Motorcycles

2025-04-05
Birmingham, AL

Today's activity was a trip to the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum just inside of Birmingham. It holds the Guinness Record as the largest motorcycle museum, with about 1,000 bikes on display (and several hundred more that rotate in). Fun fact: Birmingham used to known as the "Pittsburgh of the South" due to its iron production.

These aren't like the Carvana car vending machines that rotate a bike to the bottom. That would be cool.

I spent a few hours wandering around the museum. It's kind of challenging to decide what is picture-worthy; pretty much all of them are, which also means none of them stand out. I picked a few that caught my eye, but you may have been fond of a completely different set of bikes. Oh, and I didn't take pics of all the spec sheets for the bikes, so your guess is as good as mine as to what they are.

Not sure I'd want a full head of steam there...

80's Hondas were my bike for a while, but not these. I'm still not cool enough for these.

I actually repaired one of these for a friend. The $600 valve cover protected the $80 grip from scraping the ground.

As it turns out, today is not only Saturday, but also the second day of MotoAmerica, a motorcycle racing event at the track. This meant a fair amount of traffic, tons of motorcycles outside the museum, and limited parking. However, there were bikes racing on the track and the museum has a bridge out over the track that I took a few pictures from. For the camera nerds, I was trying to stop the action rather than get a little blur, but at 1/500 second shutter speed it's not quite perfect. I probably needed 1/1000 to 1/2000. On the other hand, I did expect that pretty much all the shots of different bikes would look pretty much the same, and they do. Unless you know the rider or bike, any of my shots describe the moment.

After the museum, it was a scheduled laundry afternoon so I did that. In hind sight, I should have driven the hour to tomorrow's destination and checked out Cheaha State Park before the rain and driven back to this hotel tonight. However, I have either a cold or bad allergies (pollen is everywhere) so I'm going to blame that for not figuring it out.