Don Garlits Classic Car Museum

I am late in sharing these pictures from our Labor Day trip, but better late than never!  This is the second part to the Don Garlits museums.  There are two separate museums, the first being the drag racing and this is the second one: the Classic Car Museum.  Both were fabulous.  A fellow classic car lover told me that he'd been there five years ago and that the collection had really grown since then.

I was very impressed with what was there.  I could have spent much longer in this museum than we did!

I was amused at some point to overhear a couple discussing a particular car.  The guy was sharing what kind of a car it was.  The lady said she knew, her dad had one.  He asked her if she really knew about it?  She told him again that her dad had one.  He nodded and dropped it.  I'm guessing he might have thought that meant she did know about it in the way a guy would want to know about it.  I would suspect it is more likely that she was simply saying she knew as much as she ever wanted to and more just by having a dad that owned one.  Which means she probably hardly knew a thing about it in guy world.

We demonstrated this same man/woman dynamic with me trying to take hundreds of pictures of the pretty cars while Nathan gave me in depth lessons on engines and exhaust systems.  I can now tell you which kind of engine our truck has and how exactly it operates.  That will come in handy because the last time some guy asked me about it I told him the only thing I knew about the engine of our truck was that it was really big and loud.  He couldn't tell if I was an idiot or joking so he politely just walked away.  I hope I run into him again so I can let him know that a trip to the car museum fixed all of that!

Living the life in interesting Florida!

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!