Layover

I was in beautiful San Francisco this weekend. I spent way too much time delayed and held over in Houston, but at least I got a postcard map:

*Think of this post as a layover/delay until I can get back to blogging biz.

The Things in AZ

Things have been really rainy here in Memphis. A somber week. I thought I'd just put up some more Arizona snaps from the trip.

The Olds Days

On my last visit to Michigan we went to the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum in Lansing.  Roughly 31% of my childhood/coming-of-age memories are somehow associated with the Cutlass so I was so excited to check this museum out. 

It may have been around awhile but we learned from a volunteer that the museum was under new direction and that they have hopes of it being of a Henry Ford level, By the way, if you haven't been to either of these museums you must go. If you don't know the history of the automobile you dont know America. But that is easy for me to say because I was raised in Michigan where everyone was somehow connected to at least one of the big three and I knew how to identify the production year of a camero from its headlights by the time I was ten. Thanks big bro! I have continued to develop this skill and hope to make it into a gameshow someday. 

The R.E. Olds Transportation Museum is on the Motorcities Passport Program, so that makes it even better for a National Park Passport enthusiast like myself. 

The place itself is lacking a bit of narrative (I like a museum map and a brochure/bio) so you never really get the whole story of RE's life or how things, like the cars, came to be and how things came to and end (Oldsmobile stopped production in 2004), but what it lacks in story, it makes up for in metal:

I spared you some of the photos of the earlier cars and skipped straight to the muscle. Grand National! Glory days!

I loved the group photos of all the folks that worked on the lines:

I wonder what happened to this rebel dude wearing the Lou Reed shirt?

To top it all off, the gift shop had vintage postcards from GM dealers:

*I like to imagine that 72 cutlass smashing a fixed-gear bike. Wait, I am totally kidding. I love bikes very much.