Day 12: Stiftung Museum
Today we were headed to Wolfsburg for a private tour at the Stiftung Museum so after an early breakfast with Tom and Terry Reay we headed out. We arrived in plenty of time for our scheduled tour and found Dave and Pat already there. They told us about their great trip through Switzerland and Austria while we waited. Jim Maljanian showed up just in time and we went in to meet with our guide. The tour started with the early Beetle stuff and then circled around through the Busses and other then a bunch of really unusual one offs before turning our attention to the Ghias. Richard spent some time studying the details of the early T14s there before I was able to draw them over to the T34 prototypes. Yes there are 2. We opened up all the nooks and crannies discovering that the 2 cars have "VR" vehicle IDs one number apart assuring that they were built at the same time. I had been making that claim since I first saw the 2 cars back in 1999. After thoroughly picking apart the cars documenting their construction we heard that there were some other cars outside being loaded into trucks from Karmann. We hurried outside and found an early T34 convertible and 2 T14s, all in white. The '53 prototype was also out there and we found that it was due to stay ther at the Stiftung during the time we would be celebrating the 50th. This was very disapointing news for us but we knew it would be even more so for the hundreds of people coming to the celebration. There was nothing to do but bring the news back to GM so that those who could afford the time to come to the Stiftung after the show. Here's a more detailed account of the PROTOTYPES
After lunch with the group we split up and a few of us went on to Neustadt for the night. The hotel Richard found was in the middle of town and the owner threw up the American flag on the pole to welcome us.