Living the Dream at the National Corvette Museum

Our next two days were all about Corvettes. And Penny’s return to the place of her birth. Bowling Green, Kentucky. Bowling Green is the home of the Corvette assembly plant, and the National Corvette Museum.

We had two important things planned for our two days in Bowling Green. The first was the opportunity for Bob to drive a C8 Corvette (not Penny, but one of theirs) at the NCM Motorsports Park, and then to spend the day at the Museum. As you can imagine, this was a big deal for Bob.

The NCM Motorsports Park is an actual racetrack that serves as an event facility for car enthusiasts as well as a high-performance driving school. Bob was booked to drive a Corvette for 4 laps around the 3.2-mile course, following a track professional. Bob selected a ceramic grey Corvette (looked off-white to me) and Mitch, a Corvette guy and ex-race car driver drove a blue one. Mitch explained that he would lead and tailor his speed to how close Bob followed, leaving the speed up to Bob. I decided (wisely) not to ride as a passenger, however, they did let me climb up into the tower where they flag the cars as they pass the start of a race. Bob had a great time and pushed his C8 to 120mph. Then he walked over to the assembly plant to get a picture of the newly minted C8’s in their wraps.

I wasn’t sure I would be very interested in the Museum, but it turned out to hold my attention for as long as Bob wanted to hang out. It was fun to look at all the beautiful cars and read about the history of the Corvette, since they started in 1953. This was just one year after I was born, so it ended up being about the growth and popularity of these cars in the United States of my youth. On February 12, 2014, a sinkhole opened in the museum itself and 8 corvettes fell to their doom. Those cars were displayed in the museum and the history of the event as well as the repair of the museum afterwards was detailed in numerous exhibits. Of course, there was also a Corvette Café with burgers and a terrific chocolate coffee malted shake.

One of the things that caught my eye was the exhibit of cars and art from Ed (Big Daddy) Roth. Ed's drawings of animated cartoons in cars was something I remembered as a kid. The most notable was Rat Fink, a pretty scary-looking character, that personified the age of the hot rod. Ed was apparently also quite a car designer and several cars from his collection were displayed.

We had help from Keeley and Lauren, who man the FotoFX site in the Museum, and they took lots of pictures of us and Penny to commemorate the event.

It was a long day, but lots of fun, and Bob got to hang out with lots of other Corvette nuts. Now it's on to Memphis.