| On Saturday, January 15, 2000 Tom Rooney and I
drove to Stuttgart. We had heard good things about the car museums there. We
met our objective of visiting both the Mercedes and Porsche Museums. Both companies
have factories in Stuttgart. The Mercedes Museum was by far
the best, occupying an entire building on the Daimler-Chrysler site. The admission
was free and they have mint condition cars covering the entire history of the company from
1886 to present day.
After the Mercedes Museum, the Porsche Museum was somewhat of
disappointment. Not that the Porsche Museum was bad, it just was not on the same
level as Mercedes. They had maybe 20 cars that occupied one room. If you
look at the pictures you'll see what I'm talking about.
I took pictures of every single car in both museums are there are some
really good shots. The Mercedes pictures all have captions with the dates because I
was able to buy a book with the facts to match up with the pictures afterwards. The
Porsche museum didn't have a book, so no captions for their cars.
Other than go to the car museums, we didn't do much else besides
eat pizza and drink some Dinkel Acker beer (we have yet to find a bad beer in Germany) and
walk up and around a vineyard in the middle of the city.
From what little we saw of the city, Stuttgart is a fairly modern,
mostly industrial city. It's fairly modern because it was bombed very heavily in
WWII. The terrain is hilly with vineyards right in the middle of the city, which
makes for a very nice contrast. We had a nice day for our trip. There aren't
any pictures of Stuttgart because it was a hazy day and visibility was not good.
On the drive down, we saw a lot of evidence of the terrible
windstorm that came through France and Germany in December 1999. In southern
Germany, there were a large number of downed and snapped trees that reminded us of
hurricane Hugo in Charlotte. And that was in Germany. France got the worst.
Fun trip. Saw lots of cars. Took too many pictures.
Next time I'll pace myself.
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