Odds & Ends

Car Museums

I took a little road trip in September. My first stop was the Cadillac Fall Festival at the Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners, Michigan. It was a beautiful, cool fall day -- perfect for wandering around outdoors and looking at cars. The museum is really nice, displaying more than Cadillacs. It houses a great collection of American cars. If you've followed me at all on Facebook (which I'm no longer on), you know I have a thing for 60s vintage Cadillacs.

After spending a few hours looking at Cadillacs I headed south to Auburn, Indiana. I visited the Auburn / Cord / Duesenberg Museum. This museum is stunning. It's housed in the former administrative building for Auburn Motors. There is another museum behind it that occupies some of the manufacturing and R&D facilities. I'm not a huge fan of cars from the 1930s, but I enjoyed the museum anyway. I really liked the Cord 812 - the second front-wheel drive car produced in America.

Illinois Waterway

I took a drive to Ottawa, IL and visited the Illinois Waterway Visitor Center. It has a so-so display about the waterway, but it has an excellent viewing area to watch boats and barges move through the lock there. I first saw pleasure boats headed downriver to the Mississippi. There were quite a few in the lock. The boat nearest me was a sailboat and the couple aboard told us they had sailed all the way across the Atlantic from Sweden! They had been on the boat for over a year and weren't sure how much longer they would be sailing. They were headed south down the Mississippi - and that seemed the extent of their future planning. After the pleasure boats went through a tug pushing a barge headed up the river, toward Chicago.