…relax, it’s FOR salamanders
DogCon 5, Trip Day 2, Part 1
We are all awake and chowing down on breakfast here inside the bus. Zach and I got up early to do the cooking and we have everything from bacon & eggs to bagels & lox to hot & cold cereals laid out. Since the critters were fed shortly after their morning constitutional, they are now in the meadow room.
Flash: But we can still smell all that food, Dad!
Sasha: Bacon! BACON!
In just under an hour, we’ll be starting up the coast with our first stop being in Santa Barbara for a visit to the World Famous Button House. No doubt we’ll also see some other interesting sights, but a hose made of, or at least decorated with, buttons? That’s the big attraction.
From there, we’ll head just a bit up the road to Lompoc, the nearest town to the Village Of The Giants, about which I shall say no more, except that it is also World Famous.
Our final stop on today’s roadside attraction triple header is at Cambria, home of the Weird House, which absolutely nobody on this bus wants to not visit. I mean, come on, “Weird House”?
Lucy: And this will be different from where we live how?
Abby & Bea: Hahahahaha! Good one, Lucy!
Now, I shall tuck into my bagels, lox & cream cheese before assuming my role as bus driver. More bloggage soon.
Radio Station: “Guys Named George”, Music by and about men named George
Destination Sign: The 8th Dimension
DogCon 5, Trip Day 2, Part 2
We are all sipping ice cold drinks at a small cafe just now, but I’ve gotta tell you about our visit to the World Famous Button House. On the trip up, during which we missed much of the worst traffic on the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway), we all took turns guessing what the Button House would look like. The general consensus was “old lady cottage covered in buttons with button covered knick knacks”.
We were way off base on that one.
The Button House is an 11 room Victorian mansion covered in 14.25 MILLION buttons! Every square inch of the exterior, all the floors and all the ceilings are button covered. The floors were given a coat of resin to make them smooth, but everything else feels buttony. Did I mention the doorknobs? Bigass buttons! Light switches? Buttons! The furniture, doors, window frames, appliances, fireplaces and about 3,000 other things? Covered with BUTTONS!
Our guide, a lovely young lass named Deena, told us that the whole thing started in 1898 when the young Stuart and Mathilda Todd, button collectors the both of them, built the house and then decided to indulge their button obsession. Over the next 68 years, they not only buttoned up the whole place, they raised five children, made millions in ranching & banking and lived to a ripe old age. Upon their deaths, the house was set up as a museum to buttons and has remained that way ever since.
It was an interesting tour, you bet. Some of the buttons are very old and worth big bucks to collectors. According to Deena, there are buttons made of 217 different substances, from bone to titanium. They range in size from one eighth of an inch to 6 inches across and they come in every color and pattern you can imagine.
In related news: t-shirts, fridge magnets, bumper stickers and…buttons were purchased.
Time to climb back on the bus and head for the World Famous Village of the Giants. More bloggage soon!
Radio Station: “The Dr. Demento Channel”, featuring new stuff and past shows from his long career
Destination Sign: Fortress of Solitude
DogCon 5, Trip Day 2, Part 3
Ok, so here’s the deal on the World Famous Village Of The Giants: It’s way out in the sticks, it costs you $3.00 a head to visit and, like many roadside attractions, it has seen better days. Still, it was interesting to see.
Lucy: Once again, we were trapped in the bus and could only think of all the rabbits and deer and other wildlife we could smell.
Sasha: And cows! Boy howdy, could I smell cows.
Flash: Oh, what I would give for opposable thumbs!
Abby & Bea: Carnivores is da cwaziest people!
It seems that back in the late 60’s, rancher Bill Sankey got a great deal on giant sized props from various movie and television studios. Giant pencils, telephones, books, etc. Anyway, Ol’ Bill reckoned that all these giant props could do with some giant folks, so he hired a bunch of artistic types to make him some. By about 1978, he had 22 giant people, 6 giant dogs, 4 giant cats and a giant mouse. They were all set up so as to be using those giant props and then Bill opened it up to the public from 1979 to 1993, at which point he retired to San Diego and his sons inherited the ranch. Never really having liked the giant stuff much, they pretty just handed the place over to the caretaker and told him to run it until further notice, which he still does.
Without any sort of money for repairs, the place has slowly run down until everything needs a paint job and some minor to major repairs. A couple of the giant people are looking pretty shabby and one of the giant dogs is missing a tail and a hind leg. The whole self guided tour took us maybe half an hour, after which we bought t-shirts that I suspect were made in the late 90’s. A few minutes later, we were on the way back to Lompoc and “Big Larry’s Steakburgers” for lunch. The steakburgers are pretty damned good and the milkshakes are great.
