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It's vacation story time again! Now sit right back and you'll here a tail; the tail of a funky trip. It started at a win'try shore and ended there too; there's a flip!

So for dinner on Saturday, we decided to check out the restaurant next door to the hotel, via the tunnel we'd briefly looked at on Friday. The best way to describe it is very Willy-Wonkaesque. I don't mean the happy-bouncy look of most of the original movie. It was reminiscent of the nightmarish tunnel that Charlie and the group hurtled through aboard the Wonkatania.

There was a flattened concrete floor with gutters on the sides to collect the condensate that forever flowed down from the ceiling. All along the length of the rough-hewn walls were embedded random objects like animal skulls and windows to nowhere. At one point, a fully clothed leg, complete with boot, protruded from a gap just barely wide enough for it giving the impression that a passage had closed in around someone in mid clamber. That's not to mention the rubber ghoul mask and disembodied head in the central room. The whole thing was quite bizarre.

And then we had to walk back through it again when we found out that, not only did the restaurant not have pizza, but what they did have was in the low to mid teen range. Not always a bad thing, but not what we were looking for. Fortunately, the waitress was able to direct us. "You want bar pizza? Go to the Red Room! Best pizza in town!"

We found our way there (given that downtown Dodgeville is approximately the size of a large soapdish, this was not too difficult), and walked in. We were immediately approached by a waitress who spoiled the affect of the instant attention by asking "You with Land's End?"

"No." It took her several minutes of confused looks and conferences with the rest of the staff to figure out what to do with us. Apparently we had crashed a gathering of Land's End employees. Oops.

They put us at a small table to one side of the room and took our order. The Red Room was, in fact, two rooms, so 'Room' is something of a misnomer. On the other hand, it is extremely red, a dark blood-velvet shade, so maybe that makes up for it.

Our pizza was pretty good, and Andrea seemed to enjoy her beer; therefore, all was good. We drove back to the Don Q and decided to take advantage of the pool and hot tub. Regretfully, it felt more as though the pool and hot tub had taken advantage of us.

It was swarming with very loud children who screeched and shouted and threw balls at each other and at adults who occasionally joined in. Andrea and I got in the pool and, after some mental preparation, swam out under the transparent plastic flaps that trailed in the water at the top of the channel that lead to the outside part of the pool.

I've never been somewhere with an indoor/outdoor pool that was actually open in semi-cold weather and the experience was memorable. As long as we stayed in the water up to our necks we were fairly warm, and we could look up at the sky and see so many stars! The two of us snuggled up together in the closest thing the rounded pool had to a corner and commenced to be generally mushy until a couple of the more drunken looking adults decided to come out to the outdoor section as well.

We moved briefly to the hot tub, but the pool room was so loud that we gave up on that too. It was okay; we had our own great big bathtub to soak and play in. And we did.

In fact, we were up late enough that we didn't manage to get up in time for the continental breakfast. The fact that the daylight savings time shift happened over night didn't help either, as we'd completely forgotten about it. But we were still up in plenty of time to pack up our stuff and, after a short postponement, check out. We're really going to miss the swinging bed. But I digress.

So it was off to the House on the Rock. I'd heard and read a lot about it, but I didn't quite know what to expect. I still don't. Andrea posted a link in her journal to some representative pictures, but I'm not sure that any set of images can convey the full scope of the bizarre, chaotic collections of ephemera and the strange feel of the energy of the house.

As much as I love the twisting passageways, low, cozy ceilings, and seemingly random intersections of rooms, stairways, and sharply slanted windows looking down onto the valley below, I can't imagine that any sane architect would have designed a building like this. In fact I kept being reminded of a couple of lines of dialog from Ghostbusters; "So they don't make 'em like this anymore?" "No Peter, nobody ever made them like this."

From there, it only got weirder. The highlights for me are probably not what would have caught other people's notice. For instance, there was a room, the organ room, which, as well as some fantastic organ consoles, also had large amounts of incongruously connected non-functioning machinery. Tucked down on a platform just off the path we were on (red carpeted paths lead all over the room, up, down, and around various racks of organ pipes, walls full of randomly placed dials and gauges, and mammoth clocks) was what I recognized as very nearly the same piece of refrigeration equipment as is in the basement of the Rhode Opera House. A large piston-arm casing with a plate emblazoned with "Viltner" tipped me off. I investigated closer, moving around to see it from different angles, and confirmed my suspicion. This was a giant cooling and refrigeration machine from the twenties.

