The Greatest Collection of Crap in All the Land

As an extended part of Kristin's birthday celebration, we went to the House on the Rock on Saturday. Whether you have been there before or not, it is definitely worth seeing. The house is pretty pimptastic, what with all the surfaces (and even some rocks) carpeted. It has an Infinity Room, basically just a giant phallic room that extends outward over a forest. There's a little glass area where you can look down and see how far you are about the trees. Unnerving for some, but old hat for those of us who worked tactical skydiving missions in 'Nam. Still cool though. Especially when you realize there is nothing holding it up at the end, and it shakes pretty badly, and you could die at any moment.

But then you get to the crap collections. Now, these are still pretty sweet, at least judging purely on volume. But then shit gets creepy. For instance, dollhouses. I had been there a couple times before, and I had looked at all this stuff, but I never really took in the fact that the guy has roughly 3.8 billion dollhouses in his collection. KHays pointed this out for me, which I hadn't really considered - - the guy who assembled all of this must have been bat-shit crazy. It's like "Hey, look at all these dollhouses." Then you turn a corner, and you've got another hallway of dollhouses. Then, another corner, another hallway filled with dollhouses. Pretty soon you start to think the dollhouses will end, but you move into another theme-crap collection, and hey look - - it's another dollhouse, just randomly placed. Sure enough, we make it through to the final room, and at the very end, there's a frickin dollhouse apparently floating in mid-air.

I don't want you to get the wrong impression - it's not just dollhouses. Specifically, the guy has roughly the same amount of wooden horses. We're walking through a vast room filled with actual dolls, and look at the walls -- wooden horses lined up one on top of another, twenty rows high, fifty rows deep. Walk along the walk way, turn around, look at another wall, and you see the exact same thing. Then you enter a room with a giant carousel. Turn around, horses everywhere. Holy balls are there wooden horses.

Okay, so these are collectible items. Maybe it's wierd, but maybe the guy is just obsessive compulsive about getting every dollhouse and wooden horse in existence. He's got collections of absolutely ricockulous crap that no one in their right mind would ever build, much less collect. There's one room filled with gigantic mechanical crap; a walkway winds around and winds around, and you start to take in the sheer magnitude of what's there. These are not collectors items. It's not like you buy yourself a 25 foot tall windchime, and then another, and they just start piling up. There's a cannon in there which would fire a cannonball roughly the size of a hot air balloon. Okay, so in battle, that would be sweet. I can't imagine it was ever functional. Then you've got a hundred-foot tall mechanical gear contraption which, apparently, is used to run a small clock. Then, more flippin' dollhouses.

Again, the place is incredible. There's a gigantic whale, a collection of armor, guns, swords, reproduced crowns, old elixirs, tapeworms in jars, the biggest carousel ever, and an ice cream shop. Absolutely worth seeing if you've got 3-4 hours free one afternoon. But still...god damn...