Sunday, August 24, 2014

Iowa Visit!

We spend a week in Iowa visiting family before heading back to Idaho. While visiting my family in Chillicothe, I was still in the sight-seeing mode, so I asked at dinner one day what we could go see in the area.  Dad mentioned some pyramids, so we loaded up to go check them out.

We headed out in Dan's minivan to see to the pyramids that are in a cemetery

The biggest one has a tomb on one side that is open.  Mom was the first to go down to look in.

Dan and Kyle also went down to poke their heads in.  Right after this picture was taken, Mom, standing behind us, screamed. We all jumped, you should have seen the look on Kyle's face, while mom giggled.  We're used to her shenanigans, but Kyle's not yet.  

Examining the pyramid.

Selfie in front of the cool pyramids!
After we stayed a few days with my family, we headed to Cedar Rapids to see friends, Casey and Amber.  We stayed with them one night then went to Galena, IL the next day.  Kyle has always talked about Galena to me, so we decided to take a day and visit.

We had lunch at a funny place called Durty Gurt's.  


We went to the Grant Museum.  This is General/President Grant at a pretty young age.




Outside the Grant Museum. I got the coolest owl coloring book ever!

Outside the Grant House, but it was closed, so we didn't actually get to tour it.


So cute! Love these guys!

Climbing on a canon.  Proud moment.

We also went to a park.  The weather was gorgeous, this picture is from a bridge overlooking the main tourist strip in Galena.

After Galena we headed to Manchester to see Kyle's family.  Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from that visit.  We enjoyed our time there celebrating Terry and Teresa's wedding anniversary. We went kayaking and ate lots of sweet corn, well Kyle did.

Instead of heading home on Friday like originally planned, Kyle had a surprise for me.  On Friday morning we headed up to Dodgeville, WI to see The House on the Rock.  This guy named, Alex Jordan, built his crazy house up on a cliff.  He didn't do much planning, just built how he felt it should go.  The house was cool, but weird.  But then we also got to see his many collections.

Beautiful gardens at The House on the Rock.

He built a room that extends out of the house, called the Infinity Room.

Obviously, it looks like the room keeps going forever.  Really neat.


He had a lot of collections, but my favorite was his collection of doll houses.

They were so beautiful and perfect.  With tiny furniture and everything looked so real, just miniature.

Part of his Circus collection.  A pyramid of elephants.

A doll castle!
Jordan also has the world's largest carousel, a collection of model boats and ships with a giant replica of a whale.  There was one room that was huge and dimly lit with all sorts of stuff in it.  Like giant bells, parts from a steam boat and a giant chandelier made out of smaller chandeliers.  There were music machines, actual instruments that he made mechanisms for to play them. Pretty cool. I'm glad we took the time to go see it.
Here's a video of one of the huge music machines.  Sorry the camera doesn't focus very well, it was pretty dark in there.


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