Sept 12th

"Barbie" parked on the street

I am starting to write this while sitting in the GMC on a city street and within sight of the Auburn, Indiana town square.  The WiFi signal I am using is being provided for free by the town of Auburn.  I don’t know the details but the guy at the camp ground about 5 miles away on the other side of the highway said it is available there too.  We are really starting to like Indiana.

"Turn of the Century"

So far today we have toured the town – it is pretty small – and taken photos of many of the sculptures in the “Sculptures on the Square” exhibit.  This is the last weekend that they will be exhibited and there is a walk/run event going on in town so there are quite a few other people doing the same thing as we are.  As you will see in the photos, there was a woman and her daughter that were taking posed photos at each of the statues – she, the mother, is in several of my photos – I couldn’t resist taking her picture too.  It is the mom’s idea, she wants to outdo the daughter who did the same thing at the last exhibit three years ago.

1927 International Harvester

After the sculpture visit we headed for NATMUS – the National Auto and Truck Museum which is right behind the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg museum and on the same property.  It is an interesting and pretty typical auto museum except that it displays heavy trucks like semi-tractors, and older heavy duty work trucks.  They are trying to specialize in the old International Harvester brand of trucks since that was made in this area but almost gone now.

GM Futurliner

For the GMCers that read this, there was a little exhibit about the GM Futurliner – that was the huge motorhome-like vehicle that GM used to provide a traveling marketing show.  Futurliner #10 was donated to the museum in about 1996 and was pretty much a basket case.  The museum did not have room for such a large vehicle and, in 1999, a man named Don Mayton wanted to take on the restoration job as a volunteer project. They made an arrangement they call their “Partner Program”.  The museum owns the Futurliner but it is in Michigan and has been restored with the help of lots of folks.  Visit their web site at www.futurliner.org.

Here is a slide show of the rest of the photos from Auburn today.  Don’t forget to click the little box at the bottom right so you can get a better look at the photo.