National Corvette Museum

We visited the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky while staying at the nearby Thousand Trails Diamond Caverns RV & Golf Resort in early May 2025. Bowling Green is the home of the Chevrolet Corvette with the manufacturing plant located nearby the museum.

The museum traces the evolution of the Corvette – Americas Sports Car – from its origins in 1953, through its eight major model updates (C1 through C8) to today’s spectacular mid-rear-engine iteration. The museum includes many corvettes from each generation and also several prototype and concept versions that showed design ideas over the years that may or may not have made it into production.
We particularly liked the classic 1963 split-window Corvette stingray, the only year with the split rear window design; the 1968 Jim Lovell Corvette that was an example of the Corvettes that were driven by many NASA astronauts during the 1960’s space race; and the 1962 Gulf Oil racing Corvette that dominated US sports car racing in 1962, winning 12 of the 14 races it entered.

In 2014 a section of the floor of the Skydome display hall collapsed into a massive sinkhole, taking 8 cars with it. The cars, ranging from unique prototypes to iconic classics, were recovered in a dramatic effort, with some restored to their former glory while others remain in their damaged state as a testament to the event. We saw one of the “unrepaired” sinkhole cars on display in the museum.

After we toured the museum, we visited the Stingray Grill restaurant attached to the museum for lunch. The museum had an excellent choice of food with some very nice vegetarian options included.

A selection of photos from our visit are provided below.