The 2025 Condo Week Trip, That Last Little Bit

 This is the last of a series of posts, which I think you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.

 

Monday, September 1

 We didn't have any clear plan for this day, so after a discussion over breakfast at the hotel, we decided to go back up to Holy Hill, in Hubertus, some thirty miles northwest of the city, to see the basilica that we'd been too late to see on Friday. We thought we'd also go to the labyrinth in West Bend, which is maybe fifteen or twenty miles farther, since we'd skipped that in hopes of reaching the basilica in time.

 We did get to the basilica fairly early, and that's when we discovered there's an elevator. I took that up to the porch; Jeff did too, a little later. I don't know how Sherry and Nancy got up there; they rushed off as soon as the car was parked and disappeared, like they usually do when they're together. For all I know they had themselves beamed up.

 Sherry took the stairs up the "scenic tower". I looked at the stairs and decided there was no way I was going to climb that narrow little staircase up seven stories and come back down without assistance from emergency medical technicians, so I just looked at her pictures. Oh, for the days, now so far in the past, when I would not let a tower go unclimbed. 

 While we were there, we saw a procession of young girls with wreaths in their hair, carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary up to the porch. I wonder if they came all the way from the bottom, because they were singing as they climbed up the last flight of steps (the part of their procession that I witnessed) and none of them seemed the least bit winded. Maybe they'd come just the one flight. 

Anyway, so the inside of the basilica is, as I said somewhere earlier, very spare in its decoration. It has ribbed vault ceilings in the gothic style, with almost no iconographic decoration on the walls. There are images in the stained glass, and a few icons across the front of the sanctuary, but by Roman Catholic standards the decor seems positively protestant in is sparseness. Beautiful, but in a very different way.

 We ditched the labyrinth again, because the Art Museum downtown was open only until five today (usually it's closed on Mondays, but today is a holiday, so it's open) and this was our only chance to see it, as it would be closed all day on Tuesday and we'd be leaving on Wednesday. We got down there and found a parking place in a nearly-empty garage across the street, and the first thing we did was have lunch in the cafe on the Lake level. It was nothing special: fruit bowls and prefab wraps with captive-audience price tags. I went out on the terrace to look at the lake and ended up staying out there for two hours or so, while everybody else toured the museum. Judging from their photos of the artworks contained inside, I made the better choice. I'd had a look at the museum's map of galleries and felt just from that that I'd be dissatisfied at having paid something like twenty bucks to see a bunch of abstract and postmodern crap. There was one gallery of paintings I might have liked to see, and an exhibition in the basement on the history of photography, but the map and the pictures my peeps took tell me I made the right choice (for a change) for myself.  

North Point Lighthouse

 Next we drove up to the North Point Lighthouse, which was small and really kind of squat and dumpy (it was built in two phases; first the top portion, then the bottom part was added later on). But it's a very pretty setting, sort of at the end of a miles-long string of parklands along the lakeshore that start way down below the art museum. The lighthouse itself, though, wasn't very impressive, especially after having seen the one at Wind Point in Racine.  

On the way to our next stop in our off-the-cuff tour, we stopped to get a photo of the Water Tower, built in the 1870s. Then we just sort of cruised around the Third Ward, a gentrifying artsy-fartsy area on the southwestern corner of downtown. It's got a lot of warehouses converted to expensive flats, and trendy restaurants and boutique shops, and is centered on the Milwaukee Public Market. The whole area is a duplication of the Pearl area in San Antonio -- all the same characteristics, right down to the enclosed mall of pop-up shops -- so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that every major city in the country has a gentrifying artsy-fartsy area just like the Third Ward, or the Pearl, and they all believe they're special because of it.

 While we were there Nancy found that there's yet another lighthouse in Milwaukee, the Pier Head Light, so we drove out to see that. The lighthouse itself is a grafitti-covered lump of metal maybe fifteen or twenty feet tall, but it does offer nice views of the skyline. Then she found a listing for something called the Schlitz Audubon center out in a suburb some ten miles north, but the website said they were open until 8pm, so we went. Got there just after five o'clock, to learn that, as of today, the first of September, their closing time is five o'clock.  Probably just as well; there were a lot of mosquitos.

