For dealers who like to pass along interesting road trip ideas to their customers, here’s a good one from Roadtrippers.com.
“I spent every penny I had on these,” Dale Cross says as he points to an orange dirt track race car with white trim. Fellow visitors listen intently to the tales of his racetrack glory days while Cross leans heavily on a cane. Cross is an Amarillo Motorsports Hall of Famer and docent at the recently combined Jack Sisemore RV and Motorsports Museum in Amarillo, Texas.
Sisemore started with a gas station. Over the years, he added rental motorhomes and grew his business into a massive RV dealership located in the Texas Panhandle. Together with his son Trent, a former two-term Amarillo mayor, Jack started collecting RVs in the late 1980s.
“The teardrop and 1962 Bambi (Airstream) were the first RVs we acquired and restored,” Trent says. In 1998, the Sisemores opened a free museum to share their collection with visitors.
Packed with vintage chrome, sleek retro aluminum, and high-gloss metallic paint, the 18,000-square-foot museum provides plenty of proof to back up the saying “The bigger the boy, the bigger the toy.” Near the entrance, three Harley-Davidson motorcycles from the Sisemores’ own collection tower over visitors in an eye-catching vertical display. Race cars gather around, too, from hardwood kid-sized varieties to the named and numbered cars that Cross spent his hard-earned money on.
Vintage signs remind visitors of full-service filling stations and family road trips to Yellowstone. A black and white Route 66 sign is a nod to Amarillo, which lies between Chicago and Santa Monica along the Mother Road. When it opened, Americans hit the road like never before – and haven’t stopped since.
Click here to read the full story from Teresa Otto in Roadtrippers.com.
