Absolutely! It was worth every moment of hiking for days at altitude while utterly wiped out by a nasty stomach bug. Even with tourists crawling all over the place, it had a sense of peace and serene awesomeness that I have never felt anywhere else. (TMI, but we picked our sperm donor from the cryobank partly based on his desire to travel to Machu Picchu – it impressed us that much!)
Another vote for the St Louis arch, especially after watching the film on how they built it. I love standing under it and looking up at stuff reflected back down to me. Trippy, like the bean in Chicago’s Millennium park, but bigger.
Also, San Marco in Venice blew me away. Not so much the piazza, but the inside of the church itself. My absolute favorite piece of music in the whole world was written for San Marco (Monteverdi Vespers) and going there was like a sacred pilgrimage, even for a completely lapsed individual like me. Actually, all of Venice lived up to my expectations.
Stonehenge. Somebody made a comment in the the other thread about how small Stonehenge was. What were they expecting? Stones three miles high? The damned things are eighteen foot tall, weigh tonnes and were dragged hundreds of miles for no discernable reason. Pretty impressive.
Niagara Falls. In my neck of the woods, we call a weir in a brook a waterfall. Nothing can prepare you for seeing that the first time (although Niagara Falls the town is like Blackpool).
The battlefields and cemeteries in Northern France. War films have desensitized people to big bombs and explosions. It’s not until you’re stood in the bottom of a crater, forty feet across, twenty feet below ground level, that you truly grasp how deadly those shells must have been. The rows and rows and rows of graves are mind-numbing, and there’s lots of war cemeteries in France.
I came in here to mention that. My husband’s grandfather was killed in Normandy and we recently drove through the area. We visited the American Cemetery, which was absolutely stunning in its beauty and in the incredible tragedy it represents. I knew I was going to cry when I saw the 9,387 white crosses/Stars of David, but it was even harder than I expected. And Utah and Omaha beaches gave me chills nearly every second I was there. Like you said, you can grasp how deadly the whole situation was.
Even more moving to me than the American Cemetery was the modest marker in the tiny village of Montgardon commemorating the “American soldiers who gave their lives to liberate us”. Most especially since my grandfather-in-law was one of those soldiers.
On a lighter note, I also have to plug EVERYTHING in Paris. That place is just unbelievable.
It looked small to me, even though I was very interested in it and certainly enjoyed seeing it.
The Eiffel Tower was much more impressive when I saw it in person. Photographs and films don’t prepare you for all that art-nouveau wrought-iron tracery.
The Eiffel Tower
Stonehenge
The Statue of Liberty
The Brooklyn Bridge
Bryce Canyon
The Ann Frank House
The Colosseum
The Golden Gate Bridge
The Grand Canyon
Kilauea lava flowing into the ocean, at night
Sunrise or sunset from the summit of Haleakala
The Milky Way from the summit of Haleakala
Notre Dame de Paris
The Sistine Chapel ceiling
Arches National Park
The Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon
Lower Manhattan skyline, from top of Empire State Bldg., at sunset
The Chartres Cathedral
Monet’s house in Giverny
The Montreal Biosphere
Dome of St. Peter’s
Fallingwater
The London Eye
The Hundertwasser House in Vienna
The Guggenheim in NYC
Ground Zero
and, though it’s not a “landmark”: a total solar eclipse