County Counting Update

 My recent trip, to Kansas City and then Michigan, went reasonably well despite technological issues, and I got to two new counties in southeastern Nebraska, and all the remaining counties in Iowa (10) and Michigan (20). The trip home went nothing like I'd planned it -- not really a surprise there -- so I didn't get to any new counties in Kentucky or Tennessee. 

Who cares. Since I very much enjoy driving my little convertible on such winding mountain roads as abound in both those states, I'm sure I'll be going to those places soon enough. 

Meanwhile, here's the updated situation. I've now been to all the counties in 37 states, shown in green on the map below. The states in yellow are those where there are only "a few" counties left to visit, which I arbitrarily define as ten or less. The number of remaining counties to go to is shown in red.

The grey states, Georgia and Oregon, are those with more than ten counties left to visit. And then there's Alaska, which doesn't have counties. I've decided that any step taken in that state is good enough: One and Done.

 This last trip was the first I've ever made with county-counting as the express objective, and the last. The only remaining areas where there are enough to tempt me to go for that purpose are (1) the state of Georgia, with its surfeit of tiny little counties, and (2) the Northwest. But doing the Northwest all at once would be an exceedingly long and no doubt dull wander, while doing Georgia in a single trip would be just plain tedious; so I won't attempt it. Best to collect those counties as I pass through on the way to places more interesting.

 The dearth of counties left to visit for the first time has prompted me to change my goal to visiting all the car museums in the country. There are hundreds of them, and they're nicely scattered across the country, often in small towns. They are the new excuse to wander, not really the objective. You know the old saying, "It's not the destination, it's the journey"? That applies here. 

At the same time, I will not get all worked up about it. On my last trip, at one point in the planning I counted 17 car museums among my planned stops. (That number included, I think, five in Hickory Corner, Michigan, because I didn't understand the set-up there; there are actually 19 separate buildings, but some of them are operated by various car clubs and, I suppose, count as separate museums. Since I went to all the ones I'd planned to see, and several others, over two days, I'm counting it as five museums.) I actually went to 13 of the ones I'd planned. The rest I skipped because their hours of operation didn't fit my schedule. (A lot of them are only open a few days a week.) I did get pissed off when I showed up at one museum -- the first, as it happens -- and they had changed their hours within the last few weeks. Well, it happens. I got more pissed off when I drove half a day out of my best route to see a museum that doesn't deserve that name. Even so, I enjoy car museums, even most of the mediocre ones. And since they come and go like cellphone plans, I'll never run out of new places to go. Will I.

Twenty-One Years

 An entire generation has now grown up since this happened. It does not include any of the unborn progeny of the firefighters of NYFD Ladder Truck 118, seen crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground. They all died that day.

(the picture was uncredited on the site where I found it; thanks to whoever took it)

2022 KC/MI Wander: One Last Thing

 

This is Part 14 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

 I did, in the end, manage to contact the people who run the British Transportation Museum in Dayton, Ohio, and arrange for a tour outside their normal Monday and Saturday hours, and I'm really glad I did. I got there just after 9:30 this morning.

I was a little late because, for reasons known only to itself, Google Maps had me get off the freeway north of town and drive south for about 5 miles on Dixie Highway, a four-lane city street that parallels the freeway, but with a red light every few hundred yards and, if it's possible, even more over-the-road trucks than the freeway. Then it had me get back on the freeway and continue south to downtown. Somewhere along the way (just south of Lima, about 90 miles back) the written instructions that normally appear at the top of the screen froze with the legend "200 yards Bellepointe Drive right turn, then turn left." But the audio worked and the actual map kept moving so I could follow the correct (or at least the specified) route. Until I got to downtown Dayton. The instruction there was, "In a quarter mile, take the interchange on the right." After that quarter mile, there were two exits, literally one right after the other. I chose the first one. Not, it turns out, a good choice. That took me out of the way, to the east. Google Maps rerouted me through a somewhat convoluted neighbourhood and got me back where I should be, but at that point the map itself stopped moving, so all I had was the audio. Fortunately, by listening carefully to the instructions and moving with unusual deliberation -- in case I missed a turn, I wanted it to have time to re-route and actually give me an oral instruction before I passed by the new turn -- I managed to get where I was going. And since I remembered from having looked at the map several times over the last few weeks that my destination was south of downtown and west of the freeway, I was somewhat confident that I was headed the right way.

I fantasize throwing my phone to the ground and grinding it under my heel, but I need it for other things than Google Maps.

So anyway: I got to the British Transportation Museum and met its director, Pete Stroble. He and I talked for probably 45 minutes before we started looking at the cars that were all around the floor. He told me the history of the museum, which has been going on a little over 25 years now. Its membership consists of people, mostly local, who are afficionados of this or that make of British car -- his personal love is the Morris Mini. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, just northeast of town, brings a lot of people to Dayton who have also been posted to England and there developed an interest in British cars. 

an MG restoration under way

This is not a pristine collection of finely restored gems of motoring. While there are some cars in top condition, most are in more ordinary shape. Unlike many museums, this one actually owns most of the vehicles on display. They get donated to the museum, and restored as time and money allow. Much of the work is done by various car clubs in the area; for example, I saw an MG coupe (it may have been a hard-top convertible) undergoing complete restoration by the local MG club. Its body panels have been removed and laid out on the floor prior to painting. 

