Legoland in Denmark.
London Science Museum to view the working replica Difference Engine.
Come for the geekiness, stay for the hookers and gambling? It does seem an odd mix.
Er, Florence.
I went to the National Cryptologic Museum by NSA HQ when I was in DC a few years back:
http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/index.shtml
Very cool place and the museum docents were fun to talk to since they’re former spooks.
I met one of the guys who works on a railroad museum out here in California where you can actually drive the locomotives! I’m thinking of taking my dad for a surprise birthday present (he’s an engineer, albeit of the non-train variety).
The Dayton, Ohio amateur radio festival:
It’s coming up in just 2 weeks!!
Man. I think this is going to inspire me to take more vacations. I acrue it without using it much because I usually can’t think of anywhere I’d particularly like to go.
These suggestions are inspiring.
I think I just went on one. The gentleman and I spent last weekend at Mind Games, a weekend-long event during which members of Mensa test board games and give five of them the Mensa Select seal. What may make it even geekier is last weekend was our first anniversary. We had a blast playing some good and not-so-good games with a couple of hundred like-minded people, including some good friends.
On our last vacation we visited Cranbrook Institute of Science and our first Valentine’s Day was spent at the Carnegie Science Center here in town. He’s an engineer; I’m a programmer; we may be geeks, but we’re happy ones!
My DREAM geek vacation is Oak Island. (From the master)
Always put it at the top of my nerd/geek list. Bonus: Condos are cheap to rent!
You bastard! I came in here to post that…
Me too.
Silicon Valley and the Bay Area is clearly the best place for a geek vacation. We have the Computer History Museum, the Intel museum in the lobby of the Noyce building in Santa Clara, (look up to the 6th floor and spend a moment of silence for a year of my career when I was enslaved there) and the Tech Museum in San Jose.
In San Francisco we have The Cable Car Museum which is free and awesome. All the cables for the cars go through here, and you can learn how they get fixed. Even cooler, on Pier 45, is the MUSÉE MÉCANIQUE with tons of coin operated machines you can put money in.
The museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, and Sir John Soane’s Museum in London are both pretty awesome. Also, the Huntington Library, garden and tea room (in Pasadena, CA) was about the most geek fun I’ve had. But then I really like tea.
Astronomy geek fun:
I went to Kitt Peak near Tucson and Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff on a trip to Arizona. I also went to Meteor Crater on that same trip.
I’ve been to Lick Observatory near San Jose as well, and to Griffith Observatory in LA. I’d like to go to Palomar Observatory and Keck Observatory some day.
In England, there’s Greenwich Observatory. Not only do they have cool exhibits there, you can also stand with one foot on either side of the Greenwich meridian- they have a line marked in the pavement for this purpose. While you’re there, you can also go to Westminster Abbey to see Isaac Newton’s grave, as well as stuff of great interest to geeks interested in history or English royalty (am I the only astro geek interested in that stuff as well?).
Prague is a good destination for astro geeks as well. There’s the famous Astronomical Clock, Tycho Brahe’s tomb and a monument to Tycho and Kepler. If you’re Jewish or just interested in the Golem legend, the synagogue where the remains of the Golem are supposedly in the attic is also in Prague.
Scale models of the Solar System, with the size of the planets to the same scale as the distances, are also fun and geeky. I’ve been to the Sagan Planet Walk in Ithaca, NY and the one in Boulder, Colorado.
Don’t forget the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC and Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
I went to Australia in November of 2005. Seeing Southern Hemisphere stars was a large part of the purpose of that trip. We went to Alice Springs to get a good view of the Magellanic Clouds, and I got up before sunrise one morning to see the Southern Cross and Alpha and Beta Centauri (they weren’t up in the evening). This summer, we’re going on an eclipse tour to China to see the total solar eclipse in July.
There’s an observatory here in Pittsburgh, with lots of old telescopes, that I’ve been to. There’s also the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I’ve been there, but not since they put up the new T-Rex Vs T-Rex exhibit. I have to go back sometime to see that.
I was hanging out at a local game store where Dave Arneson was a regular and we were taking a break from playtesting a game, and he was talking about how back in the day, Lake Geneva had a pretty popular Playboy Club for a community of that size.
I’m sort of a geology/geography nerd: I’m not intelligent enough about it to have ascended to geekdom, but I still have the obsession with it sometimes that still qualifies as nerddom.
For instance my brother collects rocks and I had a hard time classifying most of them besides the completely obvious one and sometimes not even then. But when I visited him in his home near the Smokies we were looking at a map for a hike and he thought it would be rugged and without a good view, but just from the way the path curved I could tell it was closely hugging the level so it would be a gradual incline, with an added bonus helping of many tiny little streams that weren’t on the map.
I’d count as a geekcation whenever I go on hikes and I feel like I have already been there due to reading the topo map so much.
GenCon game fair when it still was in Milwaukee. Though it was more of a pilgrimage then a vacation.
Riverside Iowa, the birthplace of Captain Kirk
Any geeks who are going to be in Pittsburgh the next few days might be interested in this:
Pittsburgh to implode Davis Avenue Bridge on Wednesday.
I wish I didn’t have to work and could go see it. I bet imploding a bridge would look cool.
Might I suggest the Casualty Actuarial Society fall meeting?
Oh, I see. You meant “geeky”, but not that geeky.
Gotta agree with Anne Neville on Greenwich–where else can you find history, geography, and science all in the same place? I wish I would have had a GPS device when I went there, just to watch the zeroes blink on and off.
Brewery, winery, and distillery tours are also fun for geeks who like a drink.
One of the coolest things about visiting Dublin in June of 2004 for me was going with a tour to a bunch of different pubs, and seeing the sun still up at almost 10 PM. I would love to go to St Petersburg, Russia, and see the White Nights, and to Alaska or some other northern location to see the midnight sun. I know Mr. Neville would have a hard time sleeping (he had this problem in Copenhagen when we went there in the summer of 2006- the sun was rising very early and woke him up), but it would be so cool.
And then there was seeing that the moon really does look upside down (relative to what I’m used to) in Australia. I almost fell into Sydney Harbor because I was walking around with my head tipped way over, to see if the moon looked like it did at home when I did that (it did).