Road Trip!

Bob and I have really missed traveling since Elsa was born, so earlier this summer, we decided it was time to take our first real trip with her. We thought about trying to get on a plane, but that just seemed like more effort than we wanted to deal with right now. So we got a Wisconsin guidebook (yes, there actually is such a thing), and decided to go for a long weekend in ... Green County and vicinity! Home of "America's official little Switzerland," Spotted Cow beer, and an eccentric pack-rat millionaire's bizarre legacy.

Green County is actually very scenic and lovely—rolling hills, rustic barns, cute little white churches with picture-perfect steeples, etc. So we enjoyed the drive, despite the fact that we were listening to the Wonder Pets CD for what seemed like the eight millionth time (Elsa shrieks in the car until she hears that damn guinea pig). We stayed at a hotel called Chalet Landhaus in New Glarus, the aforementioned "little Switzerland." It's a cute town full of Swiss chalet architecture, cheese shops, cow statues, people in Bavarian outfits, and the like.


Saturday morning, we headed off to The House on the Rock. We went there under the impression that it's a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Wrong. Turns out, it was actually built as a parody of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. A very wealthy, very strange man built it in the 1940s because his father, also an architect, had been fired by Frank Lloyd Wright years earlier. To even call it a "house" is a stretch—the guy never intended to live in it, so it has no bedrooms, and it's more a maze of tunnels built into the rock than it is a series of rooms. But it's interesting, I'll give it that. Most of the "rooms" look similar to this one:


It also has something called The Infinity Room, which hangs 200 feet over a valley with no visible supports whatsoever:


Here's Elsa hanging upside down over part of the Infinity Room that has a glass floor:


And the house is only one small part of the whole House on the Rock experience, which was named one of the Seven Wonders of Roadside America by roadsideamerica.com. Apparently the main attraction is this eccentric millionaire's collection of random crap. There are musical instruments, nautical memorabilia, Christmas ornaments, dolls, doll houses, hot air balloons, circus props ... you name it, this guy collected it. Elsa seemed to really enjoy the "pneumatic orchestras," as the brochure called them. Entire rooms were filled with instruments that all played by themselves (if you fed them a token, of course)—there was an Asian orchestra with lots of drums and gongs, a Baroque orchestra that played the Blue Danube, even an "underwater" orchestra that played Octopus's Garden.

Here's Elsa enjoying "Bolero," as played by one of the smallest pneumatic orchestras we saw.



I liked the giant carousel, which looked like something out of a movie. Unfortunately you can't ride on it—the carousel animals are antiques, collected from all over the world.


Bob liked the 200-foot-tall sea creature:


There was also stuff that was just plain creepy, like the Doll Carousel:


Elsa didn't get a chance to nap until we left The House on the Rock at 2 p.m., and she didn't really eat much lunch either, but she was an incredibly good girl and only let out a few of her patented ear-piercing shrieks throughout our tour. But she took a good nap in the car on the way back to New Glarus and was all ready for our next stop: A tour of the New Glarus Brewing Company, a small brewery that makes Spotted Cow and a great Cherry Belgian Red.


Unfortunately the tour was a self-guided audio tour, and we quickly learned that operating an audio tour device with one hand while toting a very heavy 1-year-old in the other is not all that enjoyable (the brewery wasn't stroller-friendly). But it was fun seeing where the beer is made, and the story of how a husband-and-wife team started the brewery 15 years ago was interesting. They bought the equipment shown below from an old brewery in Germany, just one day before it was supposed to be sold for scrap metal, and got an incredible deal on it—they got $1 million worth of equipment for only $24,000.


After the tour, we stopped into the Tasting Room, which again was not the greatest place for a 1-year-old. But we found some comfy boxes for her to sit on while we tried several of their beers:

After the brewery, we went back to the hotel for Elsa's first-ever swim in a real pool! And she loved it:


Finally, we went for an authentic Swiss dinner in downtown New Glarus, with cheese fondue as an appetizer and roesti potatoes (hash browns with cheese and onions) as a side dish. Elsa was so exhausted she had to lay her head down on the table at one point, but she still didn't cry or crab! Bob and I said to each other over and over again this weekend how lucky we are to have such a laid-back, easy, trooper of a kid.


We headed home Sunday morning, making a quick stop in Mt. Horeb to visit the Mustard Museum, which basically consisted of walls and walls of mustard jars. Not sure what else I expected:


They did have various mustards that you could sample in the gift shop, as well as lots of paraphernalia with their hee-larious "Poupon U" slogan (we didn't buy anything).

A big thank-you to Katie, who was nice enough to take care of Belle this weekend while we were gone. We had a really fun road trip, bonding as a family and exploring my adopted state. And Elsa is clearly ready to graduate to some more serious, hard-core traveling with Mommy and Daddy very soon! We love you so much, baby girl!