MGB

Elsewhere there are cars that leak fluids, cars that need brakes, cars that run and cars that don't. The museum -- "car-rich and cash-poor," Pete calls it -- does what it can when it can. There is a core of about a dozen guys with varying degrees of technical expertise (Pete himself is a retired engineer) who put out fires left and right and then devote themselves to particular projects until they're completed. As we went around the display floor, I heard about what they've done to this car, what they need to do to that car, and what they couldn't do with a car that is no longer there. One of the ways the museum raises revenue for the expensive work of car restoration is to fix up a car they don't need in their collection -- a donated vehicle of a type they already have on hand --restore it and then sell it. Naturally, the most common British vehicles are the ones that get fixed up and sold: MGAs, MGBs, Triumph Spitfires. Rarer cars, they keep.

1960 Ford Consul

And they've ended up with a fascinating collection of cars that are unfamiliar to me, along with some interesting examples of familiar cars. A bright yellow Spitfire (a kind of car I nearly bought in the late 1970s) and a couple of bright red Triumph TR-3s (one on loan, one owned by the museum); an MG TD and a couple of rare MG saloons; a 1926 Rolls needing a lot of work; a 1936 Daimler that took part in the coronation parade for King George VI; and of course the cars I always want to see, the Jaguars: only one E-Type, a 3.8, a couple of XJ-6s. There were two Humber saloons from around 1960, big American-style family cars that seem somehow out of place in England. A 1960 Ford Consul convertible also looks like it belonged on an American street in the Kennedy years. A 1960 Peerless GT that looks English to the core. A Morris Oxford estate car ("all-steel," a big selling point in post-war Britain) and a pair of Triumph Herald sedans, which I'd never seen before.

As we went around the floor, Pete shared all kinds of stories about the cars, pointing out things that I probably would never have noticed. How the door on an MG saloon is misaligned because the frame of the car is made of wood that has warped (still, it's a beautiful car); how the US Ambassador's 1936 Packard (with right-hand drive) ended up in their museum; how they came to have an old Vauxhall DHC, and what still needs to be done on it; and so on. 

If I had just gone around looking at the cars on my own and taking pictures, I probably would have spent about an hour and a half in this fascinating museum. With Pete telling stories as we went, I ended up staying a full five hours without noticing the time. (On the downside, I often forgot to take pictures of the cars, or to note the details for my photo captions.) He may regret spending his day that way, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Anything that makes me forget to eat lunch is a great experience.

When I left, it was with the thought that the weather in Cincinnati was going to determine whether I followed my planned route through the unexplored counties of Kentucky; but the persistent problems I'm having with Google Maps foreclosed that option. I can't trust the app to route me the way I want to go. So I just told it to take me home, and it showed me that I was 19 hours away. I got a paper map of Kentucky at a rest area on I-65 south of Louisville, and saw that, with a relatively short detour to the east I could still get the 3 counties in the middle of the state; it would probably add no more than an hour to the return trip. But what's the point? Those three counties are on the way to the other 5 I would need to finish the state, so I might as well wait until they're on my course. Likewise the two in Tennessee, although that would finish that state.... With my paper map of Kentucky I can plan out a route that gets me to those to somewhat remote counties. But then what? I can't count on Google Maps to get me to Memphis afterwards, and I have only the vaguest idea of how I'd get there on my own. So I'll likely skip that little diversion, too, and just stay on the goddamn freeway all the way home. I won't get there tomorrow, but might get to Dallas, and then home on Friday. Either way, there won't be anything to tell about the rest of the trip, so this is going to be the final post from the 2022 KC/MI Wander.

2022 KC/MI Wander, Day 15: The Road Home?

 

This is Part 13 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

 In my memory, life was much simpler before the tech revolution. For a traveller, the halcyon days were those that came after the invention of accurate paper maps, and before the invention of GPS. Paper maps work every time you look at them. They do not issue ludicrous instructions, they do not freeze up for no reason, they do not require a signal of any kind to operate, they do not suddenly go blank, they do not change from moment to moment. True, there's a lot they can't do: they can't tell you if the road is closed or if there's been an accident up ahead. They can't warn you of a speed trap along your way. And they can't tell you what restaurants or motels are along your route, or how much they cost.

I'll take that trade.

Anyway. So saying, in yesterday's post, that I would finish with Michigan around noon and start for home proved to be a little optimistic. After Google Maps threatened several times to send me down gravel roads I just pulled up a map of the state, figured out where I wanted to go, and then looked for paved roads that would take me there. That worked, at a glance. I also enjoyed, for a change, having at least some picture in my head of where things are in relation to each other, in the thumb of Michigan's mitten. And at 2:20 pm I sailed into Sanilac County, the last of the 83 that make up the state. Thirty-seven states down, thirteen to go.

And now I'm torn. I've already skipped Wills St Clair Auto Museum -- that was easy; it was closed -- and Stahl's Automotive Foundation -- that was harder; it's only open on Tuesdays, and today's Tuesday -- and Marvin's Marvelous Museum, and the Roush Automobile Collection, the National Construction Equipment Museum (it would have been closed by the time I got there), Stroh's Center (home of the world's largest bronze falcon sculpture), Snook's Dream Cars, the Fostoria Rail Park and the Fostoria Glass Heritage Center; and the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation. Some of those things I'm more disappointed at not seeing than others. And tomorrow I know I'm going to skip almost all the stops I'd planned on. (I did try to buy some moonshine here in Ohio, but the supermarket I went to didn't have any. I will find some tomorrow, I hope.)

