Actually it’s a concrete box-girder bridge. The previous one, removed in the 1960s to Lake Havasu, was of stone arch construction.
I am also puzzled by why people think London Bridge has some kind of status as a landmark or tourist attraction. The confusion with Tower Bridge might be one answer, but I think it might be the “London Bridge is falling down” song. It is lit up a nice pink colour at night, though.
Of course, the old London Bridge which was demolished in 1831 would have been a sight worth seeing.
You can also put me in the “Grand Canyon” and “Alamo” camps. As stated by previous posters, the Grand Canyon is a big hole in the ground and the Alamo is a just wall that is unimpressively camped in the middle of downtown San Antonio. Meh.
I’ve also heard that souvenir shops and a Pizza Hut are right next to the pyramids in Egypt. What crud.
I was travelling up the east coast several summers ago and went to the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey; the site of the Hindenburg disaster. The gate guard checked my ID, and gave me directions. There’s two huge hangars still there, and in the middle of a large field of gravel, there’s a concrete pad about 20 feet long, and a metal post. I was the only person there.
I was a bit surprised by how low key it was, but I guess I shouldn’t have been. It’s not hyped as a tourist attraction at all. If you just said “Lakehurst, New Jersey” to people, how many would know what happened there? I don’t think an interpretive center and gift shop, selling “Oh, the humanity” t-shirts would have enhanced the experience at all.
I don’t think anyone but the lowest of the low would want to glorify and capitalize on such a disaster. That’s like setting up souvenir shops at Ground Zero.
From “touring someone’s grave” to “touring someone’s grave and going to buy a snowglobe and a slice of pepperoni afterwards,” there is a difference only in the degree of tackiness.
Or the Alamo? It’s not unheard of to cater to crowds at the sites of tragedies, but it has to be done with respect. I’ve been to Gettysburg and Arlington Cemetery and thought they handled it well. I laid flowers on the graves of Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee. Was I being tacky?
I had a tour of Gettysburg from someone who had studied it very thoroughly, and I was impressed and moved by what had happened there. I wasn’t as impressed with the topography.
“The Union troops were here, and the Confederate lines were over there, along the top of Seminary Ridge.”
I always tell visitors to go to the restaurant/bar at the top of the Hancock Tower instead. The view is much the same (except you can get the Sears Tower in your panaramic photos this way) and, for the $18 bucks the Sears Tower charges you to take the ride up, you can get a sandwich and a drink in the Hancock.
I’m probably going to be branded a traitor for saying this, but:
Las Vegas
If you don’t like gambling a whole lot, you’re going to be bored. Yeah, the shows are first-rate (I saw the Blue Man Group, and it was awesome), but at $100 per ticket, you aren’t going to see more than one of them.
Add to this the fact that it’s by no means certain to be the rock the Pilgrims landed on. It was identified by a 95 year old village patriarch who wasn’t even alive at the time (this was 120 years after 1620), based on REALLY old dcollections and traditions. There’s a marker there that tells of this (I was just there yesterday. And I’ve heard it all before). Besides which, it’s not the first place the Pilgrims made landfall, anyway – they first landed at Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod. But, as Richard Schenkman puts it, nobody remembers that today except the Provincetowners.
Mark Twain once suggested the Plymouth Town elders sell the rock and get the 83 cents it was worth, before anyone else found out what a fraud it was.
Plymouth isn’t exactly boring. It’s got Plimouth Plantation and Mayflower II and Cranberry World (“Fairy World? No, Cranberry World!”) and Whale Watching Tours and a Ghost Tour, and some decent restaurants.
You stand on Cemetery Ridge, at the “high ground” in the center of the Union line, the point where Pickett’s charge on the third day was aiming at, and you think, “this was high ground?? Holy shit, I could run up this without breaking a sweat!”
It clearly didn’t take much of an incline to give the side with the high ground a big advantage.
The posters talking about Dealey Plaza were talking about how small it seemed, when they were actually there. That reminds me of that rather tiny piece of ground at the end of the Union line at Gettysburg that Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his men held onto on the second day. Not that much hill there either - it’s much steeper than in the center of the Union line, but surprisingly short.
It wasn’t so much the incline as it was the fact that the area was clear and gave the Union pretty much a clear view of the Confederate assault from a mile and a half out. They may as well have been carrying signs saying SHOOT US. It was like attacking someone from the other end of a rifle range.
Having just got back from my 7th trip to Yellowstone, I just can’t understand this sentiment. I love Old Faithful. The problem is not with the geyser, but with all the people around. Try it late at night, by moonlight, when there’s no one else around. This whisper of the thing, and the slight rumble underground, are just wonderful. It brings tears to my eyes every time I go there.
Yes, there are larger geysers, and ones that erupt for longer periods, but they are irregular, and you can’t sit around all week. But once I got lucky and saw five or six of them erupting simultaneously from the trail up the hill near the OF Lodge. Very cool.
Mind you, the thermal features aren’t my favorite things in Yellowstone. But that’s for another day.
Anyway, from the same vacation, comes my nomination for the actual OP: Craters of the Moon National Monument. It’s just a bunch of basalt lava flows which, being quite old, are mostly covered by sagebrush. Whoop-de-doo.
Catton, Shaara, etc. make it seem important that Pickett was attacking uphill. But I’m more with you on this: even if the field had been dead level, Pickett’s massed infantry would still have been reduced to a few hundred at most by the Union artillery by the time they got to the Union line.
Little Big Horn is that way: very small. You’d think from looking at the battle maps that forces were all over the place. Nope, the entire battle could have taken place on my high school campus.
The way it was explained to us, that tree line originally extended a bit further down that hill. The straight line you see is just the effective range limit of the Union artillery, which ground up all of the trees, soldiers, and whatever out to that point.
I know why I was underwhelmed by the Grand Canyon, and it’s not because I had been lobotomized by trashy action films, thanks. It was because by that stage I had been schlepping around the USA on my own for weeks and I was lonely and sick of America and wanted to go home. Tourism fatigue. The point is, ones mood can drastically affect the impression something like that makes. Maybe other people who were similarly underwhelmed were likewise just caught on a bad day. If I went there tomorrow, I’m sure I would be blown away by it.
