A visit with the real life Dr. E. Brown in Florida

January 23rd 2020

We arrived in Florida with much anticipation, I could believe that we were here to get a sneak peek at a real DeLorean Time Machine, that in just little over a month would be home in Beautiful British Columbia. We got up at 7am EST (which felt like like 4am to us) to drive the hour to the location of the real life Doc Brown, Bruce Coulombe.

What we didn’t realize was that Florida has Tolls all along its Highways….

We did our best to pay all the tolls. It was not a 100% success because not all toll booth have a real humans inside. Our exit toll was un-maned and exact change only. “The State Charges $1.25” We could only find fifty American cents…

We thought maybe it will take some Canadian Quarters…Nope. We tossed those Canadian quarters in the bin and the machine didn’t even register it. What to do but drive on through, I mean what had a Time Machine to visit, and if time travel was real we would have gone back 1 hour and had change ready for the toll.

We arrived at the headquarters of Coulombe Enterprises and right in the front window was an amazingly life like Full Sized Velociraptor. The other reason we were visiting Bruce was to also look at a Jurassic Park Jeep and full JP display. The Velociraptor (Clever Girl, is her name) was part of that display. She looked incredible.

We were Greeted by Mary, Bruces wife, and brought into the front room. We sat down around the table and Bruce came in. We exchanged pleasantries and began to learn about Bruce and the history of him building Time Machines. We learnt that he worked for NASA as an electrical Engineer, He worked for Disney on things like the Electrical Light Parade (a favourite of ours), he worked for Universal Studios and still does some periodic work for them when they need it.

He was so interesting to talk to that time flew by and before we knew it it had been 2 hours since we walked in and we had not seen the DeLorean yet!!

But then it was time…

We walked through a door and our car was right in front. A stainless steel beauty. We were floored with seeing the car and knowing that it was ours.

The car was in pristine condition. Clean and bright. There was a large portion of the hardware already on the car with only a few missing pieces and the wiring for the lights inside.

Bruce talked about many of the different pieces that make up a Time Machine and showed us some of the items that were actual parts that would have been the same on the original movie car. Red and Blue capacitors, and a hubcap from a 1967 Dodge Polara that makes up the Plutonium Chamber.

We went all over the car learning about how to drive it, how to close the doors properly, etc. We ended up spending about 7 hours in his shop.

We finished the day with a great dinner at the Texas Steak house with Bruce and Mary. Thanks again to them both for Dinner!

It was an incredible day and I can’t wait until our Time Machine is up here at home.