The final stop on our birthday road trip was a stop off at Meteor Crater. I've lived in Arizona practically my entire life and have never visited this site.
The first thing of note about this site is the land around it stretching off into the horizon for miles. Standing at the top of the crater you can see Humphy's Peak off to your left in the distance and the Painted Desert on the horizon to your right. It's a spot that I would love to return to just for star gazing.
So the crater itself at first isn't anything remarkable. When I first beheld it, I felt a lackluster kind of, "Yeah, it's a crater but it doesn't seem that big," reaction.
However, the visitor center has dome something to really hammer home to visitors the sheer scale of what exactly you're looking at. At the second landing there are a number of telescopes pointed in specific items around the crater.
One of these telescopes is pointed at a bolder on the side of the crater. At first sight you think it's just a slightly big boulder, no big deal. However the telescope explains to you that this boulder is actually the size of a house!
There are other telescopes around the site, but the one that really opened my eyes was one pointed at the bottom of the crater. From the rim you can't really see anything on the crater floor with the naked eye. However through the telescope you see a wooden stand up of an astronaut and an American flag. The astronaut is actually six feet tall, which really hammers home exactly how big the crater you are looking at truly is.