Friday, February 13, 2009

day trip 2.0




So Tuesday was library field trip day!  KT's bookgroup read Nancy Horan's biographical fiction novel, Loving Frank, about Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney Borthwick's affair in the early 1900's (when such things just DiDn'T go on in broad daylight).  Just our luck, there is one Frank Lloyd Wright designed home in Alabama and it is within daytrip distance.  We got some of KT's bookgroup members and a passel of other people, loaded up a 57 passenger bus, and headed to Florence, Alabama to see the Rosenbaum House!  It was incredible to see the architectural elements and designs that hithertofore I had only seen in books or documentary films.  

We actually watched the first part of the PBS Ken Burns documentary on FLW on the way up and the 2nd half on the way home.  I had the same feeling of awe as when I visited antebellum homes, the Lincoln Memorial, Walden Pond, Blarney Castle and Mount Vernon.  As I mentioned in my post on visiting the museums in Atlanta, history is so different when you confront it face to face than when you read it in a book!  

The Rosenbaum House is apparently the only FLW designed home in the Southeast that is open to the public so you should visit if you can!  I took pictures of the interior but the images on their website are better so click through that if you want a peek inside the house!  KT and I were v.v. impressed with the house and many of the space-saving aspects of it, though I wouldn't be comfortable living in all that compactness.  Low ceilings, tiny rooms, and itty bitty doorways don't make for spacious living.  

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Lady said you guys had Rain Man on the bus with you. And that he gave you a 10 minute speech on the relative attributes of Hollandaise Sauce. I'm sorry I missed that!

Holley T said...

I knew he was straight nut crazy before that bus ever left the mall...that's why I squished myself into the seat with DKY, leaving all my stuff in the seat next to him until I could work up the nerve to ask him to pass it to me.
*singing* See Are A Zee Whyyyyy

Erica said...

wow, sounds surreal in so many ways. i wish i could have come too! we did see walden pond & mount vernon together, after all :)