Are you a collector? You know…cars, baseball cards, dolls, children’s pedal cars, antique cash registers, knives, pianos, Disney items, golf clubs, airline barf bags, vinyl albums, or out board motors? If so, the Tallahassee Automobile Museum was curated for you!
Let’s start with the obvious, calling it an automobile museum is a huge misnomer! Yes, there are plenty of classic cars here (over 160 of them), but it is so much more and from that list above, the only thing we didn’t see was a barf bag collection and that might only be because we didn’t allow enough time to visit.
This 100,000 sq. foot facility is an overwhelming mix of shiny garage, history lesson, and collector’s obsession! We were absolutely gobsmacked as we wandered around the seemingly endless aisles with new and unusual finds around every corner, like a vampire killing kit, a Batman display, and a guitar signed by Elvis.
Goggle describes the museum as “Car-themed institution housing Abraham Lincoln’s carriage & Batmobiles, plus Steinway pianos” but the best description I found was from the Orlando Sentinel that said that this museum “overwhelms the kid in you”. This is exactly how we felt…like little kids distracted in a toy or candy store, darting around in awe of each new display and by the end of the day, exhausted from a wonderful afternoon of overstimulation.
Definitely check this one out if you’re in Tallahassee!
Since Tallahassee is also the capitol Florida, after staying overnight at the auto museum (it’s a Harvest Host), we took a tour of the capitol.
The historic capitol, sometimes called “The Old Capitol,” was built in 1845. When they decided to build a new 22-story capitol in the 1960s, they had planned to demolish the old one in the late 1970s. Saved by citizen actions, the Old Capito was restored to its 1902-glory and displays were added about the Florida’s important political history, of which, I took note of none except
- A December 17, 1902, assassination attempt of Governor William Sherman Jennings by an inmate from the Georgia Insane Asylum and
- An October 1923 speed typing demonstration by Albert Tangora who set the manual keyboard record that held until 1998.
The interior, compared to other capitols we’ve seen, was not nearly as ornate nor as colorful.
Although the exterior of the new capitol is austere and constructed like Soviet era housing, it has a wonderful open air observation deck on the 22nd floor which is worth visiting.
Tallahassee is the largest city in the Florida Panhandle and the eighth-largest in Flordia. It’s home to Florida State University and many museums, which we didn’t visit.
Of the two things we saw in Tallahassee, go to the Tallahassee Automobile Museum and feel like a kid again.