I don't mind so much skipping all the places I'd planned to stop, back when I was just planning the trip. They're all things I can go to some other time, and to be honest most of them aren't worth the forty cents worth of gas it might take to get a photograph. They were just there, near where I was going to be anyway. The thing I'm torn about is: do I just get on the freeway and go home, or do I get off the freeway when I cross into Kentucky, and wander through the five counties I need just southeast of Cincinnati, and then the three in the middle of the state, and then the two in western Tennessee before I get back on the freeway? Or do I just stay on the freeway. That is the only thing on my mind. (That, and the British Transportation Museum in Dayton, which isn't actually open tomorrow but they say tours can be arranged outside their regular hours. If I could just get hold of them....)

So. Today I stopped at a sculpture museum and garden in Saginaw -- well, first I stopped for breakfast at a Bob Evans restaurant where something was going wrong in the kitchen; they were way behind and people were complaining and cancelling their orders and leaving. I, having lots of emails to read, didn't really notice until a certain point when I realized that I'd already had my allotted three cups of coffee and still hadn't gotten any food. It came shortly after so I wasn't too upset. Not like the guy behind me at the cash register a few minutes later. Then I went to an auto parts store seven miles down the street -- there was a much closer one, but Google Maps chose not to so inform me -- to find out why my Check Engine light had come on. (As I'd expected, a slight vacuum leak. It's been that every time but once since the invention of the vague Check Engine light, and except for that one time it's meant the gas cap didn't get tightened all the way, and the warning light goes out after a while. So far it hasn't gone out, but at least I'm not too worried about it.) And then I went to the sculpture garden.

Black Elk, the Lakota philosopher

 It's located at Saginaw Valley State University, and features the work of a local guy named Marshall Fredericks, who made good in the Art World. He was popular with auto-industry executives. Big, monumental sculptures in well-known places like Cleveland and Europe. The indoor gallery is mostly filled with plaster casts and scale models of works, while the garden outside has a number of full-sized pieces. 

There are also four fake swans in the pond out there. I only knew they were fake because one of them tipped over. 

Pointe Aux Barques Light

From there I made my way up the thumb of the mitten to Pointe Aux Barques, the second-most-dangerous area of the Great Lakes for shipping, to see the old lighthouse.

And from there I made my way through Detroit (which, to my surprise, has a lot of new high-rise construction downtown) and Toledo to Lima, Ohio for the night, where I will ponder my course for tomorrow.

2022 KC/MI Wander, Day 14: winding down

 

This is Part 12 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

 So I guess I didn't need to spend all that time at the Gilmore complex of car museums: on Labor Day Weekend, all of Michigan is a car show. There were several in the parking lot of my hotel last night, and today I saw at least 40 old cars on the road, including a rare 1927 Alfa Romeo. 

It's just not the same, though. You don't get the chance to really look them over when they zip past you on the highway.

All I did today was drive, from Cadillac, to Clare, then up to Petosky and through the Tunnel of Trees. It wasn't looking good when I left the hotel: 48 degrees and cloudy; but by the time I got to the scenic drive along Lake Michigan, it was clear and around 70. So, perfect. 

Of course, last night I'd carefully re-routed the Google Maps instructions to keep me on the shoreline -- it kept trying to take me on a direct route, which would have been a bore -- before sending it to my phone. Then, today, it had apparently decided that I didn't want to waste all that time driving a scenic route when there's a perfectly good road from Point A direct to Point B. So for the entire trip I kept hearing "In a quarter-mile, make a right." Until I lost the GPS signal. And then I hit the spot where the road was closed and I had to go back to one of those ignored right turns.

remains of a 1905 shipwreck

I saw a couple of lighthouses and a shipwreck, and that's about it. There were some Adirondack chairs set out by the first lighthouse, so I took that opportunity for a five-minute nap. Very refreshing.

I've been to 15 of the 20 counties I needed in Michigan; tomorrow I'll get those last five and then start for home. I have, I see, about a dozen car museums on the return trip. I can guarantee I will not be stopping at those places (with one possible exception). There's a glass museum on the route, too, but at this point, who cares? I wanna go home. So I expect I will finish my Michigan county-counting before noon tomorrow, then get on the freeway and start home. I'll be stopping at a supermarket in Ohio to stock up on moonshine, and if it can be arranged I'll be stopping at the British Transportation Museum in Dayton; and other than that I will be driving as far as my little roller skate will carry me tomorrow.

Oh, and two things I've forgotten. First, the most interesting photo I took at the Gilmore Museum Complex:

1957 Isetta and 1960 Lincoln

And the other thing is about the price of gas, since a few people have wondered about it. I use premium gas in the Jag, and while I know what I've paid, I don't know what it is at stations where I didn't stop, since they don't advertise premium's price; just regular. When I left San Antonio regular gas was going for about $3.59/gallon. In North Texas it was about ten cents less, and in Oklahoma and Kansas about another ten cents a gallon less. In fact, the price kept going down as the trip progressed, until I hit Illinois. In Sabula, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, regular gas was $3.24 a gallon; four miles away, in Savanna, Illinois, it was $3.90. When I bought gas in Illinois the next day, around Dixon, regular was $3.59. (Premium seems to run about 70 cents a gallon more, consistently.) Interestingly, in Michigan, it has varied from $3.59 in the southern part, around Kalamazoo, to $3.89 in the more remote areas up north. But I chanced on a station somewhere east of Cadillac, a BP station, that sold it for $3.29; my premium gas there was less than the regular gas at the station before, or the station after. Don't know why. Of course, my last fill up this evening was at $4.70/gallon, but then the next station I passed had it for $4.39. I don't know if prices back home have come down since I left, but I hope so.

