Old friends and very old motorcycles

Today we got together with Kate and Robert at the Barber Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. Kate and Robert are among the first people we know when we moved to Iowa. Ann and Kate both started their graduate program in Landscape Architecture in the same year and become best friends with their countless hours together in the studio. It has been four years since the last we saw each other in Ames and they have moved to Mississippi shortly after our move to Georgia.




So this weekend we decided to meet half-way in Alabama and I get a chance the visit the Barber Motorcycle Museum. The museum is really great in almost all aspects (other than that you don't get to ride the bikes there). The building is beautiful and the collection is amazing, from the earliest to the latest motorcycles in history. I'm also very happy to see that a Kawasaki Ninja 250 is included in the exhibition.



Although a Honda NSR 150 is nowhere to be found, they do have a Honda NSR 125 in exhibition.




There are some very interesting bikes in their collection, such as this one with a beautiful wooden sidecar:


This one for riding on icy road:


Two from Michael Jordon's team (I don't know he was into motorcycle racing):





Folding scooters:




This one that I've no idea how to ride:




One more great thing about the museum is that you can see a part of the racing track next to the building (a tight U-turn). They happened to have a event going on today (don't know if it's a race or just a track day) and we get to see a lot of bikes racing down the track. All kids got very excited to see that, David keeps jumping up and down in the stroller whenever a bike passed by. He also complains a lot and keeps pointing to the track whenever we moved away from the windows. It's great that he's showing such good potential, we probably can have our track days together pretty soon. :)