Reply With QuoteI spent a night on Alcatraz, slept on a cot in an actual cell - was on a workcamp at the Presidio, was a thank you event from the staff.
Inspired by a comment on another thread I thought it might be interesting to see places / landmarks the membership here have been.
So if you have been to a place that is off the beaten track, off limits to the general public (assuming you can say) or been to a well known place but have been behind the scenes feel Free to share.
In order to start, I am lucky that I get to go to some really interesting places for work
The Houses Of Parliament, MOD bases, Scientific Labs etc, behind the scenes of London Zoo but recent highlights are Twickenham (I live for my Rugby)
And the BT tower roof
What other cool places have you been?
Last edited by Sinnlover; 8th April 2021 at 21:16.
I spent a night on Alcatraz, slept on a cot in an actual cell - was on a workcamp at the Presidio, was a thank you event from the staff.
I have slept in Chequers on numerous occasions and never once been woken up by the spirit of Sir Winston.
Wimbledon Centre Court.
We'd been to Wimbledon for the day and spent much of it on No1 court (where our tickets were) but on the way out we noticed a side door to Centre Court was open so we slipped in and ended up next to the court.
It was an odd and special feeling in that:
- the tennis court itself was exactly the same as the courts at our local club
- the stadium wasn't much different to No1 court
- it was end of first week so the games played on the court that day could easily have been on No1 court
but it definitely had a sense of being somewhere special.
I'm not really a tennis fan - I'll watch it and it and it's exciting I'll get excited (much like a lot of other sport) - but Wimbledon Centre Court definitely had an 'other' feeling.
Last edited by MakeColdplayHistory; 9th April 2021 at 08:08.
Friend of a friend was a conservator at the royal academy, I bumped into him while visiting an exhibition and got a private tour of the library, best part was being able to turn the pages os the royal warrant yearbook and seeing George the III’s signature get more and more distressed with each year of his madness.
No gloves either, “are your hands clean?” was asked and he said you are more likely to tear the pages with gloves on
(Previous job he had was at the Houses of Parliament, he had sex with his girlfriend at the top of the tower!?)
As an administrator for the Post Office Underground Railway/Mail Rail, I've had 2 or 3 train rides and walked the tunnels around Mount Pleasant station, visited all 7 Mail Rail stations. Also, as Royal Mail employee I visited No.10 Downing Street and the House of Commons.
Sat/watched a Champions League game in UEFA guest seats in the Santiago Bernabeu and Camp Nou stadium.
Watch the sunset from Sydney Tower Eye and Melbourne Eureka Sky Deck.
An awful lot of places that I'm not going to elaborate on, but here's ATLAS @ the Large Hadron Collider, CERN.
Don't just do something, sit there. - TNH
I've been inside the Pentagon - amazing self-contained place with a proper running track!
Won a prize (or was it a punishment) to spend a day at Blair Drummond safari park with the staff. Everything from feeding the big cats to clearing out the Elephants enclosures. The animals take on a different aura once you cross past the safety barrier.
When Disney started to work on Epcot centre project in Orlando my family was invited as the French guests (Epcot was creating an international fair where each country was to take on a pavilion presenting the country's culture) and for 3 days we were Disney VIP, my sister and I had our own host (her name was Honey and she was sweet lovely) and not only did we get to do all the attractions without any queuing, had any food we wanted whenever we wanted, but we also went behind the scene, where gardeners kept acres of plants so that they would have them in bloom in the park across the year, the computer rooms for the robotic displays (we're talking 1974-ish, it was genuinely rooms, not desks). Fascinating stuff, on top of the enjoyment.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
I stood at the finish line for the men’s 100m final at London 2012. I was in a prime spot at Princess Diana’s funeral, and William and Katie’s wedding. I took the first ride on the Millennium wheel. I went to Barkingside police station with Neil and Christine Hamilton were accused of sexual assault. I did the first interview with George Bush JR when he became president. I’ve done a few interesting things :)
I remember your visit to ChernobylOriginally Posted by junglebert
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
Oh yeah, I’ve been to Chernobyl too!
And that was before it became Ukraine’s main tourist attraction.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
And before head to toe PPE was the thing.
I took my wife up the OXO Tower. Oh wait, sorry, wrong thread.
I have walked over (between) the multiple domes of St Pauls cathedral.
Been in the only church crypt in London with bodies still entombed within. (I was told it was the only one anyway).
Walked over/around the roofs/secret areas of more famous historic buildings than I can recall.
I am fortunate to have worked on many historic landmark buildings.
Visited the valley of the king's a few years ago, it was Feb/Mar & very quiet tourist wise. We paid to access Tuts tomb and found ourselves looking at the sarcophagus with not a soul to be seen. So I couldn't resist the urge to jump over the balustrade into the lowered area of where it stood and walked around it in absolute wonderment. There was a small ante-chamber guarded by an iron grill & peering into it saw only a collection of industrial lighting being stored there. Mrs N was getting fraught by the fact I could have been collared by the tourist police for trespass as I really shouldn't have been there.
The fact that the king was still in the coffin at that time was a magical moment for me.
Sent from my Nokia 3.1 using TZ-UK mobile app
Not sure whether they count as that special but I've been to the White House gardens, US Capitol, Australian and NZ parliaments (but not ours!), front row seats when Man Utd played Southampton (when David Beckham played for them) and watched the sun set amongs the observatories on Mauna Kea before some light star gazing. Probably others which don't spring to mind at the moment..
P1030413 by Matt G, on Flickr
For perspective, that peak visible in the distance is 60 miles away and is just over 3000m high.
I was lucky enough to work here for 11 years -
And then another 11 years in this less well-known place, which is actually a fair bit older, and almost always misidentified -
Always loved a bit of Victorian neo-gothic!
Both share a few things in common besides their purpose, my favourite being that both are very much unfinished, and now, of course never will be.
If you can correctly name both, treat yourself to a pat on the back
London and Oxford Natural History musea respectively?
Must have been fun!
Museum of Natural History, London and Oxford University of Natural History, methinks? You must have/have had a fascinating career!
A
DRAT! Beaten by 1 minute!
A
I’ve spent a night on the HMS Belfast, very uncomfortable it was too.
I had a spell off spending a lot of time in Parliament and the Queen Elizabeth building for meetings with various MPs.
The worse work experience was being a guest of the NCB in the 1970s and taken down a coal mine. That was a truly horrible two hours.
In the early 00s I worked for quite a while in 10 Downing Street on various IT projects .. well, you went in the door at No10, but my desk was in the basement of No11.
I recall a number of unexpected things, including coming across a glass case with a lump of moon rock in it, though perhaps the biggest surprise was how nice Cherie Blair was, at least to us little people (the opposite of her cariacature at the time).
I also recall one of the IT guys I was working with talking about running down the stairs with a printer in his arms once, and nearly knocking over the Dalai Lama .. all in a day's work I suppose.
Pretty good going to be fair - even people that had lived in Oxford all their lives used to refer to the University Museum of Natural History as "The Pitt Rivers" - presumably because you had to pass through the first to get to the second! "The Natural History Museum" in London was rather arrogantly re-named without any signifier as to location in 1990, having been "The British Museum (Natural History)" since 1881!
Clunky names notwithstanding, they were amazing places to have worked, in some truly amazing times, and I miss it very much if I'm honest.
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