2022 KC/MI Wander, Day 13: Into the Wild

 

This is Part 11 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

 Sojourner Truth, it turns out, lived the last 20-plus years of her life in Battle Creek, Michigan; so before I went back out to the Gilmore Museum this morning, I stopped downtown to see her monument. It's a twelve-foot-tall statue of her preaching, which she did a lot of, in a small park near the City Hall.

That's pretty much the only point of interest in the city of Battle Creek. Well, there's a Historical Bridge somewhere on the east side of town, and an arboretum, but I wasn't willing to make time for either of those things. I suppose if I ever come back here with my wife, I'll have to go to the arboretum, and maybe I'll go see the bridge, too. But there were cars to see, lots of 'em, so back up to Hickory Corners.

I did, as expected, go back to the Model A Museum, mainly to get a picture of the Model A Town Car, marketed to women "of a certain position in society" who didn't give a shit about what people thought. And to those who insist on being dropped off right in front of places where a bigger limo won't fit. You would have to really not care about the opinion of others to be seen being driven around by a chauffeur in that little limo. That's kind of like taking a sack lunch to Maxim's.

I started today where I'd left of yesterday, and finished photographing the newer Lincolns. 

You know what, I'm going to just be brief. I spent 6 hours today, walking around the immense grounds of the Gilmore museum complex; I went to the Lincoln Museum, the Model A Museum, the Cadillac-LaSalle Museum, the Steam Room (horseless carriages, mostly), the something-or-other Barn, the Classic Car Club of America Museum ("full classics," meaning cars for snobs from a long time ago -- according to them, there have been no classics made since 1948), the Pierce-Arrow Museum, and a couple of others that I don't remember the name of. I saw cars. Hundreds and hundreds of cars. I took hundreds and hundreds of pictures, most of which I'm disappointed with because of the lighting in all those buildings, but some are good. Look in my picture album from this trip if it interests you. At this point, at 11PM in a motel room in Cadillac, Michigan, where it's 48 degrees and I'm ready for bed, I'm not going to elaborate. I loved it. I'm glad I went there, I'm glad I went back, and I'm glad I'm done with it and now I'm going to wander around the Lower Peninsula of Michigan and then head home. 

1948 Jaguar 3.5 Litre coupe

(I will say that there was one Jaguar car the CCCA calls a "full classic," the 1948 3.5 Litre. I can think of two later ones: the 1949 XK-120 and the 1961 E-Type. Oh, and the Mark X, but I don't recall what year that came out. In the '60s, I believe. Hell, if they can call the 1949 Cadillac a "full classic," then anything can be a "full classic.")

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2022 KC/MI Wander: Day 12

This is Part 10 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

So, I'm in the Eastern time zone now. My phone knows that automatically; my computer and my car don't know it at all. I haven't told them. Me, I'm somewhere in between: I know it, but sometimes I forget. Like this morning, when I was planning my day after a frustrating evening of not having usable wi-fi, and a poor night's sleep. I thought long and hard about going to the Air Zoo before heading out to the car museums in Hickory Corners, but after full consideration decided that the Air Zoo would be a zoo on a Saturday morning. It sounds like fun for young and old, but in my experience that means a lot of standing around watching kids have fun and wishing they weren't there. I mean, it's not like they're my kids. And I'm sure they're all badly behaved.

So I decided to pass on the Air Zoo. I figured I'd just run by the local university campus to see a statue in front of the stadium called The Committee, and then up to the museums, which open at 9AM. I finished the frustrating task of checking through yesterday's pictures, and captioning them, and then I finished writing Part 9 of this blog. I posted it, and got to the car just a little later than I'd planned. I'd figured that 8:30 would be a good time to leave this morning, and when I shut down the computer it said 8:45. Close enough.

Except, of course, that that was 8:45 Central, and as I mentioned, I'm now in Eastern time. Oh, well, not really much I could have done about it. I couldn't have finished the post any faster, though I could have skipped the hotel breakfast, and gotten a big cup of coffee on the way instead of three little cups, one at a time. That would have saved me three or four minutes.

So I drove over to the university. Statue's not there by the stadium. I checked the listing again and confirmed its reported location. Asked three people who seemed familiar with the campus. None of them knew what statue I was talking about. Didn't really care that much, so I blew it off and went up to Hickory Corners, which is, I guess you'd say, a village northeast of Kalamazoo, northwest of Battle Creek. (I moved to a hotel in Battle Creek because the one I was in last night was such a dump; this one's a noticeably better class of dump.) (No, that's not fair. This one's actually OK so far; what you'd expect of a 2-star hotel.)

I went to Hickory Corners thinking there were five separate car museums (Gilmore, Lincoln, Franklin, Cadillac and Classics), all on the same campus. Turns out that's a little understated. There are those five ... plus the Pierce-Arrow Museum and the Model A Museum and the Campania Barn, a museum of cars from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. And a bunch of other things. Motorcycles. Pedal cars. Carriages. Steam cars.

