It was a short walk from the S-Bahn station at Neckar Park, across from the Porsche-Arena, to the Mercedes-Benz Museum on the morning of our first day in Stuttgart, but we were both exhausted. Our night train arrived at Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof at around 5 a.m. after we’d come from Berlin, where we were spending time with our friends in the forest area near Eberswalde. The museum wasn’t open till nine, and our hotel check-in wasn’t until 3p.m. so we had walked around the city with our bags and had gotten some breakfast. Getting to leave our bags in a locker at the museum when we arrived was welcome before we stepped inside the futuristic, silver, capsule-shaped pod elevator to the top floor to begin the tour. I’d been interested in Merc’s growing up and weirdly remember by dad singing his own rendition of Janis Joplin’s “Oh, Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz” whenever he’d see a 230 or an SL, rare enough in Cork in the 80’s. The exhibition started in the late nineteenth century and right up to the present day, also including the company’s involvement in WW2, which they didn’t gloss over. Everything from the first car named ‘Mercedes’ to buses, Pope-mobiles, concept cars, race cars, to the fascinating gull-wing-doored Mercedes 300SL.

The portfolio is expansive to say the least, and when we got to the ground floor, there was a banked road section of the exhibition displaying so many cars from their racing heritage. I had a 1:18 scale model of a silver Mercedes CLK Le Mans racer, and that exact full-size car with the same livery was on display. Although it wasn’t possible to sit in the cars, seeing them up close and getting to compare one era to another was really great. We spent about two hours looking at all the exhibitions and got some food before we headed to our hotel. Before we left, we got to see one of the first cars, a three-wheeled car from 1886, driving around outside the museum, amazing! All in all the museum was great and so happy I got to experience it.