BOXES 106-107: More Wisconsin.

This was my first view of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin, his home near Spring Green, WI. It was a major stop during a number of excursions I took from Sheboygan in the spring and early summer of 1977.

The first of these car trips, or rather the one where I first brought my camera, was to Door County, the peninsula extending into Lake Michigan northeast from Green Bay. I went with my colleagues Royce and Joy Shaw, and we chose that particular weekend because it was supposed to be the height of cherry blossoms. (Surrounded by water except to the south, Door County has a good climate for fruit orchards, especially cherries.) You see Joy in the first of these pictures.

The Shaws brought their poodle along for the ride, as you see in the next photos.

The second and third of those pics were, I think, taken in Peninsula State Park, on the Green Bay (i.e., the bay) side, while the poodle closeup was on a rocky stretch of the Lake Michigan shore, where we were visiting a lighthouse:

Back in Sheboygan I took this picture of Joy--I don't remember its being a special occasion, just a freshly baked cake. The Shaws left Sheboygan after two years, but another couple who arrived the same time as I did, Jim and Jean Tobin, have stayed! Here they are at the Sheboygan lakefront:

There was an especially nice sunset that evening. I showed another photo of it at the top of my previous post, and here are a few more:

Another excursion involved camping--a novelty for me. I bought a small tent with the encouragement of my new friends (and a bicycle; and I learned how to swim). This trip, to a southeast portion of the state, was with another colleague, Joe Helgert, and his girlfriend Ginny. Our first stop was at the Cave of the Mounds near the town of Blue Mounds, where I had trouble taking focused pictures without a flash. (That's Ginny at the bottom right of the third photo.)

As for the last photo, I was struck by the surrealist idea of "as-is crabs" being sold in a cavern's gift shop. If you have a perfectly sensible explanation for them, I'd just as soon not know.

We camped farther west, at Governor Dodge State Park:

In the morning we went out on one of the lakes inside the park:

And in the afternoon we drove up to the House on the Rock, the curious home (open to the public for a fee) built on multiple levels into the side of a cliff, with some fine Asian decorative arts and art nouveau lamps in the various rooms and a museum of mechanical musical instruments adjoining the house. Surrounded by trees, it's very hard to photograph in any coherent way, but in the following shots you see a walkway leading to an overlook; a view from one of the windows; a vase sitting on a ledge; and the highest portion of the house.

While on one of the upper levels I was able to get a pretty close view of a bird's nest with chicks and parent, thanks to the zoom lens (and cropping when I digitized the slide).

Our next stop was the Taliesin estate, the home of Frank Lloyd Wright and location of his studio (he later built a Taliesin West in Scottsdale). You can find a great many books and websites on the history and design of the house itself and his other buildings on the property; I'll just share my photos, including the one at the top of the post and the next two of Taliesin itself. (In those days the house was not open for tours; I got to see inside it only many years later.)

You see the house at a greater distance in the next photo, along with a shot of the windmill that Wright designed:

Here is the Midway Barn that Wright designed for the estate:

And here is the Hillside Home School, originally a boarding school, later a drafting studio:

Just across the road from Taliesin was a restaurant built posthumously from his plans (it's now a FLW visitors center). My photo was taken of the back side, from across the adjoining Wisconsin River:

And here is a glimpse of the river itself:

The rest of that summer I spent outside the state, taking a long drive back to Evanston, to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Maine, then back through the Adirondacks to Rochester and to another part of Pennsylvania for a family wedding. I'll show scenes from these visits in the next post.