So if you're not interested in my extended musings on car styling and such, you might as well just skip the rest of this blog post, because I stayed at the museum until my phone's battery gave out from all the pictures, and I traded my museum ticket for a two-day pass, because I'm going back tomorrow to see the rest of it. 

And that, by the way, will pretty much be it for car museums on this trip. I'm actually glad of that. I'm looking forward to getting in the car tomorrow afternoon and just driving up and down the state of Michigan, not having the least concern about whether someplace is going to be open when I get there or not. All I've got to do is pick a road at every intersection and eventually end up in San Antonio. The weather has been glorious since Oklahoma; I've felt not a drop of rain nor any temperature above 87 degrees. I could live like this.

just for context

The first gallery in the Gilmore was a special exhibit of Corvettes. Having just been to a Corvette museum in Texas, I got through that one quickly: a couple of wide shots for context, plus one picture of an interesting variation, the Bubble Top Corvette. (The bubble top was an after-market product usable on Corvettes with removable hardtops. It looks as silly as it sounds, unless you still think the Jetson's vehicle is cool.)

(And, once again, let me apologise for the quality of the pictures I took today, & probably for the ones I'm going to take tomorrow. The spotlighting in the Gilmore and its associated museums is not really conducive to quality photographs. Might as well park the cars next to a big window.)

1934 Auburn V-12 line-up

The next gallery might be one of my favourites of the ones I saw today. Or any day. First thing I saw when I walked in was a stunning Duesenburg J-111 phaeton, royal blue and black. I took several pictures of it before I noticed that, just across the aisle from it, were five 1934 Auburn V-12s, all painted in the same understated grey and black colours. The cars were identical from the front bumper to the windshield, but represented all five available models: speedster, brougham, phaeton, sedan and cabriolet. (If you're wondering what those names mean, compare the roof lines on those five cars.) I've never seen such a line-up of cars before. All five are on loan to the museum by a local couple. I have to wonder what's left in their garage.

I spent a lot of time going back and forth among those five cars, but eventually forced myself to move on. That entire gallery shows cars from that era, and almost all of them are fabulous, but after the Duesenburg and the five Auburns ... and the Packard 12, of course, and the Chrysler Royal, and the Chrysler LeBaron Imperial, and one of the two Rolls Royces (built in America, mind you) (the other, a Phantom I Torpedo, being so ugly I didn't even bother to photograph it; can you imagine?), and the '37 Cadillac Imperial convertible.... Well, the other cars just seemed kind of ordinary. A '34 De Soto Airflow; saw one the other day. Essex Terraplane; big deal. Packard Custom 8? Saw it in Salt Lake City.

So ordinary... 1951 Studebaker

Next up: cars from the '50s & '60s. When I was very young, I used to see cars like these on the streets all the time. Mostly in poorer neighbourhoods, because by the time I was old enough to identify a car, these were almost all old rattletraps and junkers. Cars didn't last as long back then. But of course the examples on show in the museum have been cleaned up some. The gallery's display starts with the basic Chevy starter car, then moves on to slightly more upscale cars. There were a couple of Mercuries -- a Montclair and the top-of-the-line Turnpike Cruiser -- and a whole lot of other cars that I didn't photograph because, by then, my battery was running down and ... well, I'd seen 'em. Just for spite they threw in the 1963 Chrysler Turbine, a research model that was too expensive to actually mass-produce, but one that's so famous I've probably seen a thousand pictures of it. Now I've seen the actual car. And the room finishes with one of my absolute favourite cars of all, a 1963 Buick Riviera. I want one.

Just off to the side of that gallery is the Muscle Car Gallery. I went in there expecting not to take any pictures because, as I said, my battery was running down, and muscle cars are standard displays in every car museum. I figured it'd just be more of the same, having been to so many car museums in the last two weeks. And I was right: a bunch of 'Cudas and GTOs, some Mustangs, Camaros, Dodge Coronets souped up and stamped with Super-Bee logos ... yeah, yeah, seen that. I did take a picture of one muscle car, a '68 Mercury Cyclone GT, just because I'd never seen one. Everyone I knew that had that kind of car had the Ford Torino version, which as far as I can see is identical. 

And then there was this:

The Perfect Driveway

I want one of each. Except I want them in black.

I moved on to the next museum, the Franklin Museum. I had never realised, somehow, that Franklins were air-cooled; I just always thought they were funny-looking. They didn't need a big radiator and all the machinery that pushes coolant around the engine. They were a little more expensive to build, consequently more expensive to buy, but they were excellent cars, especially if you lived in the Southwest, where cars tended to overheat. Franklins never overheat where there's air. 

(I'm reminded of my first trip to San Diego on Interstate 8, where the shoulder of the highway is lined with big tubs of water for radiators. And my first trip through Death Valley, in 1999, and all the cautions we heard about going back up to sea level: Watch your guage! Open the windows! Turn off the air conditioner! Pull over!)

So anyway; Franklins were always different looking. Odd. Owners were sensitive to the teasing they got, especially if they had one of the models that tended towards ugly. Dealers complained that the weird-looking styling of the front ends affected sales. They were probably right. But Franklin's head guy refused to abandon his form-follows-function philosophy, until he did, in 1925, when the new Franklins were suddenly adorned with a front end that looked like every other car on the road.

