Corvette museum-in-motion tour visits Arizona

The National Corvette Museum’s latest Museum in Motion tour was based in Tucson, Arizona, from March 7-12 and included scenic drives through Saguaro National Park, Sabino Canyon, Tombstone, and up to the Superstition Mountain area near Phoenix with a stop at Canyon Lake. Other stops included the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and the Pima Air and Space Museum.

Classic Car News caught up with tour participants as they arrived at Canyon Lake for a ride on the Dolly Steamboat.

“The Corvette museum is really trying to reach out to all of their members,” said Vicki Hicks, a Tucson native and Corvette enthusiast who worked with the museum to organize the trip.

“The museum has about 30,000 members and they are all over the world. We have a lot of members in the western part of the United States and they don’t get back to Kentucky (the museum is located in western Kentucky) as often, so these trips are kind of like the museum going to them,” Hicks added. “This way we can host the members, educate them on the museum and show them the museum does care about them even so they are a long ways away.”

According to Hicks, participants on the tour came in to Tucson from all over the country, including those from Ohio and even Kentucky.

One of the challenges the group faced involved stop-and-go traffic, whether in small towns or in Tucson’s rush hour.

“Thank goodness for Google maps,” Hicks said. “There is always a few glitches, like this morning we misread the map and had to make a U-turn, but as the saying goes, ‘It’s not a Corvette trip unless you make at least one u-ie’.”

All of the Corvettes participating were later models with some being brand new 2016 Stingrays. Hicks told Classic Car News that most don’t drive their older Corvettes on long trips, either because of reliability or comfort issues. So many rented a new Corvette for a week to use on the tour.

As the tour participants waited to get on the steamboat, Classic Car News asked several participants about their favorite part of the trip. Driving Corvettes and meeting new people were highlights, but many said what most impressed them was seeing the cactus in the Arizona landscape.

One participant even said she had planned to move to Tucson after the tour.

A few participants noted how nice it was to be in the sun after a long and brutal winter back home.