A few things…
The Washington Monument – Reading guidebooks and such, I wasn’t sure if they still allowed visitors up to the top anymore. On one of my trips (I lived about a three-hour drive away, so I went to D.C. as often as I could) I went to the monument and I found out it was still open but they had already closed the line for the day. One of the rangers told me that they used to let people climb the stairs, but the only way to see them now was to go on one of the special tours, and those were only twice a day on weekends. So the next weekend I drove down again, and when I got there it was only about 5 minutes until the tour was going to start, so I figured it would probably be full. Not so. I asked around and I was the only person there who wanted to see the stairs. But the rangers asked around a little and found a family that was willing to take the stairs back down if they didn’t have to wait in the long line for the elevator. So we go up in the elevator, have a few minutes to check out the view, and then the ranger unlocks the door for the stairway back down to the ground. It goes down like a spiral staircase, but in a square around the elevator shaft. And for most of the way, there’s not much to see. But the reason there’s a tour is the commemorative carved stones that were donated by various groups to help fund the construction of the monument. I think the first was from Alaska, which wasn’t even a state at the time (and remember we’re going down, so they get older as you go), and then there are stones from most of the states and other groups like fire departments and such, some of them with ornate, bas relief carvings on them. It was fantastic. If you only go to the Washington Monument for the view from the top, it’s disappointing, but the monument itself is fascinating. And I was disappointed that I was the only one who really went out of his way to see that.
Arlington Cemetery – They have to do a bit of a balancing act between being a tourist attraction and a dignified cemetery. And it’s pretty big, so there’s an office at the front where they can look up the location of any person who’s buring there; and there are maps to find the really famous sites (John F. Kennedy’s grave, Tomb of the Unknowns, etc.). I was looking for Gus Grissom’s grave, which wasn’t on the map. Someone at the desk showed me where it was, within a small area, and I went to find it. You’ve seen the pictures of the perfect rows of identical gravestones, but the older part of the cemetery has all sorts of different markers. I got to the area and had to look around a bit, but I found it, No special monument, just the standard headstone; buried right next to Roger Chaffee who also died in the Apollo 1 fire. It seemed oddly low-key for someone who was such a hero at one point.
Naval Air Station, Lakehurst, New Jersey – The site of the Hindenburg disaster. It’s still a working, active duty Navy base, so I doubt you could get in with the tighter security these days. When I went, the guard at the gatehouse gave me directions and I found a big, empty field (kind of gravelly on decades-old concrete) with a long, flat stone marker at a pole about 10 feet high. And not another person in sight. (That seems to be a theme here, doesn’t it?) There’s no interpretive center and gift shop selling “Oh, the humanity!” t-shirts. For something everybody knows about and has seen film of, the actual site seems to be almost forgotten. The hangars are still there, and judging from them you can tell the zeppelins must have been freakin’ huge.
The Louvre – I was just there in November. The Mona Lisa is marked pretty well on the museum map, and as you get close there’s a section of the gallery roped off to control the line (not a problem when I was there), turn the corner and there it is against the far wall, recessed behind glass. You can’t miss it for the crowd of people around it. And not only are people taking picture that won’t turn out, but some of the cameras use a reddish light, or even a grid, to control the auto-focus, so they’re ruining the view for the rest of us, too. That just struck me as one of the rudest things I’ve ever seen. At the Venus de Milo, groups would come and each one would hand his camera to another and stand in front of the statue to have his picture taken with it. How can you stand in front of one of the world’s great artworks and turn your back on it? It disappointed me to see people come from thousands of miles just for a souvenir to prove they’d been there, and not to get anything for themselves out of the experience.
The Berlin Wall (what’s left of it, anyway) – I was in college when the wall came down, and youth and distance can make something seem not as serious as it really is. But standing in a place that was legitimately called the Death Zone can really drive things home.
The Cathedral of Ulm – In America, it seems like all anything that’s remotely interesting or difficult to get through is closed off. If the Pyramids were here, they’d have a visitors center with pictures of the inner chambers, but they’d never let you go inside them. So it amazes me the number of churches and cathedrals in Europe where you can climb the towers or go through the catacombs. But beyond that, the cathedral in Ulm is the tallest in the world, and inside the tower I was amazed at how much empty space there was. I always thought of cathedrals as being these great masses of solid stone, with just enough space in the tower for a cramped stairwell and some huge bells. But climbing the one in Ulm, there’s a section about halfway up that’s totally empty. There are massive pillars at the corners (two of which are hollowed out for spiral stairways), and huge, gothic, filligree stonework walls, and nothing inside. It’s like a box 50 feet on a side and 100 feet tall, but the scale of it all, especially once you’re on top, almost feels like tinkertoys. Above that is where the roof starts to come to a peak, and there’s a spiral staircase in the center buttressed against the sloping walls. Climbing that is not for the faint of heart. I did make it to the top, and the balcony runs around near the peak of the roof, about 10 feet square and 450 feet high.
The Nurburgring – There’s a modern Formula 1 track there, but they’ve kept the original course, which is about 14 miles twisting throught the hills of western Germany. And it’s open to the public. I was there in November, the last open weekend of the year, and the place was practically deserted. There’s a little ticket office, a parking area and a snack bar, and about 7 or 8 other cars around and that was it. It just seemed awfully subdued for one of the absolute meccas of auto racing history. (It’s probably more crowded and festive during the summer.) Driving it was amazing, though.
