Tell you what, some of the best places in this country are the ones you'd never find unless somebody told you about them. Out in Hickory Corners, Michigan, out past Kalamazoo where the roads get quiet and the corn gets tall, sits what might be the best car museum most folks have never heard of. The Gilmore Car Museum, and it's worth every mile of the drive.

The part that gets me is that it's not some sterile building downtown with cars roped off behind velvet. It's 90 acres of old Michigan farmland, and the cars live in restored historic barns. Over 400 vehicles and motorcycles, spread across a campus that feels more like a village than a museum. You walk barn to barn, gravel under your boots, and every one of them's got something different inside.

The collection runs the whole history of the automobile. Tin Lizzies, classics from the '30s, muscle cars, locomotives of the highway from every era. There's even a full 1940s-era diner and a 1930s gas station on the grounds. The folks who built this place understood something a lot of museums miss: cars weren't made to sit in a showroom. They were made to be part of life.

And that's the standard I'd apply to any museum, same as I'd apply to a truck. Does it hold up when it matters? Does it actually make you feel something? I've been to car museums where you're through in 40 minutes and can't remember a single vehicle. This ain't that. People plan a full day here and still don't see everything.

My favorite part is the barns themselves. Donald Gilmore, the man who started it all back in the 1960s, had a thing for old barns the way some of us have a thing for old trucks. He acquired historic barns and relocated them to his property, then filled them with cars. His collection went back to the earliest days of the automobile, back when nobody yet knew what a car was supposed to be. If that ain't a country boy's idea of heaven, I don't know what is.

If you go, make a day of it. Hickory Corners is nowhere near an interstate, which is exactly the point. Take the back roads, roll the windows down, see what the countryside looks like. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the drive to a place like this is half the reason to go. Anybody can park in a ramp downtown. Not everybody earns their museum with 20 miles of two-lane.

The place runs seasonally, so check the hours and admission before you head out. And if you make it up there this fall, do what I'd do: come in from the west through the farm country, and stop for pie somewhere along the way. A man can't look at 400 old cars on an empty stomach, and that's just a fact of life.