Fallingwater Road Trip

Fallingwater Road Trip

We have been talking with Sheryl and Laura about a road trip for a couple of years and we decided it was time to make it happen. We choose Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater as our objective because Laura has long been a fellow FLW (Frank Lloyd Wright) fan and because Sheryl loves art and this building is an incredible piece of art. Okay, I’ll also admit that we wanted to pick up a few more caches in a few more states. All four of us love to geocache so it sounded like a perfect trip for us all!

This was slated to be a whirlwind trip because we had only a two day window to make it all the way out to Pennsylvania and back. We figured that would be pretty easy as we had four good drivers and we could easily split the driving burden. We set out about 6:00 AM and headed east. The drive was nice and the company was fun. Lots of silliness from the three women, but I of course, demurred.

Rudy’s

 

Our lunch stop was in Springfield, Ohio, at Rudy’s. It’s a BBQ joint where you order your food before you sit down. After a short wait we got our pulled-pork sandwiches. This was some of the most tender pork I’ve ever had and on the softest of buns. Oh man, this was excellent BBQ!!! Must come back!

Everything in the town fit on one sign!

A couple of hours later we were rolling into West By God Virginia. Of course, everyone knows you have to sing as you enter this state, so we all sang along with John Denver as we sped through West Virginia’s 28 miles on I70. “Take me home, country roads!”

 

Laura uses her Zen Geocaching skills

After about eight hours of driving and caching we checked into our hotel in New Stanton, PA. It was too early to eat, so we went geocaching, of course. The first cache was across the street from our hotel. Easy. Second cache was near a wildlife preserve. Easy. Third cache was “The Local Cat House”…easy, but I was a little disappointed.

Then came the last cache of the day, “Monkey See, Monkey Do”. All had gone well up to this point, but the location of this one was a little circumspect. Now, is when the true geocaching skills needed to kick in. Unfortunately, I had three geocaching navigators EACH with a different idea of where to go. “Turn left here!” I heard. So left, I turned. Wrong way. “Stop, go back!”, yelled another voice. So I stopped and turned back. Wrong way. “Left! No, right! South! Six miles! NO, two blocks east!! Over there! No, OVER THERE!” The commands came fast and with increasing intensity!!! OMG, it was liking driving in the Bermuda Triangle with a church bus of yelling monkeys telling me where to go! OMG!

Finally, after about twenty miles we found the cache about two blocks from where we had begun. Oye!

All that “fun” caching made us hungry. We had driven by our targeted dining place at least three times on our geocaching journey so we knew exactly where it was. We were quickly seated and ordered our food. We almost immediately knew we had made a wrong choice for dining. The lighting was subtle with lots of pastels. The clientele was nicely dressed and chatting quietly. The place settings were immaculate and our waitress had all her teeth. Argh!!!! We had violated Road Trip Rule 3.26, “Never eat anywhere that has linen table service.” We suffered through our pasta and wine and got out of that hell hole as fast as we could!

Beer Express!

Just down the street we had seen “The Beer Express”, a drive through beer store. Sheryl and Laura had never seen one of those so we had to drive in! Even though there were stacks of cases of beers all around us and the attendant walked up to the truck apologizing because they were almost sold out. “Sold out” and there must have been a thousand cases of beer in there! After buying a case and taking the appropriate pictures we headed to the hotel to crash.

Next morning we met downstairs for the hotel’s breakfast buffet. All had a good night’s rest except Sheryl and Laura had been awakened by a tornado siren. Apparently, this was a siren for only their room because no one else had heard it and there were no storms within 400 miles of the hotel. Not sure what happened in their room, and I’m not sure I want to know!

Ohiopyle Falls

We hit the road and with only a few incorrect turns we were soon on country roads headed to Fallingwater, which is in the middle of nowhere, just down from Yogi’s Yellowstone Park. In fact, we actually passed Fallingwater and first visited Ohiopyle. This is a little village in the middle of Ohiopyle State Park. We had about thirty minutes before our Fallingwater reservation so we decided to pick up an Earthcache here. Glad we did because this is a charming little area with rapids, a waterfall and hundreds of white-water rafters. Very cool place! But couldn’t stay long, because Frank Lloyd Wright was waiting on us!