That was the sort of thing that was commonplace all around the rest of the huge display rooms. Massive displays of hardware that had just somehow accreted out of a junkyard like planets forming from dust clouds orbiting a vastly prehistoric sun. Another example was the huge flywheel next to the giant carousel elsewhere in the house. It was one of the few examples of industrial equipment that was actually in motion, and at first glance it would seem to be supplying motive force to the carousel. A closer inspection revealed that the wheel was being turned by a rubber tire pressed up underneath it, and it was really doing nothing but endlessly spinning and rocking the attached reciprocating arm in an infinite, futile dance. It was the magician's stage patter and snake oil that masked the actual, much less impressive, action behind it. With apologies to Neil Gaiman's fantastic dramatization of the thing in American Gods, the carousel felt tremendously false to me. It had clearly been built solely to house some of the more fantastic animals that rode endlessly around on it. It was never meant to be ridden, or to be looked at too closely; the surface awe and grandeur of the surface, and the continual motion of the self playing drums and other displays around it are meant to distract from a thorough inspection. I could see, behind small raised portions of the carousel floor, that it simply rode on some small rubber wheels. Rather than a real carousel, it was just a giant rotating platform on which someone had stuck a bunch of carousel animals. If the distinction doesn't seem viable to you, well; it is very much so to me.

I don't mean to put down the house by any means. There was a weird, indescribable energy to it. But it's not the energy of people, of life. It's the uncontrolled energy of entropy and fractal chaos. Things are lifted to greater importance than the people who use or see them. Small pockets of light and life are enveloped in an overarcing cloud of darkness and confusion. It's impossible to know what's being presented at face value, what's being exaggerated, and what's simply a bold-faced lie. Our three hours or so spent in the House on the Rock left me with no feeling so prominent as awed confusion.

And then, we were really on to the home stretch. I watched the craggy terrain of the driftless area recede behind us with a certain sense of wistfulness. I can't wait to get back there again with a camera.

Of course, we had to stop a couple places along the way. First was the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum. It was a two room store with case after case of vintage mustard jars, tubes, boxes, and crates on one side and modern ones that were actually for sale on the other. In between the two sections was a small plot of floor space occupied by a few rows of chairs parked in front of a television that was showing informational movies about mustard. There was mustard divided by origin onto small shelves for each of the fifty states. There was mustard from Japan, Germany, Ireland, Bulgaria, and scores more countries. There were hot mustards, sweet mustards, beer and wine mustards, dijon mustards, and more. We tasted a number of really good mustards, including one that states it's the only one made from sprouted mustard seeds (That one was good!) and even bought a Chinese one that was the 2006 champion in it's category, and a wasabi mustard that has really grated wasabi. It was a fun time.

After that, it was time to feed the puppy and the raccoon. While cruising down the highway we were both keeping our eyes out for buffet signage. Though we didn't manage to find any Golden Corrals, Old Countrys, or anything of the Chinese variety like we were hoping for, we did manage to find the mecca of odd Americana that is Shakey's.

Though we immediately decided to jump on our chance for buffet food while we could, I soon began to wonder about our choice. I kept coming back to dwell on the name. Shakey's. How did a restaurant come to be called such a thing? Is that how you feel after you eat there? What would it's mascot look like? By the time we drove down the exit ramp and managed to find the building, I'd gotten as far as imagining a gaunt clown in dripping white greasepaint extending a hand quaking with the classic DT tremors to offer a plate of food. "Here! Take it!" He pauses, quivering, just long enough to be more than a little uncomfortable. "I didn't get any of the BUGS on it."

It turned out to actually be pretty good. It was a dimly lit little family restaurant sort of place with stained glass bar lights over the tables, little signs along the walls with classic bad jokes like 'Shakey's offers it's patrons prompt service, no matter how long it takes!' and a little arcade room for the kids. The buffet was mostly different kinds of pizza (Ever had cheeseburger pizza? With pickle and tomato slices?) and a couple other staples that were all at least decent. The only thing that was really odd was that drinks had to be purchased by walking up to the bar and buying individual cups full of your beverage of choice at 40¢ for a small cup of soda and 80¢ for a large one.

We finally pulled into our driveway in the early evening and were met by an ecstatic dog and two cats who were grumpy that they hadn't been receiving the attention that they so richly deserve. It was good to be back; especially good for me in that I didn't have to be to work the next day. Even though I didn't have to worry about getting up for work, the long drive and hours of wandering through the House on the Rock had worn me out enough that I didn't stay up nearly as late as I usually do on a weekend. Andrea and I were curled up in bed together by about ten thirty.

Now, amazingly enough, I'm going to have another Stormdog trip story for you in the near future about posicat and I travelling once again to the wild confines of Gary, Indiana. It should be the very near future, since I already have a title and am writing the entry in my head even as I type the last little bit of this one. Watch this space!