I apologize in advance, I'm going to be a little long-winded today.
"K" and I, but mostly "K", had a late night last night as we kept laundry going and repacked all of our bags. I hung out in our room while "C" talked herself to sleep and I kept my ears open to yell at the other 4 kids for not sleeping. The boys were pretty good, but the girls were still sitting up and talking after 11.
In the morning, I was the first one up and ran through the shower with the goal of packing some more things up quietly afterwards while people still slept. Unfortunately, "C" decided today was the day to hop out of her Pack-n-Play and run around, so "K" brought her down to me. We got the rest of the kids up and the morning routines going. I had just finished doing "Z"'s hair when we sent "A" in to work on the dishes. I pulled "C" into my lap to start doing her hair when suddenly there came a blood-curdling scream from "A" and he went running as fast as his socked feet would go on the slippery wooden flooring while he shouted "ohmygodohmygodohmygod". When we finally found out that he wasn't bleeding or injured, he informed us that there was a BAT in the sink.
These kinds of duties fall to me, so I went to investigate the sink, expecting a basketball-sized behemoth with razor-sharp everything and blood dripping from its mouth. What I found was a tiny little fella looking dazed and confused, trying to climb out of the sink. He looked pretty cute! I scooped him up in a bowl, covered him with a little clear plastic lid, and showed him to the middle 3 kids (because no one else was interested). I took him outside, gently set him down in the grass and watching him crawl off into the bushes. I think maybe he was injured, I don't know why he didn't just try to fly off.
I step back into the house and immediately get alerted to a BUG EMERGENCY in the bathroom. After getting that cricket outside, "T" happily informs me of another cricket in the kitchen while "C" ran away shouting "BUG! BUUUUUUG!" I helped that one outside and the rest of the morning was relatively bug-free. We finished loading up the van and we all piled in to head to the House on the Rock.
I know we're only 10 days in so far, but... I think this has been my favorite. I'm a big fan of Neil Gaiman, and his book American Gods (which is my second favorite book, if anyone is looking for a recommendation) features the House on the Rock, so I was looking forward to this stop to nerd out. But it exceeded my expectations by a mile.
There are 3 different ticket prices - the Original House Experience, the Highlight Experience, and the ULTIMATE
Experience. We had planned to go for the Original House experience at $20 per person, but when we got to the counter,
she didn't ask and we didn't verify, so we wound up paying the $35 per head ticket price for the Ultimate experience.
Once we got over the sticker shock, we gathered the troops, walked past the random statue in the lobby and started off
down the winding path, through the Japanese garden, and into the gatehouse.
The first area you walk into has a ton of information on the man who created it, Alex Jordan. I had a meeting and the rest of the family started without me, so I mostly skipped this room, but there was a lot of information on the house and the surrounding area. One of the tidbits I found most interesting was that he has the world's largest (allegedly) carrousel, with 269 animals, 20,000 lights and 182 chandeliers, and ZERO horses - they're all monsters, skeleton horses, dragons, and other strange creatures.
The next area is the original House On The Rock. The house is multiple stories, 13 rooms, and... weird. It's awesomely
weird. The house had a very retro feel to it, which I guess makes sense because I think it's relatively unchanged since
Mr. Jordan opened it to the public in 1959. One room we walked into had a large "band" filled with automatic instruments
which play music when you put a token in. There were quite a few of these throughout the whole place, and even though
only some of them actually made music while others were clearly synthesized, I think these were my favorite things.
These automated instruments ranged from a single small piano on the small end to enormous concerts, sometimes with "
people" (automatons?) who were "playing" the instruments, sometimes just automatic instruments playing by themselves.
Below are a few examples from later on in the tour:
After the house, or rather part of it I suppose, is the Infinity Room. This is a room that has a disappearing vantage point so that the room appears to go on forever. It extends 266 feet out from the main house with no structural supports beneath it and 3,000 tiny little windows looking out and around (and, at one point, down). Pretty fun, but not a whole lot to see here so we didn't linger very long.
After those, you move on to Section 2, which was my favorite section. It consisted of 8 distinct sections, all pretty
wildly different and filled with an insane amount of curiosities and oddities. You wind through the building from the
Mill House (which is what it sounds like) to the Streets of Yesterday. This was essentially a mockup of an old city
with lots of shops on each side of the bricked roadway. There was a doll maker, a toy store, a taxidermist, jail, clock
maker, even a store selling horseless carriages. There were also little automatic.. things, like the Gladiator concert
above, but also little dioramas that have parts that move, lights that turn on, etc.
You then enter the Heritage Of The Sea area. When you walk into this room, you're confronted by a pretty epic battle - a
giant octopus is wrapping its enormous arms around a giant whale, while a fisherman in his small boat is nearly capsized
by a large, cresting wave. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a picture to capture everything because it was so massive, but
hopefully the picture below will give some idea the scale of this place. You wind your way around the outside of this
room, up 3 stories high, and the walls all contained tons of scale models of ships, bits of naval history, articles,
narwhal and walrus tusks, and more.
You then enter the next room from the top, called Tribute to Nostalgia, and it's exactly what it sounds like. We hit the
top of this room and could immediately smell some delicious pizza from the restaurant down below, and were staring
eye-level at some hot-air balloons hanging from the ceiling. We wound our way down around the outside of the wall and
past a giant Rube Goldberg-esque machine, down to a retro camera store, some old cars (including a Lincoln Continental
entirely covered in tile), and around over to the restaurant. We foolishly thought we were almost done so we skipped,
figuring we'd have a picnic lunch somewhere with the sandwiches we had in the car.
After walking through the restaurant, you enter the Music of Yesterday section. This one is filled with the automatic music machines like I mentioned earlier, like automatic pianos, automatic hurdy-gurdys, automatic radio roll players, pneumatic devices that play drums and draw a bow across a violin, etc. You wind your way past room after room and it seems like it goes on forever. Some of these were really, really cool,
Up next, we walk into the Spirit of Aviation. This was also a cool room. There were lots of articles on famous flights,
both uplifting and sad - there were newspaper articles on the Hindenburg, 9/11, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindbergh.
There were tons of models hanging from the ceiling and even an airplane gas pump. We were definitely losing steam here.
Finally came the last room of Section 2. This was the Carrousel Room. The carrousel was MASSIVE, so big and bright. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get a non-blurry photo, but trust me it was cool. We walked through a doorway shaped like a giant monster's mouth and down a hallway formed to look like a throat and into Section 3.
We were definitely gassed by this one, and we did not have energy for the last 7 rooms. I took one picture of this first
room, the Organ Room, because it was so overwhelming. There are 5 organs contained in this giant room, and there are
organ pipes of all sizes around the outside of the walls. However, the focal point of the room is an enormous chandelier
in the middle of the room. The woman working the entrance to this room said Alex Jordan originally planned to build his
office inside of the chandelier, but he died before the work was finished.
Honestly, the rest of the rooms from Section 3 are a blur that we speed-walked as much as the kids' little legs could walk, but I'll list them here for your entertainment: Inspiration Point, Doll House Room, Circus Room, Galleries, Doll Carrousel Building, and Japanese Gardens. By the time we finished, we had walked more then 7,700 steps and spent more than 3 hours. The kids were ROCK STARS for keeping up. They had lunch in the car and the youngest 3 all immediately fell asleep when they finished.
I don't know how much the kids loved it, but I know they at least liked SOME of it. I loved it though, it was pretty incredible. And I have every intention of going at least one more time, probably without kids. That was the only stop we made before driving to Des Moines, Iowa to cross off state #10.