Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing

Since it was an extra long weekend, we both were able to pick a thing to go and see/do and then we picked one together.  My pick was the Drag Racing Museum that was nearby.  I have been excited about this museum since we got here.  I love all things to do with cool cars of any type.  Nathan is a little less enthusiastic about them.  When it comes to them being in a museum, it works out perfectly though because it is the only kinds of museums that I want to spend as long in the museum as Nathan does.

While he reads every single written word in the museum, I look at every single thing on the car that I think is cool.  Then I take pictures of every single thing I think is cool.  Which means I end up with way more pictures than is reasonable.  Then I go home and look at them...over and over again.  I really love cool cars.

This particular museum was founded by Big Daddy Don Garlits.  His bio is extremely impressive.  His cars were extremely impressive.  The museum was extremely impressive.  We had a great time visiting this place!

There is not a lot of information about the museum online, so I did not know just how much would be here.  I was hoping there would be enough that we would feel it was worth the time and money.  It went way beyond that, having far more there than we expected and it was laid out very nicely making it very easy to learn a lot along the way.  Alongside of the displays were posters, signage and even movie clips.

There was information about the drivers, some of which were women.  There were stories about the times when the reality of how dangerous this is reared its ugly head.  At one point Garlits had an injury that sliced through his foot, tearing his foot in half.  One of the outcomes of that injury was some engineering design changes such as moving the engine behind the driver instead of in front of the driver.  There were pieces and parts of the cars that had been in accidents.

And of course there were rows and rows of the awesome cars!  We highly recommend this neat museum if you are in the Ocala area.  There are two museums on site, I will come back and share about the other one after I get the pictures cropped and edited.  That might take days because I took even more pictures at the other museum!  Living the life in interesting Florida!