 It had been a day of some disappointments, obviously, but still an enjoyable day, and I think we all kind of needed a low-key day like this. And we finished it off on a high note by going back to Oscar's Pub for dinner, where we'd had such great food on Sunday (I think it was Sunday) before the Conservatory. 

 

Tuesday, September 2

  Our last day in Milwaukee began with a morning at the Pabst Mansion. When this Flemish revival house was built, in the late 19th Century, it was one of about 60 large houses on what was then called Grand Avenue. (Now it's Wisconsin Avenue, and all the other mansions have been torn down or repurposed to economically more rewarding uses than mere dwelling spaces.) After the Pabsts died, the house was sold to the Archdiocese of Milwaukee for a bishop's palace. When, in the 1970s, it became too expensive to maintain, it was sold to a neighbouring hotelier, who planned to redevelop this space into a parking lot. This was the catalyst that resulted in a save-our-history upswell among those in town who saw more value in the property than just the money it could make for the owner. Visionary fools, always getting in the way of progress. 

 To get their way, the visionaries had to give up the carriage house; but they did save the old house, now the last one remaining on the street. As someone in the gift shop's documentary video said, "a few pieces of this history to tell a larger story." 

 There was also a small domed temporary building, originally the Pabst pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, that had been transported from there to Milwaukee when the fair ended and attached to the east end of the house. I don't think its removal had to do with the property deal, because the temporary building has been dismantled and stored in the big house's basement, awaiting a spare twelve million dollars to reconstruct. I think it was just in bad shape and they couldn't afford to fix it up. Too bad, really, because architecturally it's prettier than the house. 

This year's HQ

 Anyway: so when we arrived I realized we had actually driven right by it when we came to see the Joan of Arc Chapel, I hadn't realized it because it is serving as this year's headquarters for the Fog & Scaffold Travel Club; I just saw the historic marker for Captain Pabst, off to the side of the front lawn, as I executed a (probably illegal) three-point turn.

 We parked around the corner, not knowing there's a lot just for the Pabst Mansion across Wisconsin Avenue. We spent the few minutes we had before the tour piddling around the gift shop. Sherry found me another sweatshirt on sale ($20, not bad, and a nice bright red colour) and I stashed my camera bag in one of their lockers. Wish I'd left the camera too, as the house turned out to be so dark inside that I couldn't get any decent photos without a flash. Fortunately, Sherry got a few good ones with her cellphone camera.

 The tour itself was excellent, largely because we had a retired history teacher to show us through the place. She didn't know everything about the house -- she's only been a docent there for a couple of years -- but what she did know, she knew well, and told in an interesting fashion, without a lot of hype or melodrama.

 We located a place for lunch close to the dock where our afternoon river-and-bay boat tour would start, a sort of dive bar called München Biergarten, where we got light lunches of wurst and a big pretzel for Nancy (and I do mean big) with beer and bad service. Nancy asked for tea, which was on their digital menu, but the bartender denied they had any. Then she asked for something else on the menu, which he also said they didn't sell. She got water; they had that.

  As enjoyable as the Pabst Mansion tour had been, the afternoon's Milwaukee River & Harbor Cruise was even better. Mostly because we could sit down the whole time. (Tourism is tiring, and hard on the feet, especially for us old folks.) We booked our places on Edelweiss, which for all I know is the only company offering boat tours. They have a warning on their web site saying they cannot delay the tour for late-arriving passengers, because of "scheduled drawbridge openings." And they didn't give refunds just because you miss the boat. So I was picturing a two-deck vessel such as I'd seen by the art museum, and was looking forrward to watching the drawbridges operate from river level. But on a Tuesday afternoon after Labor Day, there aren't enough of us tourists left in Milwaukee, so we got a single-deck vessel, sort of a wide bateau-mouche, which didn't need to have the bridges open for it. That was the only disappointment of the trip. (And I wonder: if the reason they can't wait is invalid, would they wait?)

