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Pix:Trips:North
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Jerry, Cinderella, Hippopotamus
Alas, there was no hippopotamus from River Nile still in the car. The fairy tale cars were some of the fanciest and goldenest.
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Circus Missile
I don't know why the circus had a missile. Or maybe it was a rocket?
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Music Car
First in a series of devices making automatic music. This one wasn't actually playing, as opposed to most of the ones later.
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Snake Dancer!
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Ship of Bone
This is in the House on the Rock now. One of the few places that wasn't very dim, this is an entrance case with... a Chinese ghost ship? Who knows? Nothing has labels, it's all inexplicable art.
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Music Box
This is one of the smaller "automatic music" devices, playing Bolero. The finger levers and plucky things make it seem like the stringed instruments are playing, but they aren't really; the drums and tambourines and castanet are actually robotic-ish.
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Rawr
The "Heritage of the Sea" is a three-story exhibit of ship models around the outside of a ramp, with the inside taken up by a VAST HUGE SEA MONSTER fighting a kraken. Also at the bottom is a robotic octopus that plays "Octopus' Garden". Sadly, most of the House on the Rock is really dim, and my cell phone was running out of power so I didn't use the flash. But you can kind of imagine the scale here.
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Player Piano
There were a lot of robot-music rooms and carts and pianos and metal-disc music boxes and player pianos... this one was particularly fascinating, in that it's a perpetual roll, with these paper loops - the paper is being fed rightwards across the top going into the player mechanism, and ejected in loops at the right hand side a bit below that, and the whole mass of paper loops is shifting slowly to the right. I am astonished that it never seemt to clog up or tear.
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Music Room
This is an automatic music robot room (again, some real, some not): the Mikado.
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Clock in the Organ Room
The Organ room isn't actually musical at all. It's just this vast huge room full of... mechanism? sculpture? architecture? It's a little bit like taking a tour through a physical incarnation of someone's somewhat surrealist painting. This was probably my favorite room, just because it was the part that seemed the most implausible that someone had actually *made* it.
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Three-Trigger Gun
There's a section of a gun collection, which included a lot of interesting looking guns, or fancy old guns, and some that seemed... more eccentric. There was a four-barrel blunderbuss, and there was this three-triggered flintlock.
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