Aug 06 2014 09:55 AM
Re: Vacations 2014
So as you may know I was in Wisconsin for a week, here are some hilites.
First nite there, met the Monks and shared a beer with this sweetheart:
The following morning was going out for a run when a big coach bus pulled up in front of the neighboring Hotel Pfister where the Mets stay. Noting a line of lumpy autograph seekers out there, we went in for a further look but found only a giant stash of Met luggage in the lobby; the team has apparently already departed for the ballpark. I felt like a fool shooting photos of luggage and the lobby was dark, but snapped away anyway. Great tags. Who's Nishio?
Spent the day at "Germanfest" which sounds more German than it really was, despite there being German bands and German foods and some German beers and guys in Leiderhosen, it was mostly a street fair with a German theme, the same venue with small changes could be made up for "Italianfest" the next week.
Food portions out there are enormous by the way, as were a lot of the people we saw. Its weirdly nice to stay at a place where you stuff yourself every night and needn't feel too fat.
We stayed at the stylish Hotel Metro and hung around the trendy Third Ward, where there was still more food and beer.
Never found Mr. C's hardware or Arnold's Drive-In but did encounter the "Bronz Fonz"
Next we headed way upstate, past the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field to the Northern peninsula on Lake Michigan, very beatutiful countryside filthy with cherry orchards and shops selling everything cherry: Cherry pie, cherry salsa, cherry wine, cherry everything. Took two boats out to Rock Island in the middle of the lake for some hiking. This was what it looked like from the boat
They do a thing up there is called a Fish Boil, where they cook whole whitefish, potatoes and onions in a cauldron of saltwater under firewood, then make it boil over, Gene Simmons style. Fish was pretty good!
[youtube]qN1rXGAOrLM[/youtube]
We then headed a few hours Southwest to Madison where lots of college students in bikinis hung around the lakefront campus & every restaurant had a better local beer selection than the next. I'd have flunked out of there in 3 weeks, at least while the weather was nice.
Retail stores love when customers use the merchandise to take selfies then don;t buy anything.
Finally, spent a day out in the "Wisconnsin Dells" which is a highway offramp community consisting of casino-sized indoor/outdoor waterparks. Crazy fun. In the end it was sort of weird to vacation in places where the locals vacation, but we had lots of fun and the weather -- cool in the mornings and evenings, never too hot daytimes, was just swell for July-August.
