the plan today was to see two nearby frank lloyd wright homes, fallingwater and kentuck knob. fallingwater was an hour and 45 minutes away, so we got up early and immediately got in the car.

the weather was somewhat dissapointing. it was raining lightly and foggy in places. i slept for most of the ride; jen and i had stayed up late last night.

i'm not sure how to describe fallingwater to do it justice. it was so good, that i didn't even think to take pictures. i was in awe the whole time. i had my camera in my pocket and i never even thought about it. everything about that house is magnificent. looking down from the south terrace over the waterfall is great. the interior and furnishings are beautiful. it's just like i remember it from reading about it, only 100 times better.

i picked up a lot of ideas to incorporate into the house i've been drawing plans of in various notebooks for the last two years.

even though there aren't that many rooms at fallingwater, it's huge and that is immediately recognizable. it spreads way up the hill in five stories of varying size. every living and bed room has a terrace, and the bottom floor is the water. stairs lead town to it in two places.

even though we were there on a gloomy, rainy winter day (well, technically it's the first day of spring, but it felt like winter...), fallingwater was astoundingly beautiful. i can only imagine how amazing it would be during fall or summer, when the surrounding forrest had color.

the tour of fallingwater is surprisingly complete. they take you to almost every room. after the tour, we were free to wander about the grounds but unfortunately we had scheduled our tour of kentuck knob too early and we had to leave immediately.

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kentuck knob is perhaps a more realistic house. you could see someone actually living there. it's on a more modest scale. i found the name to be a bit weird and a bit obnoxious. the area it is found in used to be called 'little kentuck' back when kentuckey was spelled without the 'ey.' the 'knob' referrs to a hill with no trees on top. kentuck knob's first owners planted 10,000 trees in the vacinity, however, so it really isn't a knob anymore and it's certainly not in kentucky.

the owner (a lord in the british parliment, actually) is a collector of fancy furniture, and thus has a lot of wright's work in the house that wasn't originally designed for the house as well as some great sculptures and artworks by other artists. kentuck knob has only been open to the public for about five years.

of course, the building was as beautiful as any of wright's creations, but it was no fallingwater. in retrospect, we should have seen it first to avoid anticlimax.

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since we hadn't eaten anything since the pancakes at breakfast, we were starving after we left. we stopped at a cozy resteraunt called 'the stone house' near kentuck knob. it was good food and a nice fancy sunday church atmostphere, but our waitress had this weird deformed thumb with a claw-like nail on it. yucko.

we made it home after dark, and went out for ice cream and a movie. the big lebowski. despite all my attempts to give nichol a hard time and make her think i didn't like that movie, it's pretty frip frappin funny.

"what the fuck is this?"
"obviously you're not a golfer."