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COPYRIGHT 2004 Ehlert Publishing Group
"C'mon, c'mon!" I want to shriek! Just 100 yards away stands motorcycle Mecca, but my travel companions are messing around with jackets and keys. I grit my teeth and smile vapidly but I'm thinking cattle prods and ankle-nipping sheep dogs.
Finally done with their rituals we walk (I force myself not to skip like a kid with keys to the chocolate factory) toward the 30-foot-tall, curved-glass facade of Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. Inside the inner sanctum, 8-foot-wide concrete corkscrew ramps connect three concrete floors surrounding a vast central open area. In the center of this pavilion, a dump-truck-size glass elevator car glides up and down a semi-enclosed shaft. Only thin stainless-steel guy wires stretched between steel posts separate my eyes from brilliantly colored vintage sheet metal and fiberglass, chrome and polished aluminum. Three-foot-diameter concrete columns support floors stacked at least 20 feet above each other. Light pours in from the glass rooftop. Everything is gray on gray; nothing detracts from the shiny, twowheeled beauties.
To my right are bikes whose names I'm only vaguely familiar with: Erie, Shaw, Wall, Marsh, Reading Standard and Brough Superior (just like the one Lawrence of Arabia got whacked on)....
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