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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on DALE & SPIKE’S SEARCH FOR ODDITIES – part 2

DALE & SPIKE’S SEARCH FOR ODDITIES part 1

Recently, my friend Spike and I figured that we could kill a few days by getting on our motorcycles and looking for odd stuff. We were in search of roadside oddities, the world’s largest anything, and places off the beaten path and on a path that has not been beaten enough. We figured that the best place to start our search was Wisconsin. Having been up north many times, we knew it was different but this time we were looking for the totally unusual. Perhaps we’d happen upon a resident who hates the Packers, or somebody who doesn’t like cheese. We found neither of those but we did discover the unusual.

Our adventure began by riding to Dodgeville, Wisconsin, home of the Don Q Inn. In my career, I have stayed in a lot of hotels. The best ones were rated with five stars. The Don Q Hotel deserves a rating of five joy buzzers. What a hoot.

IMG_1544For starters, parked right in front of the Don Q is a c-78 cargo plane from the Korean war. It’s huge and actually landed on an airstrip in front of the hotel in 1977. It has quite a history, including being in a car commercial featuring Farrah Fawcett, and she even autographed the fuselage. When I asked where her signature was, I was told that somebody painted over it. Thank goodness I had a marker with me and put it back where it belonged. I even spelled her last name correctly, Faucet.

When you walk into the Don Q Inn, the first sight you see is a very large round fireplace surrounded by a ring of old barber chairs. There’s also a couple of old dentist chairs if you want to relive childhood horror. Then, there are the guest rooms.

Don Q offers two kinds of rooms. Regular rooms are just that, regular rooms, clean, comfortable, and reasonable. They also offer “Fanta-Suites” which cost a little more but offer a variety of options. The Swingers Room” for instance, features a bed suspended from the ceiling by four chains. The igloo room looks just like an igloo, and the Flintstones would feel at home in the Cave Suite.

Due to an overbooking of regular rooms, I got upgraded to a Fanta-Suite. What luck. Spike got a regular room but I was assigned to the Blue Room which was very appropriately named. Everything in the room, the walls, the carpet, and the bed covering, was blue. Also, it made me quite blue that I was here alone.

The main feature of the Blue Room was the mirrors. There were large ones located over the bed, behind the bed, and to the side of the bed. If you were here with a partner, I imagine the multiple mirrors would provide you with a view you might not normally see. For me, they only served to bring out my multiple personalities. I would ask myself a question, then discuss it with the guy behind me, the guy to the side of me, and the hideous creature hovering over me.

The other oddity in the Blue Room is the bathtub. It is round, enormous, and made of IMG_1516copper. I discovered that the tub holds 300 gallons and was formally a cheese vat. There were no jets or fancy plumbing, just 300 gallons of water to which you could add the complimentary bubble bath. I did not use the tub because it was deep and I was alone. ‘Nuff said.

Don Q was a great place to stay and I would recommend it to anybody with a taste for the unusual, but it was only the tip of the oddity iceberg. Next stop, the House On The Rock.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on DALE & SPIKE’S SEARCH FOR ODDITIES part 1

Danger is all around us…and sometimes it’s funny

Tim, Teri, and Dale look at things where common sense was over ruled by stupidity and the results were not good. A man picked a fight with a pig and wound up losing…a vital portion of his anatomy; a couple had sex in a car but didn’t set the parking brake and it rolled into a lake; a man chated on his fiance while on an airplane and the mile-high event was recorded and went viral. Plus even more odd events. 

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Danger is all around us…and sometimes it’s funny

The Kidders #128 – When you just gotta go

Tim, Teri, and Dale are back at it with some of oddest events in the news. Numerous body parts are tastefully mentioned and really stupid people are raked over the coals. Join our broadcast barbeque and be sure to subscribe…for FREE. What a deal, you get your laughs for free.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on The Kidders #128 – When you just gotta go

The Kidders #127 He pulled a what? With his what?

Tim, Teri, and Dale tackle the tough issues of the day including a lady who married a train station; the Indonesian monkey mafia; a baby that walked out of the womb; a three foot tall porn star and a guy that pulled a helicopter with his

It’s fun for the whole family. Give us a listen and subscribe for weekly fun.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on The Kidders #127 He pulled a what? With his what?