Not too far past the border, we came to a little town called Carcross (taken from “Caribou Crossing”) and headed east toward the Alaska Highway. We were on the connecting road for a couple minutes when Adam just about flew off his seat while getting whiplash. His neck snapped in a panic as he tried to veer his face out every window. He spotted something. This was more than the normal van or motorcycle; he was just glowing.
“Did you see that sign for a MOTORCYCLE MUSEUM!? DID WE PASS IT? I think that was IT!”
Needless to say we spent some time there. The German owner, Jack (pronounced Y-ahhh-k), had a school bus full of motorcycles, plus more on the front porch, and even more in the back shed. He decorated the bus with teddy bears and old vintage motorcycles. He had a great collection. His oldest motorcycle was a NSU 1930-something (1932?). He had 4 others close to the same year (within a ten year span) and most (if not all 4) of them still ran. Adam was so happy.
The way he got the motorcycles was pretty interesting. Jack used to live in Germany and he knew a man named Gustav. Gustav had a big shed/warehouse where a handful of German soldiers brought their motorcycles before they left for war (to either get fixed or to store them) and the soldiers never returned to claim them. Most of their families didn’t know the bikes were being stored here, so they just stayed in Gustav’s garage for years and years. He was planning to do something with them eventually but never did.
Jack got wind of this and asked to buy them, but was told no. Years later Gustav had a stroke and his wife called Jack to make a deal. She said if you come help us clean out the warehouse you can take the motorcycles. Jack said he had no idea what to expect. When he got there some of the bikes were buried under firewood and a couple were disassembled. So he got a trailer, gathered all the parts he could find, and brought those along with the other bikes to his house.
He started working on the NSU 1932 and eventually got it to run. Later he rode it over to Gustav’s house to show him. Jack said even though Gustav couldn’t really talk anymore because of his stroke he was still pretty sharp and very happy to see that Jack got “the first dinosaur” to run.
Jack put together the rest of the bikes using the parts he found and sold the other unneeded parts. He used this money and whatever else he had to ship a container with all his vintage motorcycles to Alaska, and sometime after that he made the infamous Motorcycle Museum.
After we toured the bus he asked if we wanted to see more. Wide-eyed Adam was in a trance, so we headed to the back shed. In there we saw three more motorcycles including the one below. Jack made a side car for his two dogs. They will leave for California in a couple months and come back in the spring.
