DALE & SPIKE’S SEARCH FOR ODDITIES – part 2

Gassed up and ready to go, Spike and I opted to start day 2 of our motorcycle journey with a rousing 10 mile ride from the Don Q Inn to Spring Green, Wisconsin

Spring Green, Wisconsin is the home of two architectural wonders. Frank Lloyd Wright built his masterpiece, Taliesin here. The sprawling prairie style house adorned with beautiful decorations attracts tourists from around the world who marvel at its beauty. Alex Jordan built a house there too, and people marvel at its oddity.

Alex was an artist, and self-employed odd duck. On a visit to Spring Green, he saw a big rock and decided to climb atop it and have a picnic. Pretty soon, he was having picnics there all the time, and struck a deal with the owner of the land to lease the rock. He then started charging people to climb up his rock for a picnic and thought, “I should build a tourist trap here.”

Alex built a house on the rock. He built it by hand without the need for blueprints or building codes. The house was more of a gathering place for parties than it was a place to come home to, so Alex started to charge for tours. He filled the house with unusual Chinese pottery, artwork, and take-out menus. He collected a lot of weird stuff.

An intriguing part of the house is the Infinity Room. The Infinity Room is a glass enclosed wi09Infinityprojection from the house that struts out 200 feet with no apparent support. At the end, you can look straight down to the canyon floor. If you have vertigo, I would avoid this room.

As Alex continued to collect oddities, he found that the house was not big enough to hold them all. So he put up another building, and another one after that, and filled them all with, what my wife would call, “crap.”

One building featured collections of anything you could imagine. Guns, dolls, dolls with guns, pipes, bed pans, Zippo lighters, horse-drawn hearses, and enema implements.

He also built the world’s largest carousel featuring a hundred beautifully painted animals, but the stupid part of this display is that nobody can ride it. What the hell good is a carousel if you can’t ride it? It’s like having a goldfish that you can’t pet.

But the world’s biggest carousel was not enough for Alex, he then built the world’s biggest, two level, carousel…for dolls! This guy has more dolls than American Girl and built a carousel for them to ride on, but no merry go round for real people. Issues? Yeah, he had issues

The House is also loaded with musical machines. When you deposit a token the machines comes to life; animals start playing instruments, and music fills the air. It’s like Chuck E. Cheese without the bad pizza.

The Organ Room contained organs. Hearts, spleens, and kidneys, all on display. Ha, ha, IMG_1541ha, got you on that one. It was filled with pipe organs powered by a bellows the size of Vermont. The Phantom of the Opera was not there the day we visited, but around the corner was a mechanical fifty-piece full-size circus orchestra playing their instruments. And you thought clowns were creepy.

It is impossible to fully describe all of the junk Alex Jordan crammed in his house and warehouses but I think OCD might be a start. This man had a problem and it became a tourist attraction. Let this be a lesson to us all.

After wandering around the buildings for hours, Spike and I became overwhelmed and looked for a way out. The only door we could find would sound an alarm when opened, so we just ran through the crowd yelling, “The circus people are alive! The circus people are alive!” We were soon outside and on our way to the next attraction.

The House on the Rock is a “Don’t Miss” in my travel book, but be prepared with an escape plan. Next stop, the Forevertron.

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