23: A Crazy Dream House DONE!

House on the Rock, Wisconsin Dells, WI. October 2012. We went on a little winter camping trip because the kids had a long weekend from school. We stayed in a cabin and explored the Wisconsin Dells area, including the House on the Rock. It was wild.

The house itself was either cool or creepy. It felt kind of clammy and dark and was filled with shag carpeting. It was built on a rock, and had a lot of rock walls (some with water trickling down them), lots of backlit walls, and lots of crooked or weirdly-angled walls. Some places you had to duck to get into, and other places were full of stairs that went around and around in circles from room to room. I guess it was cool, but not in a I-want-to-live-there kind of way.

From the original house, this place spiraled out of control into a sort of museum that was like a collection of collections. There were tons of machines that you could "play" with tokens - some played music or were animatronic scenes. Some were tabletop size and others filled huge, huge rooms. There is no way you could explain this place with words or capture it with pictures. We were all pretty overwhelmed.

Here's Cook in the gun collection section, which was gigantic and sandwiched I think between the circus toy collection and the Asian art collection. Mind numbing. It was like being swallowed by a monster that had also eaten everything in the whole world. What a trip.