The National Corvette Museum Rocks!

Thursday, May 19, 2022

Hi Blog!

Because we are racing back to Virginia to spend Memorial Day with our kids and grandson, we only have a couple days to cross Kentucky. Yesterday, we immersed ourselves in Bluegrass Music. Today, we took a drive up to Bowling Green to visit the National Corvette Museum.

Our friends, Ginny and Eric toured the museum back in 2017. Here is a link to their blog with lots of cool car photos.

You may remember when the National Corvette Museum made the news on February 12, 2014, when a giant sink hole swallowed 8 of their one-of-a-kind cars. Security footage showed the cars sliding into the abyss.

In an effort to make lemonade out of lemons, the museum salvaged the cars, repaired the sinkhole and reopened the museum, complete with a new interactive exhibit documenting the entire process. The image below shows the museum floor and the cave that opened up and swallowed the cars. If you look closely, you can see how the cars landed on top of each other.

Construction crews had to remove giant boulders from the hole, before filling it with 4,000 tons of stone, installed support beams and trusses, rebuilt the entrance doors and other infrastructure improvements, and finally installed a new floor. The new floor includes a trap door with a ladder leading to the bottom of the cave, so crews can monitor the stability of the repairs.

As part of the sinkhole exhibit, you enter inside a mini-cave for a virtual simulation of the collapse. It was wild watching the cave slowly form, the floor of the museum give way and the cars slide down. After watching the simulation, we walked out onto the repaired floor of the museum. 

Six of the 8 cars that ended up in the cave were repaired. They are still working on number 7 and number 8 is now part of the exhibit.

One wing of the museum is devoted to model Corvettes. They had several displays in different scales. They even had a display of Hot Wheels. We later learned that the museum is gearing up for a big summer programs called Hot Wheels, Race to Win. This behind-the-scenes look at the thrilling world of racing investigates the scientific process for designing super-fast cars and helps families who have the need for speed understand how it is achieved. The exhibit was created by The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis in partnership with Mattel. Looks like it would be a lot of fun for kids.

There is no doubt that Corvette owners love their cars. However, when the Corvette first came out in 1953, only 183 of 300 were sold. It was a slow start for a car that would go on to break speed records.

Things do pick up for Corvette. By 1958, the Corvette received a body and interior freshening which included a longer front end with quad headlamps, bumper exiting exhaust tips, a new steering wheel, and a dashboard with all gauges mounted directly in front of the driver and a more powerful engine.

The Corvette has become widely known as "America's Sports Car." Automotive News wrote that, after being featured in the early 1960s television show Route 66, "the Corvette became synonymous with freedom and adventure," ultimately becoming both "the most successful concept car in history and the most popular sports car in history."

If truth be told, we really didn't come to see the cars. We came for the sinkhole. The interactive displays takes you right down in the cave; they have samples of the different rock formations. A 360-degree video lets you look all around. However, our nephew, Michael Davis, would be disappointed if we didn't include a couple cool cars in our blog. 

Mike, these are for you.

In the lobby, are all the current models that are available for purchase. For $73,000, this little blue bundle could be yours.

We leave you with the age old question: which is the true sports car?

The lesson of this blog entry?  Not all of our adventures are in wilderness, but you can be sure all of our adventures will be WILD!