Mona introduced me to FLW (Frank Lloyd Wright) not long after we began dating by taking me to visit the Dana Thomas House in Springfield. I was pretty sure I would be bored to death, but instead I was captivated by the genius of this incredible man. Over the subsequent years I’ve read many books about FLW and we’ve managed to visit about twelve of his creations scattered across the country. Mona also introduced Laura to FLW at an early age and Laura likes to talk about a paper she wrote in eighth grade about him. Laura has also visited the Dana Thomas House and last year she visited Taliesin with us in Wisconsin.

This was our second visit to Fallingwater, Laura’s first and this would be Sheryl’s introduction to Wright. In my opinion, visiting his masterpiece is be a pretty good introduction!
As I said, Fallingwater is out in the middle of nowhere. You enter the property from a county highway and wind your way through the woods back into the property. You end up at the Visitor Center which seems to have organically grown out of the forest. It’s high on a hill above Fallingwater, yet the forest here is so dense you can’t see the structure. Here, the lower reaches of the forest are filled with Laurel Trees. It appears we had just missed the peak blooming but it was still beautiful.

At last, it was 10:00 and our tour began. We walked down the hill along the rock bluffs and were soon in the valley below. The first view of the valley is of the Preservation Foundation’s flower garden. Hundreds upon hundreds of black-eyed Susans, purple phlox and other varieties of native flowers were all in full sun and full bloom!

First view of Fallingwater

Walking a little further you begin to hear the sounds of Bear Creek. A little side trip of a hundred feet to the right reveals the creek rushing its way to Fallingwater. We’re happy already, but in just a few hundred feet we get happier as we get out first view of Fallingwater! Even just this view of the back corner is breathtaking! From here you can clearly see how FLW used cantilevers to float the house over the water, literally within feet of the water below. The building is huge, but at the same time it seem to fit perfectly within its surroundings and it feels as though the building and the location were always destined for each other.

We had a wonderful tour guide, Shelby, who spent an hour sharing this incredible home with us. It was built in the 30s, but its design is so modern that you think it’s actually yet to be built in the future. Although modern, it is designed to bring the outdoors in…to make the people at home with nature. Large, open rooms with horizontal lines that match the lines in the stone outside; lots of windows and terraces; and even steps from the great room to the rushing water below. It’s magical!

Okay, maybe it’s not iconic!

All too soon our tour was over. We strolled through the backs to the overlook where we took our “iconic” photos and recorded our presence here for history. No carvings in the tree, just photo-electronic proof we were here!

 

It was time for lunch so we headed back to Ohiopyle. There we had a true and proper Road Trip lunch where we ordered inside and sat outside with a view of the nearby rapids. Locals wandered around us with their dogs and finally our lunch was served. Our server had lots of tatts and was appropriately missing a tooth. Ah….this is fine dining!

After lunch we determined that we were only about 45 minutes from Maryland, and since neither Sheryl nor Laura had a cache from that state….well, we hit the old National Road and sped on to Maryland. We soon found a cache in Maryland at the Bear Camp Historical Marker. Here in 1755, George Washington was marching with General Braddock to Fort Duquesne. Washington came down with a violent fever and was forced to stay behind here until he recovered. The things you see and learn while geocaching

It was time to head home so we turned east on I68 and soon we were singing with John Denver as we again entered West Virginia. Then Pennsylvania again, then WBGV again with more John Denver and then no more singing until Indiana wanted us. We kept those miles steadily moving behind us until Laura finally turned us in to Decatur on Route 48 about 10:30 PM. It had been a short and fun-packed trip, but it was good to be home. Can’t wait for the next Road Trip!

Post Script: About 11:30 I was checking to be sure the doors were locked before I went to sleep. All

Welcome Home!

seemed well, except for a persistent high-pitched noise. Thoughts of Sheryl and Laura’s one-room tornado siren went through my mind, but I pretty much dismissed it as a new tune from my ever-present tinnitus. About then Mona said, “What’s that squeaking noise?!?” She quickly narrowed it down to the vestibule closet. She opened the door and just like in the cartoons a pile of everything fell to her feet! The sound was coming from a timer for Taboo!

My first thought was that Monte had again been doing pull ups on the hanger bar. But, apparently, the shelf that held all our games and coats had given way while we were gone and the pile had been waiting for Mona to open the door and get her surprise.
We couldn’t close the door so we left it and went to bed.  No way would we let that spoil our road trip to Fallingwater!