valis2 | House on the Rock, part four.

Visiting Wisconsin's legendary House on the Rock with

gypsyjolie was absolutely magical.

Part one | Part two | Part three

Part four. The last part!

This was a crazy room. The upper walls of the room had huge cutouts with saints behind them. And there was an enormous chariot being pulled by tigers. What's not to love? Here's a video of the Red Room in action.

(I'm a little confused, though; maybe this picture is out of order. I can't tell if it belongs with the red room or the giant chandelier warehouse room.)

Okay, back to the Red Room.

Okay, here's what the HotR is known for; the largest carousel on earth, supposedly. And they tout that no horse's head is on it at all. Which, well, yes, there are no horse heads on the actual animals (and there are some really freaky animals), but there are definitely horse heads on the upper tier of the carousel. So yes, there are indeed horse heads on it.

One of the walls, which was covered with poles and carousel horses.

One of the other amazing things about the room is the ceiling. There are tens of mannequins hanging from it, clad in togas. Did I mention that they have wings? It's rather extraordinary.

I love this shot SO MUCH.

Um. I thought one of the volunteers was going to yell at me for taking pictures with a flash, and so when I heard a voice while I was taking a picture, I turned abruptly and this is what happened. BTW, nobody cares if you take any sort of picture at all. lol. It's AWESOME.

The mechanism that ran the carousel.

The end of the tour takes you through these huge warehouses. Seriously, one was the size of a small football field. Here are a couple absolutely gigantic chandeliers.

Yes, you are obligated to hum the Close Encounters theme if you see this in person.

This is an enormous clock that took up most of one wall.

These reminded me of old fashioned monster movies.

As a kid, I remember going to a church that had an organ like that. It seemed like a space pod with tons of buttons and...a keyboard. OMG I WAS FASCINATED. I loved playing the piano, and I loved Star Wars, and I just stared at the organ the entire time we were in the church. Stared and stared and stared. I don't know what I expected, like maybe I could go inside and play Three Blind Mice while circling the Death Star, but seriously. There were like ten of them in this room here in the HotR and I was in heaven.