House on the Rock (Part 1)

Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin High 77 Low 59

Today, thanks to Jan's comment we decided to go see House on the Rock. It is not something we had ever heard of, but after seeing her comment and asking at the concierge's desk, we decided to go see what it was all about. It is located about an hour south of where we are staying. The grounds before you get to the house are pretty impressive.

We watched a short movie about the house and it's builder by the ticket office before going on. As Jan pointed out, admission is a little more than we liked, but after it was all over, we decided it was worth every dollar.

There is so much to see, that I can't possibly put all the parts of the tour on one post so have decided to do it in installments. What we have come up with is to talk about the house whenever we have a slow day for the next while.

There are three parts to the tour, and each part other than the house itself has several parts.We were told to expect 3 hours seeing it, but after 5 hours we finally got through. I might add at this time that we did spend a lot of time taking pictures with 2 cameras. I asked Cindy to guess how many we took today, and we both guessed 500. The actual number was 940. It's really a good thing for digital, for we wouldn't have even thought about taking that many with the old film cameras.

So here goes: We will start with the house portion of the tour. The "house" itself is atop Deer Shelter Rock, a column of rock approximately 60 feet (18 m), 70 feet (21 m) by 200 feet (61 m) on the top.

There are many small rooms and alcoves. A lot of stained glass is installed for windows. The House has an oriental look and feel to it. From the film, you would think that Alex Jordan was a small man, but he was actually over 6 foot 2 inches tall.

There are a lot of stained glass lamps and chandeliers through out the House. There also was a lot of carved wood panels.

There is one part he called the infinity room.

• The Infinity Room juts out 218 feet (66 m) from the House on the Rock, without supports underneath. The room has over 3,000 windows. 

 The room seems to go on forever, because the last portion is getting smaller and smaller. In about the middle there is a glass window looking down, and that was as far as we could go.

We were glad to have gone to see the House and thanks again Jan for telling us about it.





 He seemed to have a lot of books and one wall was a large more than 2 story book shelf.












 Here are a few more pictures of the inside of the house. As I said before, I will try to put more on in on the blog as we get time.

Thanks for visiting.