Upon departing Lompoc, we began the two hour drive up the cost to the small town of Cambria, thence to see the “Weird House”. There is very little on the internet about the place, but my cousin Jim said he visited it back in 1990 and it is indeed a very odd place.
About 45 minutes into the journey, when most everyone else was either relaxing and watching the coast go by or having a little siesta, I heard Miranda yell “Uncle Doc, the goats are fighting the robots!” (something one doesn’t hear much even in a Toon game) just before many loud noises drowned her out. I hit the autopilot button and ran into the living room just in time to see Abby kick a SmartBot about 15 feet into a wall at the same time two SmartBots were trying to, as far as I could tell, polish Bea’s horns.
Abby: They tried to shear off my hair!
Bea: I’ve never had my horns polished. No fun!
Of course, where one finds mayhem, one also tends to find a certain black hound and a certain pint sized cat and, sure enough, they were in the thick of it. Lucy had a SmartBot by the arm and Flash was on top of another trying to scratch through the poor bots face.
Lucy: Oh yeah, it was on! I’ve wanted a piece of those robots for ages!
Flash: It was self defense! Those bots have terrorized us for years!
Fortunately, this year I had thought ahead to such animal antics, so all of the critters were wearing Stun Collars. I pressed four buttons on my keychain remote and ZAP, both goats, the cat and the dog were laid out flat as mackerels. No permanent damage, just a 2 minute long trip to slumberland.
Flash: Holy fuckin’ shit! One moment we’re kicking robotic ass, the next I’m waking up in lockdown! WTF?
Lucy: It must have been some damned robot trick! Those little bastards zapped us!
Abby: We woke up in the meadow room with the door locked! What the hell happened?
Bea: I don’t know, but maybe we’d better steer clear of those robots.
Sasha: Man, I go to take a little nap with Mom and I miss all the fun. That blows!
After questioning SmartBot Control, I found out that the bots had mistakenly tried to groom the goats, which the goats are not cool with. After a bit of reprogramming, that won’t happen again. On the other paw, we have long known that Flash & Lucy hate the SmartBots with the same passion they hate the vacuum cleaner at home, so I gave SmartBot Central the frequencies for their Stun Collars. I predict near daily stunning of cat and hound.
And then I had a large glass of iced tea before going back to driving.
When we got just south of Cambria, we saw a big sign telling us to take the next right turn to get to the Weird House. It was about a mile off the highway, back in an otherwise normal housing area and it stuck out like a sore thumb.
First off, it’s big, as in four stories tall and as wide as three regular houses. Then there’s the paint job: every exterior wall is a different color with a different color and style of trim. (Note to self: This could be the next way you fuck with the neighbors back home) Finally, all of the walls are cockeyed and the windows and doors are doubly so.
Still, that didn’t quite fulfill our expectations of “weird”, so we piled off the bus just in time to join a family of six who, after gawking at said bus, got out of their minivan to take the tour with us. We walked up to the front door where a sign said…
“Please knock and have your $4.00 each ready”
It only took a few seconds after we knocked for a young guy about 25 to open the door, tell us hello his name was Ethan and start taking our money. The actual tour was lead by another young guy named Zeke and a young lady named Liz. And let me tell you, folks, the inside of the house was some no shit weird stuff.
For one thing, there are about a dozen secret passages and hidden doors. Some of the doors are pretty much impossible to spot from the outside without a guide helping you.
Then there are the round rooms that not only rotate, but slowly raise up or lower to let you out on a different floor. Some of the windows use mirrors to show you a view that is not the one you expect…but if you turn away, the mirrors shift and then you see another view.
The floors in some rooms tilt slightly as you cross them, which made some of us queasy. The basement is a big maze and at some point while I was taking a leak in the fourth floor bathroom, it lowered to the second floor.
After the 45 minute tour was done and we had bought the usual stuff, I asked Ethan, Zeke, Liz and the Stanley family from Millgrove, Kentucky (they of the minivan) if they’d like to see a REALLY weird house. They agreed, so we showed them the inside of the bus. By the time we left, 20 minutes later, Ethan had refunded all of our money and the Stanley family were exiting a bit too quickly and praying to their Lord Jesus while doing it. I think it was the Slide Room that got to them.
But yeah, the Weird House is weird alright.
We’ll be camping out in the Los Padres National Forest tonight and pasta of several types is on the dinner menu. After that, there will be gaming and movie watching, since tomorrow is a bit of a lazy sightseeing day with only one roadside attraction stop planned.
Ah ha! Joe has just checked in and he has the parts he needs plus “something cool”. I can hardly wait to find out what it is.
The blog, she will resume tomorrow!
Radio Station: “The Woodstock Channel”, featuring the music of Woodstock Nation
Destination Sign: Whitechapel, 1888
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