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Sunday, June 15, 2014

House on the Rock (Part 2)

Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin High 81 Low 57

The weather today was windy and cloudy, but it still managed to warm up quite a bit.

Today we drove through downtown Wisconsin Dells to see what there was to see. There seem to be roller coasters and water parks everywhere.We decided to go back tomorrow when, we hope, there aren't so many people. We want to check out some of the shops, not to do to water slides or amusement parks.

Today I am going to tell some more about The House on the Rock. I forgot to mention yesterday that the house also has many levels, with lots of steps and ramps.

In answer to Jan's question about the musical instruments. Yes there are musical instruments of all kinds, most you can put tokens into for them to play. They seem to be everywhere and are every kind you can imagine.


Notice the stained glass chandler, They are all over.




There are stand alone player pianos, some with a large large metal disc with holes through it designed to play music as it turns.


This player piano was reworked to show the mechanism.See Below. 

There are even whole orchestras, some with conductors.





I read that Alex Jordan considered one called Mikado his masterpiece. It was playing as we went by it and it sounded very nice.


There was one that I thought was kind of interesting. The paper seemed to be continuous and it looked like it bunched up on one end until it slide down an incline a little bit as the paper was pulled from the other end. It looked like it worked kind of like a player piano, but the paper wasn't on a roll.

There are many different collections as we went through. Pistols, rifles, toys, and a lot of horse drawn buggies and sleds.




There was also a lot of stained glass throughout the complex.


Alex used to explain his sprawling creation of collections, displays, and galleries by saying "that one thing just sort of led to another".

I will put more pictures on an other time.

Thanks for visiting.


2 comments:

  1. Now, that is a lot of instruments!

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  2. Glad they still had the music. It's so large all you can do is listen to a little and keep going or you'll run out of steam before you get to the end. I still can hear the merry go round in my head. Is Alex Jordan still alive? When we were there, they said he'd sweep the floors while watching the visitors enjoy the place.

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