Unsinkable

So, while the wheels sort of predictably fell off the wagon with 30 days of creativity, I was pleased that I made it to day 13.  And I have been being creative since then, I just haven’t been posting on the blogzors.  I have some partial drafts that I need to get going on, (spoiler alert: I have been tearing up the kitchen this summer and making Rose a ‘princess and the frog’ costume for halloween, as well as rebuilding the school’s website) but this post is just a quickie to mention that I have lived in Wisconsin my entire life, and never visited the House on the Rock before today.

At an event earlier this summer, I bid on a silent auction item that I really didn’t think I would win (and then did), that had all these tickets to historical Wisconsin and Illinois attractions.  Last week, the whole family visited the Naper Historic Settlement, but today Charles and I went to the House on the Rock sans kids.  I had, of course, read Neil Gaiman’s book, American Gods, which has a good bit about the House in it, and just listened to (and made Charles listen to) the 10th anniversary edition of the audiobook, which is fabulous.

I can’t describe the House to you.  It is just a crazy house built by an artist in the middle of nowhere on a rock.  And then he spent fifty years filling it full of stuff.  Crazy, wild, collections of stuff.  Like, carousel horses.  And a carousel that works, has 20,000 lights, and has every other imaginable creature on it besides horses.

Shadow's steed from American Gods

There are beautiful things:

Glass wall in ladies' room

And kind of miraculous things:

Miniature cork carving

And then there is stuff that is mostly disturbing (but also kind of cool):

Mannequin orchestra

Anyway, if you are in Wisconsin, I suggest you go at some point.  While we were there (playing hooky from work on a random Wednesday morning/afternoon) we saw travelers from all over the world.  It really is amazing and worth a visit.  I am glad we left the kids behind for this one, though.  It was basically five hours of walking, and the families with kids seemed to be having way less fun than we were.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 at 10:19 pm and is filed under meaningful labor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.