surprised me, other than the vividness of the colors in those places where it is colored, which can’t be matched by pictures, is the slot canyons that are caused by the mountains rising too quickly for erosion to cause the valleys to form their classical shape. Since it’s relatively lacking in sandstone, it doesn’t look like there will be slot canyons.
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.
I’ve had a lot of great travel experiences. I’m trying to think of the ones that totally blew me away. There’s the Ulmer Münster. When construction started in 1377, it was planned to be a Catholic cathedral. Ulm convereted to Protestanism in 1531. It might have been the tallest building in the world except the Washington Monument was completed first.
For a couple of euros, I climbed almost to the top of the steeple. From the bottom looking up, some of the carvings look like finely detailed carvings. When you get up there, they’re as big around as your waist. The last part of the climb is an open lattice of incredible gothic stonework. It’s not for the faint of heart. It took 513 years to build, and it all shows; the scale and workmanship are spectacular.
I went to the Grand Canyon once, and it was just too much to take in. I knew I couldn’t really appreciate it from the rim. So a few years later I hiked across it. I remember it for the views and for the toll it took on my body; I could barely walk for a week.
It may not be a tourist attraction in itself, but I remember being blown away by the Brooklyn Bridge. I was in New York City with a friend who was a civil engineer, and what did he want to see? Not museums and Times Square and the Empire State Building, but the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had studied at engineering school.
We drove across it from Manhattan, and found a place to park in Brooklyn. Then we walked across the bridge back into Manhattan. All the while, he was pointing out this and that, he explained about how the caissons were sunk and the foundations dug, he explained about how the bridge contained so many fail-safes—such as these (he pointed)—that with proper maintenance, the bridge could conceivably last forever.
When we got to Manhattan, we walked up and got a bite in Little Italy, then we headed back. The return trip into Brooklyn was full of, “Oh, I forgot, see this here …” It was fascinating; it was like getting a guided tour of Brooklyn Bridge, both ways.
I suppose that to New Yorkers, the Brooklyn Bridge is just another bridge, and I guess it would have been to me too, except for my civil engineering friend’s knowledge of it. I didn’t mind passing on the museums and Times Square at all, if I got to learn that much about Brooklyn Bridge. I sure wasn’t disappointed!
If someone is going as far as east Africa and has limited time, I’d suggest Ngorongoro crater. This is a huge caldera, about 13 miles across, and the floor of it is absolutely teeming with wildlife. Or at least it was when I visited 36 years ago. Hopefully little has changed since then.
If someone has enough time, then of course both Ngorongoro and Serengeti would be worthy.
And as we learn from The Gilded Age, after her father-in-law died, and her husband was disabled by caisson disease (the bends), for ten years Emily Roebling, a trained engineer, secretly did much of the work needed to finish the bridge, with assistance from her husband.
Well y’all are pretty fancy but, in our wandering around the USA in our RV we’ve seen quite a bit.We’ve visited every state but Alaska and that’s on for next year. I’m totally impressed with what we have to offer here. One of our more pleasant surprises was Ruby Falls in Chattanooga, TN. Not only was I impressed with how this intrepid explorer found it, I was even more impressed that he talked his wife into going down and looking at it. When you see the original passage you’ll know what I mean. It’s beautiful.
I’m totally impressed that you drove your RV to Hawaii.
Yes, all of the temples and shrines in Japan were impressive.
I am pleased to be adding two that aren’t on this list:
- Azores. We had the golden opportunity to visit the Azores in 2022. We went to Sao Miguel. I cannot in words tell you how amazingly, utterly beautiful every corner of this island is. I don’t understand how people live in this much beauty and never seem to notice. I am going to include a couple of pics to showcase the stunning beauty but they don’t do it justice. You turn to the left and there is a gorgeous view of the ocean. To the right, and it’s crater lakes. We couldn’t get over it and I am totally in love.
- French Quarter in New Orleans. I have traveled the Contintental US a lot and it’s my favorite city. Never want to live there but people are amazingly nice and friendly. EVERYONE IS. Jazz coming from every corner, first time I learned to appreciate jazz (live jazz is completely different from recorded jazz). Good food, good weather (other than the floods). I never went during mardi gras so it’s never that crowded. And the French Quarter itself is different from every other city. So many cities are cookie cutter, a Bed Bath, a Target, a Walmart - the French Quarter is nothing like that. We went in 2016 and just went back in November.