  The cruise lasted a little over an hour, I think, going out into the bay behind the breakwater on a beautiful cool late summer's day, We had an excellent narrator, one who told amusing stories about the chequered history of Milwaukee, many of them featuring the same Mr Kilbourn for whom Wisconsin Dells was originally named; a man who knew how to run roughshod. 

 Milwaukee is an architecturally interesting city.* In the late 19th Century, when all the world was putting up gingerbread houses and Neo-Classical Revival buildings, Milwaukee was too; but they also seemed to have a thing for Flemish Revival. Besides the City Hall and the Pabst Mansion, there are a number of buildings in that uncommon style, like the Dubbel Dutch Hotel. Collectively, they give the city a slightly distinctive flavour, which, being from New Orleans and living by choice in San Antonio, I appreciate.

 Most of the new stuff, of course, is dull in a postmodern cost-saving way, but in between those, there remain some attractive structures. Like in the photo above: the brown building at the right is an event venue called the War Memorial Center. Its height is the same as the cliffs at Omaha Beach, it is set back from the water's edge by the same distance as those cliffs, and the design of the building's facades is meant to evoke the German pillboxes American soldiers faced on D-Day. 

 The pointy white building behind it, by the way, is Milwaukee's first high-rise apartment building. It is now, not surprisingly, unaffordable to most people. The old building at the far left is the local gas company, so the neon flame on top lights up in different colours to show how much money they're going to make, depending on the weather. (If it's going to be really cold, it lights up gold.) The glass-and-steel buildings in the middle, behind the beautiful art museum (seen with its vanes closed, because the museum's not open on Tuesdays) are typical uninteresting glass-and-steel buildings, with curves and lumps and bulges added in the vain hope of giving them some attribute to set them apart from other typical uninteresting glass-and-steel buildings. Didn't really work.

 We were then at that closing stage of our Condo Week Add-On, a time when we just kind of roam around, making random turns and seeing what chance brings us. We saw a mouse climbing up a pole next to a railway underpass; we saw a city park that seemed to contain a small reservoir; a shop selling "bubble pancakes" and ice cream; and then we went back to the area around the Domes so Nancy could get a picture of a building she'd seen on a previous visit, the Knitting Factory. They used to make underwear there, but now it's low-income housing of some kind.

 By this time it was getting on toward being late, and we all had to pack for the next day's departures; so we started back to the hotel. We weren't in a great hurry, so I decided to take city streets all the way back, about a dozen miles. That took us through a variety of neighbourhoods in Milwaukee and into a separate city called West Allis, where we decided it was time for something to drink. We'd had such good luck in stumbling across Oscar's Pub and Grill that when I saw Paulie's Pub, I felt a sort of hopeful kinship, so I found a parking place and we went in. They were producing a (I assume) local radio show about car racing -- there was what looked like a demolition derby car parked outside, with decal illustrations of a grille and headlights where the real things would normally have been -- and it was so loud, and crowded, that when we got our drinks and a couple of small snacks, we took them outside to the porch that ran down the side of the building. One of the snacks was called jalapeño poppers, but they were nothing like what we'd get if we ordered that back home. They were more like flautas with a cream cheese filling. We also had cheese curds, which weren't nearly as good as the ones I used to get out in western Wisconsin; but despite that, there were quickly none left.

________

* Unlike Minneapolis, which contains many of the ugliest buildings I've seen, all in one central business district. 

________ 

The Drive Home: Wednesday, September 3 through Friday, September 5

 It was basically an uneventful trip home. We left the hotel at around eight in the morning and had a few spells of light rain in the first hour or two. In northwestern Illinois, we met my former law partner Curtis, who recently moved to that area from Nevada. We used to go hiking while Sherry played soccer at the Huntsman Games in Utah every year, but I guess that won't happen anymore. And we're both at an age when travel is becoming increasingly difficult, so while this is likely not the last time he and I will see each other -- a thought too sad to contemplate -- it's surely one of the last. Unless I contrive excuses to revisit the Old Northwest, or the Upper Midwest, or whatever you like to call that part of the country.

