Back to the 50's

We left Tim's old home town of Des Moines (1950 to 1977) and drove 240 miles to the Twin Cities area on Thursday, June 20.  The Twin Cities area will be home to us for the 8 days.  The first  four days we'll stay at Dakota Meadows RV Park in Prior Lake next to the Mystic Lake Casino and Hotel.  We had a very nice back-in site reserved that was very easy to get Big Red into.

The main reason we came to the Twin Cities was to attend the Back to the 50's http://msrabacktothe50s.com/  40th anniversary car show.  The show is held at the Minnesota State Fair Ground in St. Paul.  This year they announced a record 12,033 show cars registered.  We haven't heard what the spectator attendance was, but in previous years it has been over 125,000 people.  It takes 2,000 volunteers to work the show.  Let's just say it is MASSIVE!

Entry to fair grounds

We attended two days, Friday and Saturday taking over 500 photos of cars and people.  How do we present these in this blog post without overwhelming some readers and boring others?  So we'll post just a few pictures now and figure out a way later to make available more pictures to those readers who are interested.  We were overwhelmed and overloaded by attending the show.  Too much to see.  The following are a sample of what we saw.  This show has no judging.  If you can get it there, you can show it.  There were vehicles of many makes (predominantly American) and types and in different states of condition.  As long as the vehicle was originally built prior to 1965, you can show it.  Some were meticulously restored and others only slightly resembled the original make and model.  Beautifully painted or no paint didn't matter.  If you bring it, you can show it.  This made the show very interesting.

Meticulously restored 40's classic

Nor so restored classic Pontiac

Beautiful street rod

This pickup does run

A nice 1062 Avanti (Studebaker).  A car ahead of its time

Cars from the wing or jet styling era like this Buick LeSabre

Thunderbirds from the 1st four generations like this 1962

Linda next to 40's style street rod

Very rare Studebaker Champion convertible circa 1950

Two tone painted street rod

Rat Rod (imitates or exaggerates hot rods of 40's, 50's, or 60's)

Cute "American" street rod

50's & 60's Corvettes

The original SUV, Chevy 3100

Wow woodies

1950 Ford like Linda's parents owned

Pontiac Bonneville (they don't style them like this anymore)

Ford Anglia (made in U.K.) dragster

1963 Buick Riviera like Tim's father owned

2 story rat rod

Wonderful Corvair, the car Ralph Nader killed

100,000 plus spectators looking at over 12,000 cars

1964 Chrysler Imperial similar to Tim's father's 1965

Gorgeous street rod in restored Chevy flatbed hauler

Slammed street rods

 The above vehicles are only a small sampling of what we saw.  The sign on the last car sums it up.

We attended the show on Friday and Saturday.  After we left the show on Friday it looked like bad weather was approaching.  We drove to a pizza place near Minneapolis that Tim had read about.  The wait time was 70 minutes.  Rain and wind came while we waited in the very small  entry way.  Then the power went out.

Tim ran to the car (luckily we had our rain ponchos) and picked up Linda.  We drove toward the RV park and ate at a local restaurant.

Saturday morning we drove back to the car show.  On the way we saw some results from the storm.

Trees blown over and uprooted

Glad we didn't own this house

Fortunately, there was no damage seen at the car show on Saturday.  We walked and walked and saw more cars and lots of people.  After Saturday our eyes couldn't take anymore cars, so we did something different on Sunday.  We'll tell you more in our next post.