29/05/10

We actually had a bit of a lie in this morning, which was nice. We got up at 9 rather than the 7 or 8 that we had been used to since San Francisco. After breakfast we drove down to The House on the Rock. I had never heard of it, but G0N had read about it in a book so we decided to give it a go. It is a ridiculous place. Initially it started as a single room clinging to a rock overlooking the Wisconsin countryside, but developed into an amazing house and then on into an attraction. The house is an intricate multi-leveled abode with low ceilings that winds around the central rock spire. Trees that were growing in the cracks in the rock were incorporated into the house, so there are tree trunks passing through at several points. The highlight of the building is the Infinity Room, a corridor that extends out from the rock over the trees. The extremity is cantilevered in such a way that it appears to be unsupported, just floating there. The end of the room inside is tapered so that it gives the impression of going on forever, hence the infinity room.

The rest of the place is dedicated to showing off the collections of stuff that the house's owner and designer had amassed. There were guns, paperweights, dolls, miniature circuses, dolls houses, model ships, general maritime stuff, model planes, carousel horses, organs, mechanically controlled musical instruments, armour, copies of the crown jewels... it is a fantastic, surreal and often creepy collection of random stuff. The highlights are the three story model of a whale fighting an octopus and the largest and brightest carousel I have ever seen. The collection of automated musical instruments ranged from small music box type contraptions to full automated string orchestras. The only problem was that the string based sets were faked. The percussion was all fine but the violins, guitars, harps etc. were clearly not actually playing. They may have been moving, but the strings were slack or broken, or the bows of bowed instruments didn't actually touch the strings. Some of them had the movements of the instruments completely out of time with the music. I'm sure that when they were made a few decades back they worked but I resent people trying to fool me and if we are paying to get in, the exhibits should work as described. Apart form that, a really a very strange but cool place.

We are now heading on east and should be getting to the Chicago area fairly soon.

Cube out