 Sherry and I started listening to an audiobook by Danielle Arceneaux called Glory Be, a funny little murder mystery set in Lafayette, Louisiana, where I used to live. The reader happened to be the same reader as the one that read Hollywood Homocide, which we'd listened to on the drive up, across Iowa. She's a good reader, but being intimately familiar with the pronunciation of place names in Acadiana made me wince from time to time. Especially the way she would pronounce "Lafayette", like it was in Indiana. Enjoyed the book anyway, and the mystery kept us both engaged until the very end.

 We spent the first night, Wednesday, in Jefferson City, Missouri, at a so-so chain hotel. We drove downtown for dinner at a place called Ecco Lounge ("Jefferson City's oldest restaurant"), where they had good food and excellent service; then we walked down to the corner where there was a place called the Ice Cream Factory still open. One of those local places that makes all their own product, and you want to try every flavour. It's been several days now, and if I meditate on the question I could probably remember which I had, but all I remember at the moment is that we ate it outside at a cafe table, I had mine in a waffle bowl, and there was some guy who'd left his car running in the parking lot with the headlights shining in our eyes while he went inside. Anyway, it doesn't matter what flavour it was; it was good, and next time I'm in Jeff City I'll probably go back and get something completely different. 

 On Thursday we drove from Jefferson City to McKinney, a northern suburb of Dallas. Freeway as far as Joplin, but then we took the highway that goes through several of the Indian nations in eastern Oklahoma (because most of that state's freeways are toll roads, and I feel like we've already paid for them once and shouldn't have to pay again). It wasn't as bad a drive as I remember it being, maybe because we finished Glory Be and started Skin Deep, by Timothy Halloran. He wrote a series of maybe eight or ten amusing mystery novels set in Los Angeles with a "detective" -- actually, a thief -- named Junior Bender, all of which we enjoyed; this series -- Skin Deep is, I think, the third in the series -- is also set in L.A., with a detective (Simeon Grist) who's actually a detective. In this book, he gets hired by a film producer to babysit the movie star he beat up at the beginning of the story, and it goes on from there with wit and a little sophistication. I recommend both series. (Halloran, if I remember correctly, also wrote a series or two of books set in Burma, but I haven't read or heard any of those.)

 Dinner in McKinney was at an Iraqi restaurant near the hotel. Sherry ordered "tawook," which is chunks of chicken marinated and grilled and served wrapped in a pita-like bread. I had a half-order of "Iraqi kebab," which was served with a piece of soft naan-like bread as big as a pizza pan. Neither of us had ever had Iraqi food before. I honestly can't tell it from Turkish, or Lebanese, or generic "Mediterranean" cuisine. It was very good, and not particularly expensive, but the first employee we encountered seemed to be a teenaged girl who spoke (or pretended to speak) no English and had been grounded for some reason by her parents, and was working at the shop as some kind of horribly unjust punishment. She was fairly quickly sent to the kitchen and replaced by what I assume is her mother, who was much more adept at welcoming customers. She did a lot to counter the offputting feel of the first encounter.

 And on Friday morning, after getting through the rush-hour traffic in Dallas, we had a light breakfast in Waxahachie, at a local shop called Oma's Jiffy Burger, which seemed to be the place for breakfast in that town. We each had just a breakfast sandwich of egg, cheese and sausage, and coffee; it was all good, and filling, and the atmosphere was pure small-town-Texas. Couldn't be better.

 And then we were home. In plenty of time to collect our Carly from the kennel and apologize profusely to her for having left her alone for nearly three weeks, when there were thunderstorms twice a day every day &c &c. She'll never let us live that down.

You will pay.

 

The 2025 Condo Week Trip, part six

This is part of a series of posts, which you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.

