House on the Rock and Becoming Cheeseheads

The crew has been moving at a very fast pace lately!

I’m feeling pretty pooped out. I’m a couple of blog posts behind as a result. But don’t you worry, I’ll get you all caught up soon enough. One of the reasons is because I have so.many.pictures to go through. And most of them come from this place called The House on the Rock located in a small town near Spring Green, Wisconsin. It’s hard to even describe how unique it is .

Before you even get to the attraction, you know you’re in for a pretty bizarre experience.

Driving up to The House on the Rock you’ll see huge pots with lizards and dragons climbing all over them. It is a quirky, artistic, kitsch and downright funky place.

It’s hard to believe one mans vision and lifetime of dedication was able to produce such an amazing place. It began in 1945 with Alex Jordan. He started college at the beckoning of his mother but soon grew bored. After seeing what was going on inside his mind, I can see why! He left college and began trying to figure out what to do with his life.

One day he came upon Deer Shelter Rock, a 60-foot chimney of sandstone formation. He started picnicking on it and paid the farmer who owned the land twenty dollars to ‘lease it’. Eventually the farmer sold it to Alex and he began building. Later he would acquire all the land around it. The 14-room house is the original structure and was later expanded to include many buildings, exhibits and a garden.

It’s important to note that no one ever actually lived at the house. Alex had a one bedroom apartment in Madison, Wisconsin and would drive or fly out to the small town to work on his creations. He rarely spent a day away from his lifetime achievement. It was his passion until the day he died.

The main portion of the house is little nooks and crannies highlighting all kinds of collections. There’s an organ room with instruments playing on their own. There are a bunch of Tiffany style lamps. From my understanding, some of the collections exhibited throughout the house are originals.

However, a lot of the items are reproductions inspired and created by Alex and freelance artists that came and went through the years. He had several workshops on the property. Everywhere you look, there is something to see. You will be dizzy by the time you leave this place.

The end result is something amazing.

When I spotted it in one of my travel books, I knew I had to stop for my artsy daughter and crew member Alaina. And much to my delight, she was enthralled by this place. This is her take on it:

“It’s first and foremost awesome. The architecture was beautiful, just awesome and the decor was so neat. I love how the decor complimented the rooms and I liked the fact that some parts where he went for a natural theme he included exposed rock inside. I loved how each section (there were three) had its own individual flair. I also liked how he took section one and two and combined them all together in section three. The Streets of Yesterday were very well done and the moving instruments had amazing mechanics. The attention to detail was great and things were very well crafted. The asian decor was perfect and I liked the low ceilings in the first section as you felt like you were in a doll house.”

Needless to say, Alaina fell in love with The House on the Rock. It really spoke to her inner artistic side. We had purchased tickets for sections one and two and with the five plus hours we had, we still weren’t able to take it all in. The youngest crew member tolerated the tour but she wasn’t all that thrilled. There were dark spaces and several sections had a bit of an eerie feel.

Alaina really wanted to go back and check out section three and take more time with sections one and two. She loved the creepiness of it. She said it reminded her of Five Nights at Freddy’s, a game, book and soon to be movie that all the teenagers are loving right now. So I promised I’d take her back the next day. The youngest and my brother decided they’d hang out at the RV park.

The three biggest highlights of the attraction are the Carousel, “Heritage of the Sea” and the “Infinity Room.” I’ll start with the carousel.

Carousel

When you walk into the Carousel room, it nearly takes your breath away. It was huge and the music and lights were amazing. The details on the carousel were phenomenal and the paint job on the animals very unique. In fact, the method used to paint them is unique to this attraction and is known as The House on the Rock method. It wasn’t like the typical paint you see on carousels. The colors were more rustic. However there were gems and lighter colors that helped it blend in with the rest of the carousel.

There wasn’t a single horse on the carousel but rather a mix of mystical creatures, half-human creations along with other various animals such as giraffes and lions. Each creature was individually created and casted at The House on the Rock’s workshop.

The carousel is dubbed “The world’s largest carousel in history.” There are over 20,000 lights, 182 chandeliers, and 269 animals on it. It’s 80 feet wide, 35 feet tall and weighs 36 tons. The carousel and the collection of carousel animals hanging on the walls around the room are valued at five million dollars!

The Infinity Room

The Infinity Room isn’t for the faint of heart or those suffering from acrophobia. It’s a room that juts out 218 feet from the attraction and towers 15 stories above the forest below. And there are no supports underneath.

There are over 3,000 windows all around with views of the countryside. It’s a very cool design and each time I walked out towards the tip, I was hopeful the engineer knew what he was doing. My first trip out, it was windy and the structure was moving ever so slightly!

Heritage of the Sea

Then came Heritage of the Sea. The four-story room looks like a giant airplane hangar and contains an enormous 200-foot long sea creature battling a giant octopus. A note at the beginning states that the sea creature is “part white whale, part killer whale and part who knows what.” The room has a circular ramp that you follow around the outer edges. It reminded me of being inside a conch shell.

The giant sea creature is the centerpiece of his lifetime collection of nautical memorabilia. There were displays lining the walkway. Included in the displays were custom-built ships from the Mauritius Islands. Other items were made by American craftsmen over the course of 80 years. Also included in the collection are items Alex purchased from an entire nautical museum.

Once you make it to the top, you can peer into the enormous mouth of the sea creature. You’ll find a full-size whale boat nestled inside. The room was completed in the Spring of 1990. However, Alex was unable to see its completion as he died in November of the prior year. There is a final picture of him waving from the sea creatures mouth during its construction.

There are so many other things worth talking about and I know my post won’t do this place justice. There were music machines that Alex designed himself. He started with paper roll mechanisms, than electronic recording devices and finally simple computer systems. He added synthesized music to achieve his desired outcome. If you follow my youtube channel, I will be putting together a video so you can see and hear some things. My channel is bare right now but content will be coming soon.

There were collections upon collections of many things to include dolls on their own moving carousel, doll houses, replicas of cars and trucks, a carriage hearse on display here and there, a car covered entirely of ceramic tiles, circus themes, guns, crowns, and asian inspired designs everywhere. Even the bathrooms had displays and unique designs.

Alex was a recluse and preferred his solitude. He didn’t like a lot of fanfare. One time when someone saw him sitting quietly enjoying the carousel room they asked if he was Alex Jordan. His response was, “No, I’m just the janitor.”

It is said that he would often sit quietly off to the side and watch as guests came in. When testing out a new display, he would enlist his “five-minute test.”. If in five minutes they were not awe-struck by what they saw, he deemed his creation not good enough. He was known to return to creations and make changes, sometimes many times. Perhaps Alex is still watching over his creations in the eerie shadows of The House on the Rock………

“My house will stand on a rock on a hill.
Overlooking a valley deep and still.”

                                                -Alex Jordan

Now let’s talk about cheese curds, yum!

We’ve become quite the cheeseheads since hitting Wisconsin. We stopped into Carr Valley Cheese and stocked up on a few varieties. I purchased cheese curds (of course, so yummy), bread cheese, chocolate cheese (yes cheese is an ingredient), beer cheese, aged cheddar, cave aged cheese, and a few others that have long since been devoured. Don’t worry, most of them we’re little sample packs so not much harm was done.

Next up are highlights as we rolled through Minnesota and South Dakota.

Amazon: As always, I’m ever so grateful when you use my Amazon Link when making purchases. It helps me pay for this blog and it cost you the same amount. If you like my content, I’d appreciate the support. Thank you!

{HUGS} from the Crew!