1928 Lincoln convertible sedan

After Franklin, Lincoln. The Lincoln Motor Company was started by Henry Leland, the same guy who started Cadillac more than ten years before. After a rough couple of years, it went belly-up and was bought in a foreclosure sale by Henry Ford. Ford gave it to his boy Edsel to run. The two Henry's had some history together: Henry L had been instrumental in forcing Henry F out of his first car company; now the shoe was on the other foot. It wasn't long before Henry F forced Henry L out of Lincoln. Edsel seemed to have a knack for the luxury car business, and within a decade Lincoln was playing with the Big Boys.

Lincolns had a rep for quality engineering, and Edsel had a good sense of what the luxury-car-buying public wanted. He was responsible for the Lincoln Zephyr, a very successful and stylistically bold line, and then the Continental, which started out elegant, then got even more elegant, then got ... well, maybe not ugly, exactly, but odd; and back and forth in a pattern that seems still ongoing. Of course, Edsel died somewhere in there, so he's only responsible for that first (elegant) Continental. 

At that point in my day, my phone's battery was on its last legs. I did go over to the Model A Museum, because I knew I wouldn't want to take any pictures there ... except I did, and will probably go back with a full battery tomorrow to do that.

2022 KC/MI Wander: Day 11

This is Part 9 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

Technology. Grrr.

This is what my GPS, Google Maps, did this morning: I had carefully marked out a series of seven stops, being mindful of the opening hours of the ones that mattered to me. Since the first of those didn't open until 10:30 (turned out it was actually 10:00, but never mind), I laid on a couple of timewasting stops exploring two historical districts along the way. So I'm driving. I pass an interesting looking Romanesque Revival building off to my left, and I think, hmmm, you'd think that would be in a historical district. But Google Maps took me right past it, and on down the highway until I got to the La Porte County Historical Society Museum. 

I took that opportunity to put the top down; I don't know why I hadn't done that already. It was a pretty day.

So I told Google Maps to "continue" -- go to the next destination. Obviously, I thought, I had mistaken the Historical Society Museum for a Historical District, or the web site I was consulting had. So: back on the road, and I'm driving, and I'm driving, and I'm turning this way and I'm turning that way, and then I pass a sign saying that I was leaving La Porte County. That's when I pulled over, because I knew that my first three scheduled stops were in La Porte County. I checked the email I'd sent myself with the route, and they were all listed there. I pulled it up anew on Google Maps and found that it had skipped the first two entirely, obviously thinking that I didn't really want to see those ol' historical districts; and the museum it took me to? That's where the Kelsing Automobile Collection is housed. And now I was halfway to South Bend.

That's what Google Maps did for me.

I got back to the first planned stop, where that Romanesque building was, and wandered around downtown La Porte, looking at the old buildings and seeing what there is to see. (Not a lot: buildings from the 1890s are pretty much the same everywhere; rare enough to evoke nostalgia but common enough to be disregarded.) Then I went to the Kesling Collection. (And just to gild the lily, Google Maps couldn't find it this time -- it directed me to a soybean field half a mile up the road and around the corner. If I hadn't already been there this morning, I might never have found it.)

Now, since then I haven't had an unexplained problem with it. I've used it for the rest of the day and it's done fine.

La Porte County Historical Society Museum

Dr Peter Kelsing built the building the museum is in to use as a car museum. But things change, and about 20 years ago he sold the building to the Historical Society, but a condition of the deal is that they would keep his 30-some-odd cars and various related items on display. The museum is three stories, and is absolutely crammed with stuff, including the good doctor's cars, and his airplane, and his snowmobile, and anything else he considers museum-worthy. He seems to have good judgment on that point, and indeed the rest of the museum display, despite being "just a local county museum" has plenty of stuff interesting to tourists from distant lands, like me. Not that I took the time to seriously browse through the non-car stuff in detail, but I did note that it is not just Mary Louise Jones's dress that she made for her cousin Adelie's second child's baptism. (Don't laugh; I've seen stuff like that in county museums.) 

 Daimler: a Jag in full dress

But back to the cars: They are mostly American made, of course, but ol' Doc Kesling apparently splashed some cash in foreign markets as well, on occasion. There's a Daimler from the 1960s, for example, and a couple of pre-War Citroens; a 1967 Amphicar (which might have been bought in this country; they were sold here, briefly); a 1950 Austin sedan; a '48 MG TC; and a bright red 1938 Mercedes Benz. There are, of course, many cars that you would see in any ol' car museum: the classics of automotive display. Duesenburg, Cord, Auburn and (naturally, being in Indiana) Studebaker are all represented. And the Model T's and T-birds and a few others that, pretty though they are, are the auto-museum equivalent of canned corn at the supermarket: if they didn't have it, you'd think less of the place, even though you're not there to get canned corn.

There are plenty of interesting cars on display, besides the foreign makes I mentioned. A 1903 Duryea; a 1903 Winton (in which Dr Kesling and his wife duplicated the vehicle's feat of driving from San Francisco to New York -- and it only took 40 days, compared to the 66 days it took in 1903). There's a 1931 American Austin, a 1960 Metropolitan, and a 1948 Playboy (which inspired the magazine's name). At five bucks to get in ($4 for me, because I've been 49 for so many years), the Kesling Collection is a bargain, and you get to see all that other stuff as well. I only budgeted an hour to see it, but actually spent a bit longer than that, and could easily have stayed for half a day.