Saturday, August 30

  A magazine called Racine County that we picked up somewhere along the way had an ad on one of its pages for the Racine Art Museum, touting the fact that it had "the largest collection of contemporary crafts in the country." I was sold: Houston has a contemporary crafts museum that I always enjoy going to, and it's much smaller than this place in Wisconsin. So Racine was our first destination for the Milwaukee add-on portion of the Condo Week trip.

made of plywood

 There were three main exhibits in the museum. First was a collection of trompe l'œil works by a Canadian couple. Hers were ceramics painted to look like ordinary objects; his were enamel on copper. They look incredibly real, in those cases where they represent real objects, and you can hardly believe that they aren't. Next is a collection of works by an artist named Ron Isaacs; everything is made out of plywood, but done in such a way that you would swear they were actually cloth or sticks or leaves. Some of the works made to look like clothing were so realistically done that I actually tried blowing on the material to see if it moved. (It didn't; it really is made of plywood. If you look at it edge-on, you can see how thick the material actually is, about 3/16". )

 But for me the best part of the museum's exhibits was the glass work. I first encountered a small gallery with perhaps a dozen glass perfume bottles. Nice, I thought, and I punched the elevator call button at the end of the gallery. I got off on the second floor to find another dozen or so perfume bottles, and these were also very impressive little works of blown glass. Then I came out into the main gallery on the second floor and was presented with a large room filled with my favourite art form. There were probably 75 works on display, maybe more, and some of them were just stunning. (I was also gratified to find that some of the artists featured here are also represented in my own collection back home.)

 Here are some of the best:

Judith Candy, Spring

Etsuko Nishi, Lace Caged Bowl

Baldwin & Guggisberg, Chartreuse Sentinel

Toots Zynsky, Untitled #9

Jane Bruce, Black & Red Object

Clayton & Clayton, Ornamental Vessels

 I'm so tempted to include all the pictures I took of these works, but I know I'm more a fan of glass than most people. Besides, pictures of art glass by amateur photographers like me really don't to it justice. But they're all in the Google Photos gallery with all the other pictures from this trip, and there's a link at the top of this post if you're interested.

 The raison d'être for this exhibit is that all the works were by women, or by women in collaboration with men. Where's my soapbox? Ah! Here it is. I'm frankly getting a little tired of this celebration of women who can do things, not for being capable of doing things, but because they're women. In all the centuries that only men did things (mostly), none of them were ever celebrated for being men; they were celebrated for being capable. This is the sort of thing that makes right-wing morons angry about what they call "DEI" (which most likely, they don't really know what those letters stand for). I understand the importance of presenting women's accomplishments to inspire others, particularly young girls; but because they're accomplished, not because of their chromosomal arrangement. Now we've gotten to the point where young men are starting to feel incapable. They need to be inspired, too, and exemplars for them should be celebrated -- as they always have been -- not for their sex but for their abilities. 

 The attendant at the museum made some restaurant recommendations for lunch for us, and we took her up on one at the Reefpoint Marina, not far away, because she said it had nice views of the harbour. I suppose it did; we asked for a table outside with a view, and got one on the inside of a walkway with big sheets of clear plastic over the open side of the area. It was nice enough, and even though the plastic rippled a little in the breeze, and distorted the view slightly, we could see well enough. For most of the time we were in the restaurant, there was a loudmouthed captain of a local tour boat at the next table, explaining his business to his tablemates like it was the Cunard Line, but otherwise it was a pleasant atmosphere. The waitress was unbelievably chirpy and had a voice that ventured occasionally into an octave that only dogs can hear, but she knew her job and did it well. I thought the food let her down a little. But the entire experience was made glorious by the fact that a clothing-slash-souvenir shop on the ground floor below the restaurant was having a big Labor Day sale, and I got a nice warm sweatshirt for $12, I kid you not. 

Wind Point

 Nancy, it turns out, has a thing for lighthouses. Racine has one of the tallest on Lake Michigan, possibly the tallest, at Wind Point, so we drove up there and had a look at it. It's a beautiful little shoreline park, with a stunning view out across the water. There were a good number of people in the park, but not so many that it felt crowded. I sat for a long time watching people on the beach, and their dogs, and enjoying the beautiful sight in such beautiful weather. 

