More Museums

Jewellery & the V8 Hotel: 13 August 2011

From now on, you will find Phil’s comments in blue.

A short drive this morning to Pforzheim for the Schmuckmuseum (jewellery); the most fantastic collection of jewellery we’ve ever seen, including one man’s collection of pocket watches, and stunning Art Nouveau pieces. You will notice that the jewellery museum is called “Schmuck”, that is most appropriate as only a schmuck would take his wife to a museum showing the best examples of world class expensive jewellery  Plenty of ooh’s and ah’s as Laurette walked from display to display, actually, even I was impressed and thought it well worthwhile.

Pforzheim was also the destination for Bertha Benz when she set off on her historic 

journey to visit grandma in 1888 in the Carl Benz Motorwagen.

Next stop was outside Stuttgart ( at Boblingen ) where we stayed 2 nights at the V8 Hotel, an old Zepplin airfield building which is now a car centre for high performance and collector vehicles. Cars of all eras including 5 new / nearly new Morgans for sale or lease.

We are in the “drive in” room, foot of bed is a red Cadillac, complete with working headlights & other drive-in memorabilia.   There’s a large flat screen on the wall opposite the foot of the bed to complete the “drive in” experience.

A wonderful dinner at the complex where Lamborghinis and Ferraris drive in and out as you dine.  It’s also a storage facility and service centre for your” toy” car

Still more Museums:  14 August 2011

First stop was the Mercedes Benz Museum. An interesting shaped building where you start at the top and curve around the floors following the history of the company. Interspersed amongst the cars lots of original documents & memorabilia was on display. To put everything in context, the displays showed what else was happening around the world at that particular time. One of the best museums we’ve ever seen. Next stop was the Porsche Museum. What can I say…..a museum for boys & their toys but not much of interest to anyone else, whereas the Mercedes one was family oriented. 

Mercedes museum, fantastic, really well done, building cost $280m euros.

Porsche museum also good but focused solely on cars, not placing them in historical and social context as per Mercedes.;  I was disappointed that the early 911 was not represented.

By the way, weather is still not good with rain or drizzle most days.

Bosch Archives: 15 August 2011

Thanks to Dietrich we had a wonderful tour of the Bosch exhibition & the archives and were also presented with a copy of the book published for the 125^th anniversary taking place this year.

For those who are not aware, my late father worked for Bosch Australia for 30 years or so and we have been collecting Bosch garagenalia etc for Garage Mahal.  Bosch are also now collecting and we need to be careful not to bid against each other on ebay  We will keep in touch with Bosch archives and have their invitation to swap with them if either of us have duplicates etc.

It was still raining and we travelled across 4 countries today, mostly in drizzle: Germany, Switzerland, Austria & Italy. Stayed the night at Scuol in Switzerland up in the alps. The hotel had a wonderful view.