From there I went to the National Studebaker Museum in South Bend (covering much of the same ground as before). It shares a building with the South Bend Historical Museum, which may be another fascinating place, but the two are at opposite ends of the building and there's a separate fee for the other museum. So I don't know. I was just there for the cars.

Studebaker started as wagon makers in the mid-19th Century, before the Civil War. Around 1900, one of the board members advocated building motorcars. He was outvoted and they stuck with wagons, but a couple of years later they came around to his way of thinking. The museum, which covers three floors, has its display arranged in chronological groups, and includes wagons, defense production and a bit about the Studebaker family. The basement is given over to something called "Visible Vehicle Storage," cars that are maybe not in good enough condition for a first-class museum, but are still part of the collection. 

Studebaker Hawk

Up until World War II, Studebakers looked pretty much like any other car on the road. They had a full line of vehicles, any of which could easily be mistaken for a Ford or a Chevy or a Buick. But after the war, Studebaker started to diverge in looks from other carmakers' products. They were the first company to completely re-design their vehicles, where the others simply updated pre-war designs. Studebaker made the distinctive 1948 Champion and then the 1952 Commander, which evolved stylistically into the Hawk line of cars for which the company is best remembered. They were longer and lower and the fastest cars on the road, though their slightly avant garde lines, with a vaguely European feel to them, weren't for everyone. As the 1960s approached, Studebaker was flailing, financially, and new designs like the Lark and the Avanti weren't enough to save the company; nor were mergers with other failing car companies like Packard. Studebaker ceased US production in 1963, and Canadian production in 1966. The last vehicles made in both factories are on the floor of the museum.

The last Studebaker made

Well. A hundred and twelve years, that's a pretty good run. I'm sure I won't go as long. My shareholders would never allow it.

From South Bend, I drove up into Michigan, to a glass studio in Benton Harbor that I'd been told about by someone at another glass studio. It was a small place, and near the end of the day pretty much deserted. But the woman working there gave me a quick tour and told me about their educational program for local high-school students. It was about what I'd expected but not what I'd hoped for. There were a few very attractive but very expensive grey vases done by one of the instructors, and some interesting student pieces. I went on to Kalamazoo, to the "big" studio downtown, which was just starting its monthly Art Hop. The glass on offer there was even more of a disappointment. There was a pretty blue and white set of sushi dishes -- a place setting for one -- but there was only the one, so I passed on it. Everything else was kitschy.

I apologise for how long it's take to put this post up; I know everyone is getting worried, waiting for this to drop. I'm sure social media is burning up with people asking when it will happen. I'm just guessing about that, of course: I'm not on social media. But the wi-fi at the crappy hotel I'm in is inadequate, and I'm having to use my phone as a hot spot, which means it's taken hours longer to edit and caption my pictures than it should, and every link in this post is the product of minutes in waiting. My Lord, what did we do before there was wi-fi?

2022 KC/MI Wander: Day 10

 

This is Part 8 of the blog post documenting my epic wandering around the middle part of the country. You really should read them in order. To that end, here's a link to Part One. At the bottom of each post, click the link for "Newer Post" at the bottom. And here is a link to ALL the pictures I took on this trip. Viewing them will require that you scroll through God knows how many pictures of parts of old cars, so you might want to just skip that altogether.

My first stop this morning was for breakfast, at the Red Apple in Dixon, Illinois. Good food, good service, good prices, and the place was clean. The only problem was that, since I had started my Google Maps instructions directly from my motel (in the email I'd sent myself) but actually started the drive from the restaurant, I seemed not to be on the right route. But once I followed the directions to the point where the two routes converged, everything was okay. 

Technology. Arrgh. I'll say no more.

Miners' monument

So I followed my planned route first to the memorial for the 289 miners who died in a mine fire in Cherry, Illinois about 120 years ago. The monument stands on the mass grave of the men and boys who died that day. They were mostly Italian-Americans, so half of me felt a sort of bond. 

Starved Rock

After that, I went off to Starved Rock State Park, along the Illinois River.  Pontiac was a chief of the Ottawa (or Odawa) tribe who was murdered in 1769 by people from the Illinois tribe. (He, like Black Hawk, also has a war named for him, but that plays no part in this story.) The Illinois indians had a village near the Illinois River; that village was attacked by the Ottawas (and their allies, the Potawatomis) in revenge for the murder, and its inhabitants took refuge on a high bluff overlooking the river. Rather than come down and be massacred, they slowly starved to death on top of their rock. That gave the rock the name Starved Rock, and it's now the centerpiece of a State Park.

When I got to the park, I followed the signs for the Visitors' Center. I turned off the park road into a vast parking lot, nearly empty except for lines of port-a-potties. I tooled around the lot, saw nothing that looked like a visitors' center, then made a driving tour of the rest of the park. River Area; Lodge; Campgrounds; Overflow Parking Areas (several of them). Still saw nothing, so I went back to the original location. This time I saw it, hidden behind the first row of port-a-potties and a bus. So I parked and went up to find out where Starved Rock was. There was a map in a signboard that told me it was an "easy paved path with two staircases" and a little over half a mile's walk.

view from the rock

It turned out that that "easy paved path with two staircases" takes you up to a boardwalk that goes around the rock. It has nice views of the river, but otherwise is nothing worth seeing. Oh, and those staircases? Five stories' worth.

