John Colton's blog

Right around the time we moved here, Pauline and I saw a Travel Channel show about the House on the Rock. Coincidentally, it's only a couple of hours away, so we'd been meaning to go there for a while. So, a few weeks ago we finally did!

Here are Leslie, Emily, Annie, and Becka.

There are tons of random collections in the house and associated buildings. I think these suits of armor were in the house proper. (There are two parts to the place: the original house, then probably even more impressive are all the extra displays which he built from the money he made by giving tours of his house.)

A very tall bookcase! I think it was 2 or 3 stories tall.

One of the most amazing parts of the house is the "Infinity Room". This is what it looks like from the outside--it basically extends out from the house and hangs out over the valley. I took a photo of this picture, since I didn't get any good photos of the Infinity Room from the outside.

It's designed to look like it extends into infinity. In reality, the area where you can walk stops at the place where it seems to bend upwards.

Looking backward from the "end of infinity".

Where you can't walk any further, there's a window looking down on the forest.

One of the most impressive parts of the collection are the mechanical instruments. There are an amazing assortment of probably million-dollar plus mechanical instrument displays. The instruments play songs; sometimes a display will just play one song, and sometimes it will play multiple songs. You have to buy "tokens" to make the instruments play--I think about $0.25 each.

Another mechanical instrument diplay.

Looking further to the right of the same display.

This is the worlds largest carousel. The downside is that they don't let you ride it, you just get to look. Apparently it's so huge that they can't start and stop it easily.

The trip was well worth it, and well worth the price of admission. My only regret is that we forgot to charge our camera the night before, so we started running out of battery power and couldn't take pictures of all of the weird and crazy things. Definitely a trip to be made for you La Crosse dwellers, though! We were laughing pretty much the whole time at how crazy the whole collection was.