NAIAS 2011

It comes this time every year, sometimes bringing with it great festivities and sometimes even growth of wisdom and knowledge, and no I'm not talking about my birthday, I'm talking about the North American International Auto Show. As sad as this may seem the show is usually the only time we make the trek into Detroit, but we do try to make it every year. Last year was Calvin's first time and while it wasn't a tragedy of epic proportion or anything I don't think the kid really got anything out of it and what we got out of it most of the time was the creaping in of a headache after the repeated "when are we going to be done" questions. Last year nothing engaged his interest and all he could think of was the People Mover trip that was awaiting him the minute we finished wandering between all those darn cars. So this year we tried something different. Having learned from last year that cars by themselves are not exciting we spent the week prior to our trip reading a book about cars, learning a bit about their engines, and creating a scavenger hunt and activity booklet for him to use while we were there. It was a success, the results of which can be seen below and are also mentioned in a post on Live and Learn.

"gull wing doors" was on his list of things to find and with a Mercedes this color it was not hard to find.

I much prefered this one:

And here he is drawing the logo in his activity booklet:

And a Tesla logo, too (good taste):

There was definitely an electric car craze this year...

More drawings for the book (this time a plugged-in vehicle)

He loved getting to watch the pistons in action

They actually want you to vote on this:

Octo-Scion

Surrounded by V engines

The forces of good and evil?

Actually making the pistons from this mock flat engine do their thing

Ford Vertrek, I think. Pretty cool looking inside.

All those cars and the People Mover was still the hi-light of his day. Calvin liked it, too.