Unusual Life

If you’re looking for truly off-the-wall accommodations, look no further than Woodlyn Park, in Waitomo, New Zealand, where three different motels thrill vacationers: a 1950s freighter plane (said to be one of the last Allied planes to leave Vietnam); a 1950s rail car that sleeps six; and a hobbit motel (allegedly the world’s first) dot the landscape of a working farm a few minutes from the Waitomo Glow Worm Caves. You can choose to sleep in the plane’s cockpit or tail, the train itself, or the circular-windowed rooms of the hobbit hotel. Woodlyn Park itself is also the beneficiary of some renown, given it hosts the Kiwi Culture Show, a unique New Zealand attraction involving sheep shearing and interaction with native animals.

Hobbit Motel

There’s a hotel out there to satisfy most every curiosity—whether you’re into marine life, wildlife, or Eskimo life—but we’ve narrowed the choices down to ten stand-out properties ranging from low-cost to luxe. So say goodbye to so-so lodging and catch your zzz’s in one of our favorite offbeat hotels. Pick from a 1950s freighter jet, a former prison cell, a treetop lodge, a onetime royal haunt, and more.

Offbeat Hotel Photo Tour

Sweet Dreams: Sleeping on Cakes

A vanishing bit of Americana is disappearing from Tucson and Dianne Stevens of Airstream Life was able to record a bit of it before it was lost forever.

The Magic Carpet Golf, on East Speedway Boulevard will soon be razed to make way for a parking lot. The entire place was handmade with concrete sculptures, colored lights, and exotic scenes from popular culture.

There is talk of moving the sculptures to another location for preservation, but I don’t see how it will be possible. They are delicate and crumbling, made on-site mostly from wire and concrete, and in many cases firmly anchored to the ground. Moving that T-Rex would be an operation akin to removing a real 65-million year-old dino fossil.

Flickr photoset

Via Boing Boing

Hidden passages have a long history of appearing in fictional novels and films but an even richer past in reality dating back to Egyptian tombs passages for Christians to worship in hiding from Romans. Over the years hidden passages have been used to arrest kings and evacuate popes, hide shogun warriors, facilitate guerrilla fighters, enable drug smugglers and conceal serial killers.

In recent times, however, many more modest individuals have created (or discovered) secret passages in ordinary everyday households and there are even companies dedicated to designing secret doors, rooms and passages in middle-class houses. In some cases the discovery of a secret room is a wonderful find but it can also be a twisted nightmare.

Hidden rooms today usually serve one of two purposes: security or fun. Sometimes a hidden door is used to disguise a safe or a ‘panic room’ where residents can hide in an emergency.

Creative Home Engineering offers modern-day solutions to those who want to add a hidden room or secret passage in their own home.

Via Neatorama

1979 Michael & Leda moved themselves and their paintings from Provincetown MA to rural land in Cornville Arizona. There they began the first mixed media structure which they later called Eliphante. They continued building and sculpting on the 3 acre environment.

www.Eliphante.org

Thanks to Earl and Rhonda Brown for the tip!

Dog Bark Park Inn is a bed & breakfast guesthouse inside the World’s Biggest Beagle. Guests enter the body of the beagle from a private 2nd story deck. Some of the dog’s decorative furnishings are carvings by Dog Bark Park chainsaw artists Dennis & Frances. Inside and up another level to the head of the dog is a loft room with additional sleeping space plus a cozy alcove in the muzzle.

At Dog Bark Park Inn sleeping in the doghouse is a good thing!

Dog Park Inn

Book a stay at the Dog Park Inn (Video)

Instead of throwing those glass bottles away, many folks have wondered how to recycle and build with these ubiquitous items.

This photo show walls being constructed on a build in New Mexico by Mike Reynolds at one of his “earthships”.

Apparently back in the 60’s Mr. Heineken came up with the idea of makeing the beer bottles and size and shape of bricks, while concerned about the about of litter and wastage beer bottles were causing. They never came to be, however.

Building with bottles has often been a choice of folk artists, early settlers and the poor in some countries, as they used whatever resources they had to build shelter. Agility Nut has a wonderful website featuring bottle houses around the world.

The Airlie Gardens Bottle House was created by a local artist, Virginia Wright-Frierson in 2004. It is officially named the “Minnie Evans Sculpture Garden Bottle House” after an artist/gatekeeper that worked at Airlie for many years. This bottle house is also referred to as the “chapel”. Frierson used bottles of all shapes and sizes as well as cement and chicken wire in its creation.

Beer Bottle Chapel created by Martin Sanchez of Riverside California

Ann’s Bottle House B&B in Arizona

Tom Kelly’s Rhyolite Bottle House

The Bottle Houses of Prince Edward Island