I second Joe K’s nomination of Graceland, with an emphasis on the interior.
I have no sensibilities about furnishings, but even I thought it was tacky.
When I showed the pictures I took to my then-girlfriend, she said it looked like a New Jersey sewer worker’s house.
I heard the Mona Lisa is tucked away in a tight corner of the Louvre Museum. I hear you could easily miss it.
Statue of Liberty: After growing up in DC where the Washington Monument is 555 and 1/5 feet tall, I was shocked to see how unimpressive the Statue fo Liberty is when viewed from the Battery. I think the French sculptor underestimated just how tall to make the thing. I believe it’s about 250 ft tall, but you best get a close-up view!
Cape Cod: Boring! It’s all private beaches, I guess…very few scenic views until you reach the far end. But, IMHO, the drive ain’t worth the few good views!
MD’s Chesapeake Bay Lighthouses: Skip 'em! The neatest ones have been relocated to museums, and others accessible from land are behind fences. You have to pay for the tour to see 'em inside the gates. Ridiculous!
I forget the famous sculptor’s name, but I’m sure many of you have seen the Thinker, right? Well, the dude has a tiny museum dedicated to him in Philly along the Bejamin Franklin Pkwy. Anyway, you want Thinkers? We got large ones, small ones, medium ones…the guy couldn’t make enough! Like, he ought to have mass produced them for Wal-Mart! And, here I thought there was ONE “Thinker”. Sheesh! Give me a break! :rolleyes:
As I recall, I believe an art teacher once told me it’s the molds that are worth more than the end-product itself. And, here I thought a sculptor really took a chisel and sculpted something from nothing! Is nothing sacred anymore?
Mississippi River: I don’t know…maybe we were in a draught when I crossed the mighty river. It sure wasn’t impressive to me. I’ve seen bigger rivers back East! Maybe Jacque Surrock dammed it up that day 
…if you’re a Bugs Bunny fan!
The Taj Mahal. I was expecting that it wouldn’t live up to the hype, that it would be drab compared to all the perfectly lit postcard images. Boy was I wrong. There is not a picture in existence that does it justice. The exquisite proportions, the way the marble changes character as the light changes, the way it fits perfectly into the grounds, everything. It’s like stepping into a fairy tale when you walk through the gate.
I first came to Hollywood about 10 years ago. I couldn’t believe how grungy and dirty it was. Homeless people everywhere. Little tourist trap shops all over the place. When I left the Mann’s Chinese theater one night, some guy was peeing in the middle of the street. It’s better now if you’re into the Gap.
Wow, it was the complete opposite for me. For some reason, I thought those windows in her head were much bigger. Maybe cartoons ruined her for me, with people leaning out of her head and waving?
But when I got all the way up all those stairs and looked out of those tiny, dirty windows… meh. I thought the gigantic flag on the island was much cooler.
You COULD miss the Mona Lisa if not for one simple fact: it is always surrounded with hordes of tourists crowding around TAKING PICTURES OF IT. I don’t know about you, but I think that buying an actual print might result in a better copy of the painting than an Instamatic Snap from 20 feet away. I asked someone why they took a picture of it and they said “So my friends will believe me when I tell them I saw it in person”. Hum, sounds like you need new friends.
I got burned on the Cape Cod thing too when I first moved to Massachusetts. Its expensive as hell, cold, and crowded during the summer. I do not understand the appeal at all but people here like to save all year so that they can spend thousands on a crappy house 40 miles away from home for a week.
The Mississippi River is very large at New Orleans all the way to the mouth. It can handle almost any ship in the world. The parts upstream aren’t as big.
Rembrandt’s Night Watch. I thought it would be, you know . . . painting-sized. Like the Mona Lisa. But no, that sucker’s huge. Really, really big. 438 x 359 cm, to be exact.
Cannery Row. First of all, I thought it was something Steinbeck made up so when I learned that we were going to visit it I was a bit freaked. Then I thought there might be a 50 foot tall statue of Steinbeck looming over it. When we finally got there I found that the whole place had been gentrified and was full of fancy restaurants and gift shops. The only place recognizable from the book was Doc’s laboratory.
There was a statue of Steinbeck but it was a small bust surrounded by sagebrush.
Manatees. They always looked well proportioned and graceful in picture books. When I saw them in the wild they looked like the Goodyear Blimp with very small head. They also had a sort of prehensile upper lip that could reach above the water to scarf down food people threw to them. I’d never heard anything about that before.
The White House in Washington D.C. seemed smaller than I’d imagined.
Likewise on that view.
There’s a tiny little chapel in the base of the statue. I think it would be kind of cool to attend services there on a visit, but it appears that seating might be tight. Cool.
