Testing and Vacation in In the Meadow

I meant to write about our vacation before today, but ended up being very busy this week. I guess it’s true about needing a vacation from your vacation, ha ha. The kids are taking the state standardized testing in school this week. They usually get about ten hours of sleep. I have been trying to make sure they get to bed right on time and have a good breakfast.

I have been uploading the pictures from our spring break. I will try to post some photos in my next entry, but for now I’m just going to write about what we did. We started out on Sunday afternoon and drove to a motel in Donegal, Pennsylvania. We were going to tour the Frank Lloyd Wright House called Falling Water the next day. I had been to the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Buffalo and wanted to see Falling Water. We stayed at a Day’s Inn that turned out to be quite nice. There was a large yard the kids played in. We were going to go for dinner at a place across the street, but when we got there we realized it was a real biker bar. I don’t know if the kids are quite ready for a biker bar, so we went to another restaurant. I would have gone to the biker bar if it was just my husband and me. It looked like fun. We ended up going to a really nice restaurant. They had a salad and soup bar. Not many places do anymore.

The next morning we drove to a Best Buy that was about an hour away. My husband was having some problems with his camera. We still had my camera, but he likes to have his own camera. We drove over real country roads and passed several horses and buggies. We drove by a Mennonite church and there were kids outside having some kind of physical education class.

We had scheduled our tour of Falling Water for the afternoon because it was a rainy morning. We had a very small tour group. It was just us and one other couple. They were on their way to Washington, D.C. for a wedding. When we got to the house we found there was a lot of water going over the waterfall. The past few days had been rainy. The house was truly amazing. It is the only Frank Lloyd Wright house that still has the original furnishings. There is a great room downstairs that sits right on top of the waterfall. There is a staircase that leads down to the water from the great room. Since the water was high it came right up to the slab over the water. The seating in the room is built into the walls and can’t be moved, which I thought was an interesting feature. There is a tiny kitchen in the back. We went upstairs to the bedrooms. The house was built so that each bedroom has it’s own bathroom and terrace. There is a third floor that was their son’s room.

The house was built for the Kaufmans who owned Kaufman’s Department Store. Those are Macy’s now. We also toured the guest house and garage. The tour guide told us a funny story about how Frank Lloyd Wright wanted Mr. Kaufman’s desk to be small and Mr. Kaufman wanted it to be bigger. Mr. Kaufman told Frank Lloyd Wright that if the desk were any smaller it would be too small to write Frank Lloyd Wright’s check. So Mr. Kaufman got his bigger desk.

I will write some more about the vacation next time. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the house but I did get some nice pictures of the exterior which I will try to post.