Celestial Events - More specifically, I'm thinking about the upcoming solar eclipse. Of course, I'm also hoping for good weather and a lack of chaos getting to view said awe inspiring event. Still, I'm just in awe of all of this kind of stuff...from eclipses, meteor showers, and comets to the planets and other night sky kind of stuff.
Bad Car Accident - We were fully stopped at a red light, about a mile from home and waiting to turn onto the highway feeder road, when an SUV going about 75 mph slammed into us and forced us into the truck in front of us. While we dealt with several months of back pain along with nightmare insurance issues, everyone was amazed that we all walked away from the crash.
National Parks, Monuments, and Memorials - I'll be honest, not all of them have come with that big awe inspiring, total amazement, kind of wow... but many do. Some of them are wow just because you've seen things in pictures, tv and movies so many times that it's hard to fathom that you're really seeing it face to face in real life. Grand Teton, Devil's Tower, Mount Rushmore, Mesa Verde, Dinosaur, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Little Bighorn, OK City, and Carlsbad Caverns fit this reaction. Then you've got the ones you never expected to be a big WOW that really throw you for a loop...like Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Grand Staircase Escalante, Death Valley, Badlands, and to some degree White Sands. Then you've got the ones that were every bit of the WOW and THEN SOME that you were expecting. This would be parks like Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain, Zion and Glacier. While there are some I legitimately see no reason to repeat and just visited to check them off our list (Great Smoky Mountains, Pipestone, Browns Canyon, Hot Springs, Great Sand Dunes, Guadalupe Mountains, Petroglyph, Saguaro, etc.), there are some that have some wow and awe factors, but other issues clouded our experiences. Like Theodore Roosevelt...we had already been to Badlands, so seeing more badlands in a different park doesn't have as much wow the second time around. I'm sure it would have been awe inspiring if it were our first park with badlands. At Wind Cave, they canceled our cave tour, so we didn't see enough to determine if there's real awe factor. I was really young when I visited Mammoth Cave, making my memories too spotty to decide if there was real awe. Then you've got Everglades, where our excess of close alligator encounters were just too scary (especially adding in all of the spiders) to allow me to objectively decide if that was awe or just raw fear. Hoping to add more to the AWE side of this list