People have already mentioned the Alamo, which also surprised me by being in the middle of a bunch of skyscrapers, and a Saturn V rocket, which is huge (the Mercury capsule on the other hand is surprisingly small - about the size of my Toyota). And I’ve often been surprised in NYC to find myself walking by landmarks like the Empire State Building - not because of anything necessarily amzing about the landmark itself but just unexpectedly coming across the reality of someplace I’ve heard about all my life.
Another thing that has surprised me is seeing a jet aircraft for the first time. When I was a kid I built model airplanes so I guess I unconsciously thought of jet fighters as being small toy sized objects. But seeing them close up, I’ve been surprised at how large a F-111 or F-4 really is. (Bigger than a Mercury capsule anyway.)
And when I went to New Orleans, I was surprised by how small the French Quarter is. It’s basically a large neighbourhood. You can easily walk through every street in an afternoon.
I agree; the impression I got from movies and TV shows was that the windows in the crown of the Statue of Liberty were big enough to stick your head out of, but they’re not. They are tiny. And there’s only enough space at the top for maybe two people, so you really can’t linger there.
The Four Corners - where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona all meet at a single point. It was really not that impressive. It’s not really close to anything, as far as I can tell, and it’s very hot. There’s a little concrete platform, and right in the middle, there’s a metal plaque indicating where the borders are. There’s some flags, and little booths where you can buy various things. So you jump around a little. “Now I’m in Utah! Now I’m in Colorado! Hey look, now my head is Arizona, but my feet are in Utah! Wow!” Buy a shirt. Drive back to civilization. Via New Mexico, by the way. IIRC, you can’t approach it from any other state.
Cape Cod started out as disappointing. But my wife to be and I went for a walk at dusk and were amazed at how dark it got. My whole life has been spent in inland cities, where night is a uniform gray. But at night in the Cape we couldn’t see hands in front of faces. Just a lighthouse off in the distance and a Meteor Shower that looked like they do in magazines.
Slightly less famous is Vieques, off the Puerto Rico mainland. It’s famous for being a Navy bombing range. My wife insisted we visit a Biolumenescent lake there. I thought it would be a waste of time. Our guide took us through miles of brush in an ancient school bus. And it was amazing. Every move we made in the water glowed. With a scuba mask you could see everyone wreathed in light. It was not anything I was prepared for.
I’ve been inside the Vehicle Assembly Building twice - and it looks bigger from the inside. One of the big rules they have is No Flash Cameras, because there are sensors all around the building watching for sparks which could ignite fuel. A single camera flash could set off alarms that evacuate the entire building. (We were allowed to take non-flash pictures, and the light inside was enough to do it.) Sadly the roof is in pretty bad repair. After last year’s hurricanes some guys went up there to inspect the damage… and quickly determined that they should get off the roof very quickly before something very bad happened.
On my second trip, last December, we also got to go into the Orbiter Processing Facility, and we got to stand directly underneath Discovery. The building is jam-packed with scaffolding and equipment, with a big shuttle-shaped hole in the middle. When the shuttle is in there, you can barely see it for all the other stuff surrounding it. Except for the bottom view, the best you can see is the letters “ed Stat” written on the side.
Mission Control and the Alamo (if I’m remembering right). Both were smaller than I had imagined. The Alamo’s basement was really tiny.
On the other end, the view from the top of the WTC (back when they still let you out on top) was wild. So was the view from ESB.
The Golden Gate Bridge was a lot taller than I expected. And who knew there was a catwalk underneath? Back in the 80s, I got some wicked cool pics from under the bridge. And then a guy chased me out and threatened to call the cops I doubt they would let anyone under it anymore, tho, what with the 9/11 scenarios that were thought up.
Roswell, NM. A tourist trap? LIB, it is!
The SR-71. Way cool to see and hear take off.
The LEM at JSC. Ugly and got things sticking out everywhere. Plus, it’s way too small for two people. Still, a similar machine actually landed on the Moon. Everything about the Space Program was odd to see. Huge freakin machines (the rockets) pushing these tiny little closets around space.
the battleship Texas. One big weapon with men as the ammo is the felling I got while touring her. Plus, all the stairs are really just slightly angled ladders. And… was everyone really tiny in the World Wars?
Shania Twain. Nice ass.
Well, I was a fourteen-year-old kid from Oklahoma. Maybe I was easily impressed.
The thing in New York City that I found the best, though, was the Museum of Natural History. That, and the neat-o Horn & Hardart Automats.
The Spirit of St. Louis (Lindberg’s transatlantic plane). It was pretty startling that that thing could go non-stop from Long Island to Paris. I think it is still among the top few, if not the top, in tare to gross weight. It weighed 2150 lb. empty and had a payload of nearly 3000 lb (2985).
Flak bursts. The first time I saw any my first thought was, “Just like in the newsreel photos.”
