The International Artillery Museum

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The museum occupies a former lingerie factory. There is, no kidding, a full battery of German WWII-vintage 88mm Flak guns in the back parking lot. The expansive edifice is filled to bursting with artillery pieces. For a proper gun nerd, it can all seem overwhelming. In case you’re wondering, everything is discreetly deactivated to BATF specifications.

Most but not all of the pieces are fairly modern — WWII, Vietnam era and later. Inside, there is a meticulously restored German 88mm Flak gun, a 20mm magazine-fed Flak 38 cannon, and the only remaining 50mm gun used experimentally in the nose of the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter.

One entire wall is covered in shoulder-fired weapons — Stingers, LAWs, RPGs of various flavors, PIAT guns, and dozens more. The first expansive room contains towed artillery beyond my capacity to catalog. There is also the hulk of a surplus jeep recovered from an artillery impact area just to lend some insights into what these weapons are like on the receiving end.

The next huge room is even more overwhelming. A massive Cold War-era Honest John nuclear-tipped rocket is tough to miss, as is the enormous Nike antiaircraft missile. Tracked artillery has been interspersed among tube cannons from WWI to the present. You can’t crawl on this stuff, but you can get up close and personal with it.