Harry's Snowdome Collection

Porta Nigra in Germany

We picked this beauty up in Trier, Germany in 1988 during a COSMOS bus tour of Europe. This snowdome was manufactured in Germany, and the precision of the molding is quite apparent. Even the snow is of a high quality! The Porta Nigra, or "Black Gate" is part of a wall that encircled the city of Trier. It is amazing how far back many of the structures in Europe go.

Sulfur Mountain

The Sulfur Mountain Gondola lies just outside Banff, in Alberta Province in Canada. When we arrived, in August 1995, it was a cool wet morning. The line to the gondola ride had about 200 people in it, half of them being Japanese tourists. I had expected this gondola to be used in the winter for carrying skiers, but it looks like it only supported the summer tourist traffic. At the top of the gondola ride was a restaurant plus gift shops. One of them sold me this snowdome. To add to the cosmopolitan flavor of the day, the parking lot had several COSMOS buses.

Holy Hill

Holy Hill is a monastery located in Wisconsin a little south of Kettle Moraine State Park. Who would have expected to find snowdomes for sale in a monastery? Well, to my surprise, I found a display of snow domes inside their gift shop. Chortle. Chortle. Now what was a bum like me doing at Holy Hill? I was on a Windy City Miata road trip, and our tour leader thought our group might gain some spiritual benefit by stopping. I've gone back since then and found that many Chicago area Catholics have visited Holy Hill.

You can't go home again wrote Thomas Wolfe. He probably was a snowdome collector too. On a return trip to Holy Hill, we found that the domes were slowly degrading. Now they're BLACK, instead of classic blue. Furthermore, this example concerns my worst fears about the downsizing in the snowdome biz. They fired the spell checker. Holy Hill is in Hubertus, not HObertus. I fear that our next visit will find these snowdomes changed completely over to the dreaded one-dimensional black stencilled domes, with the words reading Holly Hall, Milwaukee.