While I was up there, I noticed a belvedere on the next bluff, not too far away, from which I figured I could get a decent photo of Starved Rock. So off I went. Got up there, got my picture, came back down. Just for fun, I counted the steps: 303. That's three hundred and three steps up, and three hundred and three steps down, very slowly. I should have made that trek before I developed arthritis in my right knee. (Which, by the way, if I only have arthritis in my right knee, why is it that it's my left knee that always hurts? Just one of life's little mysteries.)

Naturally, I sweated up a storm. Good thing I'm by myself in the car.

As I drove to my next stop, in Pontiac, Illinois (named for the murdered Ottawa chief, not the car) I recognised that I was passing out of the pleasant rolling countryside and into the flat, boring, Indiana-style landscape, with straight roads and pointless stop signs. 

Once in the town of Pontiac, it was easy to find the Pontiac-Oakland Car Museum: it's right across from the courthouse. The town provides free wi-fi in the downtown area (that is, the blocks facing the courthouse; basically anywhere that's close enough to hear the uninterrupted Greatest Hits of the 1970s and 1980s that play from a series of speakers all around the courthouse). I decided to grab lunch first, something light, so I stepped into a restaurant on the corner. On the Specials board there was a listing for Chicken Pot Pie Soup, which sounded interesting; I like chicken pot pie. I asked the waitress about it; she claimed that the restaurant is "known for it," so I ordered it. (She did admit that she's "not a pie person" and has never tried it herself.) It wasn't bad, but an hour and a half later I thought I was going to be sick. Literally: I went to the public library and stood in the rest room waiting to barf. Didn't, though, so when the urge subsided I left. Did not feel 100% though for the rest of the day.

'57 Chevy Artcar

By the way, you might remember that some time back there was a craze going around the country for painting uniform sculptures to raise funds for various charities. I know in San Antonio we did cows. A town in Kansas that I went to did miniature Swedish horses. Somewhere I've seen buffalo done up in all kinds of arty ways and scattered around town, and I seem to recall a town that had armadillos; I don't remember where that was. And Winnipeg, Manitoba, did polar bears, so it was an international craze. Well, the town of Pontiac joined the craze by having artists paint ... Chevrolets. Go figure. 

The Pontiac-Oakland Car Museum is free to visit. That is the only thing in its favour. It's a fairly small space, and the display consists of only 16 cars, a few cases of Pontiac-related memorabilia, and a small gift shop. The information given about the cars ranges from none at all to the bare minimum. Most cars have a sign that gives the year and model, the number made, and the name of the owner. The rest have no signage at all. The museum makes no effort at educational purpose, despite having quite the impressive looking library in its space. Presumably all those books and papers contain information about Pontiac and Oakland cars. The displayed vehicles are shown in such a way that only a part of them can be seen. You can't walk around them at all. 

1978 Pontiac Phoenix Hatchback

Consider the 1978 Pontiac Phoenix Hatchback, set up with a tent exploding from its rear end. What does that look like from the back? Was it an available option for buyers of the car? (It looks like it might have been.) What would such a thing add to the price of the car? How many people sprung for the tent-thing? In 1978, the American auto industry was still recovering from the 1973 Gas Crisis, and the introduction of regulations requiring catalytic converters. I remember how crappy American cars were in those years. Hell, I owned one of them (a '76 Monte Carlo, which, despite its limitations, I loved). Did the '78 Phoenix manage to introduce anything innovative? (The tent was an oddity, but not an innovation; VW Microbuses had had tents built in long before, and I've seen similar things on cars going back all the way to the 1930s, if not before that.) 

Or the 1960 Pontiac Ventura. A beautiful car, displayed in the milieu of a service bay. Don't you know I'd love to be able to walk around and see what those back lights look like? How the fins are treated? The rear bumper, the trunk lock? Small things, and yes, I'm sure I've seen all those things before, on the many previous 1960 Pontiac Venturas that have passed through my life since that year. (My God, that's very nearly my entire life.)

And what the Hell is a Pontiac Firefly? Was it just so supremely unsuccessful that I never saw one, or knew of its existence in the world? And what's the relationship of Pontiac Motor Division to Oakland? Why do they share a museum? (I actually have some idea of that, but how many visitors to the museum don't?) How much effort would it take to answer these basic questions? Too much, it seems, for the Pontiac-Oakland Car Museum. 

I left, feeling actually pissed off that I'd gone so far out of my way to see that museum. Never mind the other places I went to; the car museum was my reason for what was in essence a half-day detour from where I'm going. And for sixteen cars and almost no information. (It certainly didn't help that, just yesterday, I'd visited such a large and well-presented car collection in Coralville, Iowa.) The fact that it was free to visit is small consolation for the time wasted.

I was almost out of cash, so I'd found a Chase branch close to my planned route, in a town near Joliet, and plugged that into my Google Maps route. (on the bright side, that detour got me 40 miles without a turn, so I could play the music on my USB for a while without worry.) It took me to the entrance of a subdivision six miles out of my way. I looked the address up again, put it in again, and this time it took me to the correct location, about a mile farther down the road.

Technology. Grrr. 

After that I made only one stop, to see a statue in Munster, Indiana. After having driven to that location, I have the idea that Hell is very much like the Chicago suburbs.

Click on "Newer Post" below to continue reading this gripping travelogue.