Car museums rule. If you haven’t checked one out ever, do it. I’ve got a few underneath my belt: the Ulster Transport Museum in Cultra, Northern Ireland; the LeMay-America’s Car Museum in Tacoma, Washington; even The Auto Collections in Las Vegas, Nevada before it closed in 2017. Short of trying to get up close and personal with lots for sale at the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale auction (word to the wise: don’t), a museum is the best place to go if you want to absolutely geek out at some classics and very interesting bits of machinery that you would otherwise have no chance of getting anywhere near. You can learn the history of the car or simply marvel at the design in the flesh. Where else will you learn that a early 1930s Packard is comparable to a full-size SUV in scale, or that a Lancia 037 Rally is roughly three inches longer than my right foot?

One museum that’s on my bucket list is the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California. It’s not so much about the fact that it’s filled to the brim with cars, that’s appreciable on it’s own regardless, but because of how the museum came to be in the first place. When I started deep-diving into magazines as a kid, the big names…Hot Rod, 4Wheel and Off-Road, and Motor Trend, among others…all had Robert E. Petersen’s name attached to them via the company that he had built up since the January 1, 1948 edition of Hot Rod Magazine. I ate up the printed word as if it was manna. So when the museum was founded in 1994, it was etched into the list of “must see” attractions. I’ve been in the Los Angeles area twice since then: I drove through the utterly hellish traffic while towing a car in a dysfunctional convoy move that the Army demanded I make in 2005 and I drove close enough to get a fantastic view of the lights of the city while driving to my hotel from the 2017 March Meet. I’ve never been near the Petersen. And I’m f*cking jealous of Brian Scotto in ways I dare not print for what he got to pull off recently. Check out the first of what has to be a multi-part series coming down the pike of cool stuff from inside those walls…