Anybody can say Venice or whatnot, so I’m going to list:
The Grotto of the Redemption in Iowa…
I wanted to see it because I like The Straight Story, and there was a roadside grotto on US 151 in Dickeyville, WI that I would pass all the time. It was small and relatively unimpressive. So, although I still wanted to stop, I suspected the GotR would be more of the same… Nope, it’s HUGE. I may not be a religious person, but it was a fun stop. Trouble is, it isn’t on the way to anywhere I want to go, so I’ll probably never see it again.
The Bily Clocks/Dvořák Museum in Spillville, Iowa.
My dad drug me here when I was a surly teenager. What teenager want to truck all the way to Iowa for some clock museum? Well, I was wrong! It’s awesome. And as I get older I appreciate the Dvořák part. He spent the summer of 1893 there and wrote the New World Symphony. In Iowa. Go figure! I took my wife decades later and she loved it. Thanks dad!
It definitely exceeded my expectations ( which were along the lines of “another European cathedral, yawn”). It’s just a really impressive, unusual building.
I found Pompeii to be less than I expected; my understanding is that they have moved items to a separate museum and limited access to sites compared to how it was in the past, so maybe that’s why I expected more. Also, it was pretty crowded and unseasonably hot.
We wandered around Pompeii, really enjoying it, but a bit disappointed by the signs saying we were looking at reproductions and the originals were in the National Museum in Naples.
So we booked a room in Naples and visited the museum. It was worth the extra trip.
And while we enjoyed Pompeii, the Greek ruins in Paestum a bit further south were amazing. The fact that we had the place to ourselves helped for sure. It was just a way to pass the time one afternoon but it turned out to be one of the highlights of that trip.
I love to travel, and could put a lot of these. Here are two that lived up to my high expectations. Both are in London UK:
The Tower of London - it’s freaking 1000 year old castle in the middle of a major city! Just walking along the ramparts looking at the river blew me away. Plus there are the crown jewels, the men and women in historic garb, the historical events, the displays of armor…
Hampton Court Palace - Henry VIII’s favorite house. The gardens, the buildings, the interiors are all just beautiful. And the sense of history is amazing.
Very glad I went; highly recommend it; that being said, I don’t want to go again -
Auschwitz
Along those lines, here are two similar places that were extremely powerful:
- 9/11 Memorial and Museum in NYC
- The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL
I actually visited Ngorongoro Crater on the same trip; it’s right on the way to Serengeti anyway if you’re starting from Arusha, which is where most people would be starting from. I’ll just say that everything I said about Serengeti above also applies to Ngorongoro Crater. No, I don’t think it’s changed since you were there, at least as of 2016.
The Hiroshima museum. I was on a curated tour and didn’t have enough time and had to hustle at the end. Oh my that museum is so powerful.
To those I would add:
*Vietnam Memorial in DC
*Holocaust Museum in DC
*Ellis Island Immigration Museum
(also also gets you powerful Statute
of Liberty as a bonus)
It seems few if any posters here have mentioned an event that didn’t disappoint, as opposed to a place.
The first event that came to mind for me was a concert by Kiss I attended at the Capital Center in the DC area in the late 1970s. Let me be clear: I was not a fan of Kiss, but I had heard about their shows, and as an amateur theater person and fan of stagecraft, I had to go.
It was simply one of the most amazing spectacles I’ve ever seen. The back wall of the stage was the huge KISS logo, outlined in lights and strobes, and when the strobes flashed, the imprint of the logo was burned into your retinas for several seconds. The corners of the stage had flash pots that would set off huge columns of flames. I was maybe halfway back in the arena, but when the flash pots went off, you could feel the heat on your face.
The most memorable effect I recall was during one of Ace Frehley’s guitar solos. As he was furiously playing, the guitar started to smoke. He got the guitar feeding back and then hooked its head onto a wire, and it flew up, spotlighted, about 20 feet and hung there, spinning while still feeding back. He picked up another guitar, pointed the neck of it at the flying guitar, and a small firework charge flew from that guitar to the other guitar, which “exploded.” It was hysterical.
This is a video of the full concert at the Capital Center in 1977. At first I thought it might have been the show I was at, but scanning through it I saw a different effect with a static exploding guitar at stage level. (About 35:30.) Unless my memory has been playing serious tricks on me for almost fifty years, that’s not what I saw. So maybe a different tour, or a different performance in the same tour with a tamed down effect.
Thought of another one: The Grand Palace in Bangkok.