The Henry Ford Museum in Michigan - 11/21/12

We had a free day before Thanksgiving and Donald was off work.  He asked if we'd like to go to the Henry Ford Museum and we jumped at the chance!

Welcome to the Henry Ford Museum

That's what I get for asking Theresa to look into the sun to take a picture.

Thanks for the invite Donald!

It's not just cars at the Ford Museum.  They've got a Lego exhibit of lots of famous buildings.
Here's the Burj Khalifa, the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2717 feet.  The Lego model stands over 18 feet tall!

Here's Ford Field where the Detroit Lions play.

Some famous buildings from Chicago.

Further in the museum there is a whole Lego city with trains going around it.

They had lots of little things hidden around it.  Frodo and Sam were battling a troll, Darth Vader was riding a horse, Santa was giving away presents.

And Peter Parker in one of his first spider suits.

And on the other side of the city we see Spidey swinging around.

They had a car you could sit in.

Ford was instrumental in the war effort.  Here Theresa's trying to teach me some lessons.

What are we learning today?  Duck and Cover.

That's right.

A few generators.  This is a small one.

And this one was so big, they moved it into place and then built the whole museum around it.

They had planes here as well.  Here's a model of the Wright Flyer.

And the original Fokker Trimotor, the first plane to fly over the North Pole.

They celebrated the famous wing walkers and bi-planes.

Then it was on to the cars.  Here's a 1931 Bugatti.  It's beautiful and it was huge!  I think the whole thing was longer than Donald's Excursion..

A 1931 Deusenberg.

Surprisingly Henry Ford's wife didn't drive a Ford!  She didn't like having to get outside the vehicle and hand start it.  Instead she used a 1914 Detroit Electric car that ran on batteries and got 241 miles on a single charge!

This "car" called Goldenrod held the land speed record for an amazing 27 years!  It went 409mph and had 4 separate motors in it.

Some of the "safety" seats for children throughout the years.

Along with cars, they have some huge trains.

This one is meant to clear snow off the tracks, and it's huge!

Along with a model train.

They also had quite a collection of presidential cars.  This one belonged to Teddy Roosevelt.

Harry Truman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt used this car.

Dwight D. Eisenhower's bubble-top.

There is so much history here.  This is John F. Kennedy's actual car that he was riding in on the day he was assassinated.  Wow.

And this is Ronald Reagan's car.  The exact same car he was pushed into shortly after being shot.

The bullet damage on the left rear door has been repaired, but this was the actual car.  Wow again.

And it was a little random, but they even had the chair that Abraham Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot in Ford's Theater.

And one of the more interesting cars here was the Wiener Mobile!

We could have spent much more time here but we had to leave to meet everyone else.  We got tickets for the whole family (or as many wanted to go here instead of hunting - Ethan and Tyler) to go see Wreck It Ralph.

 You've got to love theaters that have free refills on popcorn and 50 cent refills on Icees.

We all thought the movie was pretty cute.  Another good job by Disney!