For eight dollars and a trip to Denver, Colorado, you can take a look at the largest steam locomotive in the world as well as famed pilot Amelia Earhart’s Gold Bug Kissel (which happens to be her car), as well as 500 other exhibits, all at the Forney Transportation Museum . Originally, the museum focused on cars, but grew over time to include all transportation vehicles, using the slogan, “Anything on Wheels.” You’ll find here “Big Boy,” the planet’s biggest steam train as well as railcars, cabooses, antique cars and buggies, fire engines, aircraft, a cable car, steam tractors and motorcycles, bicycles and tricycles, and so on.
The featured exhibit is the 1923 Kissel Speedster, also known as the Gold Bug, which aviator Earhart owned from 1924 to 1929. She first bought the roadster when she didn’t want to travel by train across the country. Those who knew her said she speed around town in the car fairly recklessly, and Earhart admitted that she learned first how to fly before she ever learned how to drive a car.
Cross country travel in the early part of the last century was not routine, with poor roads. The road trip from Los Angeles to Boston covered 7,000 miles, and by the time they traveled from Los Angeles to Boston, the car was covered with stickers from the spots they’d visited. The car, also known as the Kissel Kar, was made by Louis Kissel and sons from the Kissel Motor Car Company, which began in 1907.
While Amelia Earhart disappeared on her attempt to fly around the world in 1937 (and declared dead two years later), her canary yellow Gold Bug is still with us, and one of the sights Colorado has to offer its visitors.
When you arrange a visit to Denver, check out this site ; it’s good not only for a place to stay while you’re checking out the Forney Transportation Museum, but a place to find any number of hotels around the state.
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