I'm listening to a book by Neil Gaiman called American Gods - great listen so far - and Gaiman has the characters headed for The House on the Rock (HotR) for a meeting, and it got me to thinking how much of a draw the HotR is to me - and why it is such a draw.I've never been to the HotR, so I can't speak to what the place is like, though there are a bunch of reviews of the attraction onlineAnd pictures as wellBut there's a sick draw. The place seems like a sicko museum of one man's weirdo obsessions with getting the freakiest collections all sorts of things - plus there's the infinity room which is shown in the picture above and the one to the right here.
The room floats out from the house precariously and would probably scare the crap out of me because of a bit of fear of heights that I have, but I would love to give it a try sometime.It's not even an attraction like I want to look as the phrase goes, like a train wreck, laughing and chuckling because of the weirdness of it all. It's something that I would simply love to see and that just might have to merit a trip sometime. My wife's mentioned wanting to go to the Dells of Wisconson (which I have no clue what they are, so I've always said no), and I just might piggyback this one in with the other stuff. Kinda sick...
But then again, it might never top quite possibly the best attraction that I've ever seen - nothing that I would spend days and days wandering through, but something that I would happily go through a half dozen times in a row because it was so amazing. It's the Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston. The Mapparium is a spherical room (round top and bottom and walls, seriously) that is one giant stained glass globe of the world - as produced in 1935 - that you walk through on a clear plexiglass bridge. While you're in there, a recorded voice over talks about peace and bringing people together - heck, I don't really remember the recording. But you're in a stained glass room, lights outside shining in toward you in a nearly perfectly round room. The echos alone are phenomenal as you can hear your echos change and finally nearly deafen you when you step to the dead center. Then you can whisper to someone across the room in the opposite focal point and hear them with perfect clarity. The physics and acoustics would be enough, and then they add in the beauty of stained glass surrounding you. Sadly, no camera are allowed inside, so you have to buy their pictures, but it's phenomenal...Stunning...amazing...wonderful...
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