Boys’ Toys at the Sinsheim Technik Museum

If you want to climb around inside a Concorde or a Tupolev airplane, or check out a bunch of famous Formula One race cars, the place to head to is the Auto and Technik Museum Sinsheim in southern Germany. It’s about an hour south of Frankfurt and a bit over an hour north of Stuttgart, so any boys’ trip should take it in enroute to other gems like the Mercedes or Porsche museums in Stuttgart.

I should quickly say it’s not just for boys: I’ve enjoyed quite a few visits there myself, but probably don’t need to spend as long there each time as car or aviation loving freaks, who are often male. For me, the highlight are the incredible airplanes mounted on the roof. You can see them as you drive past the town of Sinsheim on the Autobahn - in fact, sometimes traffic jams on this part of the highway are attributed to drivers slowing down to look at the planes.

The Air France Concorde is the best – you can climb up inside and see how the cockpit or passengers seats looked (surprisingly unluxurious, I thought!). The plane is mounted at “take-off angle”, which makes climbing up inside it a little harder than usual, but it sure looks great. The Russian version of the Concorde, the Tupolev, is just a few steps further along the roof and you can walk up inside this one as well.

There are half a dozen other plans mounted on the roof, and one of them has a slide so you can get back down to the main exhibition level faster! In two large halls, you’ll find all kinds of exhibits where most things have wheels: from racing and sports cars to tractors, motorbikes, vintage cars and trains. In the middle of these is the curious collection of large musical organs, which you can listen and watch if you donate a Euro to their upkeep.

You can get a joint ticket to watch a 3D film at the onsite IMAX theater, but don’t forget that the films will screen with German dubbing – choose something that’s mostly visual if you don’t speak the language. There’s also a large restaurant and cafe onsite and you can even stay overnight at the Hotel Sinsheim; it’s not too pricey. The museum has a “brother museum” in the Technik Museum Speyer, just 40km away, which includes a Boeing 747, fire engines, helicopters and more cars and trains – and even a houseboat and a submarine.