You know, you could do a pretty cool adventure ride lasting a couple of weeks without ever leaving Utah. I know we’re stuck at home, self-isolating and all that, so it’s a good time to share past adventures and photos of great trips. I’ve traveled a lot, and I think Utah is one of the best destinations on the planet. It is probably the most scenic and interesting state in the country.
About that photo you see above…Susie and I rolled into Odgen one day back in 2015 to visit their museums, and these Ogden motor officers were parked out front. It was a great photo op, so I asked, they said okay, and the photo you see above is the result. It was raining that morning, but that never stopped me from riding and it didn’t stop these motor officers, either!
Ogden has four museums and an art gallery in their old railroad station, and it’s one heck of a deal. For a very minimal entrance fee, you get to see the Browning antique car collection, the Browning firearms museum, the railroad museum, the cowboy museum, and an art gallery. If you don’t have Ogden on your destinations list, maybe you need a new list!
Our focus in this blog is the Browning firearms museum. John Moses Browning, who did much of his work in Ogden, was perhaps the world’s most prolific arms inventor. This museum highlights his creations as well as many other interesting guns. I was in my element here!
The lighting in the Browning museum was dim, and that’s why the photos you see in this blog are perhaps a bit below what I try to present on the blog. I was shooting at a very high ISO without flash, as most of the displays were behind glass. The photos are not great, but they are pretty good considering the lighting.
There were a lot of interesting firearms on display, and then we migrated over to the car collection and the railroad museum. Those will be the subjects of subsequent blogs. Trust me on this…if you’re ever in Ogden, you don’t want to miss this place.
After a great lunch in downtown Ogden, we talked about where we’d go next, and Susie suggested Promontory Summit. We had learned a bit about it in the railroad museum, and we were only about 45 miles away. It’s where the railroad construction crews completed the railroad that reached across the United States. That’s coming up, so stay tuned!
I visited this museum 30 years ago; it was fabulous then, and looks even better now. Browning was an amazing inventor. They also had a video of building the Big Boy steam engines. I should visit it again.
Another firearms museum worth making a trip to is Woolaroc in Oklahoma. They have a very large collection of Colt firearms and Winchester rifles. Also large collection of art and artifacts of the natives of the area and the recent history.
Thanks, Dan. I had not heard of that one. I will check it out the next time I’m in Oklahoma.
I hear what you’re saying about Utah. I had never been there and went with the planes I crew on and couldn’t get over how beautiful it was. We were in Provo one day and I was standing on the wing of the B-24 looking out across a vast flatland and in the distance I could see the mountains. There was a mist between the mountains and flatland and it looked like the mountains were just floating in the distance. It was amazing.