 Following the lighthouse, we made a quick trip to a Danish bakery, for which Racine is known. There are like six of them in town, not counting the additional locations of one chain (the one we went to). Danish pastry is big in Racine. Sherry got an apple fritter, which was way better than any apple fritter I can get back home; I forget what Nancy had, but whatever it was I didn't get a taste of it. Jeff and I each got something called an Elephant Ear, a flaky pastry cut in half, then partly dipped in chocolate, then sandwiched around Bavarian creme. Can you say "messy"? But oh! so good! So now I've been to a Danish bakery in Racine and never have to go back.

 The other main attraction in Racine was to be the Jelly Belly factory. I went there a dozen years ago to get some fresh-from-the-production-line jelly beans for my former law partner, who kept a jar of them on his desk. But now the factory is closed and all the jelly beans are made somewhere in California. Boo hiss.

 At that point we were done with Racine, but -- oddly, maybe even uniquely for us -- it was still early enough to do something else; so I pointed out that the Basilica of St Josaphat was on the south side of Milwaukee and we could go there. Even though it wasn't as far south as I thought, it became our plan of the moment, so we plugged it into the navigator and set off for the Big City.

Altar of St Josaphat

 It's hard to believe that working-class immigrants of the early 20th Century could afford such a fantastic structure as this basilica. But consider the depth of their faith, and their ascription to divine providence of any prosperity they experienced. Also consider the providence that allowed the diocese to buy the materials salvaged from the huge US Customs House in Chicago, which was torn down at just the right time. The diocese of Milwaukee got a colossal amount of already-dressed building stone, along with doors, windows, stair rails, etc.; everything that goes into a city-block-sized building; and they got it for cheap, at a figure that was less than half the amount that had been quoted for building stone alone. As a result, according to the signboards in the basilica, there are hundreds of doorknobs throughout the basilica bearing the crest of the United States Treasury. (I didn't see any; all I saw were more modern replacements that are more suitable for use by disabled visitors.) The Lord truly works in mysterious ways. 

St Josaphat, exterior

 Anyway: Saturday evening mass was just starting when we got there. I took a couple of pictures while the service was going on, but felt too much like an intruder doing that, so I looked around in other parts of the building, and went across the street to get some photos of the outside. In an area off the porch they have large statues of Sts Peter and Paul* carved from some kind of pretty brown stone on black marble plinths, and there's a nice chapel in the undercroft that I forgot to take any pictures of. Then I waited until mass was done so I could go check out the sanctuary with a clearer conscience, 

 It is an extraordinarily elaborate sanctuary, all painted and gold-leafed, and again, it's extraordinary to think of what the people of the parish sacrificed to pay for all this. It reflects a dedication that we just don't see in religious matters in this country anymore. It's also a traditional attribute of the Romanesque style the church is built in, whereas the sparse decoration of the Holy Hill basilica is a reflection of the style of Gothic revival churches in countries where Protestantism has strongly influenced artistic sensibilities.

 Once that was done, we wandered vaguely toward downtown Milwaukee, where we found Veterans Park and got out and walked a little, then headed back to our hotel. No one was up to going out again for dinner that night. I had half a sandwich left over from lunch in Racine, and I ate that. Jeff had half his sandwich, plus some coleslaw in go-boxes that had sat in the car since about 1pm. He ate that. Sherry and Nancy, as far as I know, skipped dinner entirely.

 

Sunday, August 31

  This day started with two Premier League matches on television. In the early match, West Ham got their first win of the season by three goals to none at Nottingham Forest; that was a surprise. In the interim between matches, I started a load of laundry so someone -- I'm not naming names here -- would have enough underwear to get home without offending personal sensibilities. I also washed my new sweatshirt and a few other things, but not enough to make a noticeable dent in the laundry bag's fullness. If I'd known how capacious the washer was in the hotel's guest laundry -- there's only one, and one dryier -- I probably would have washed a few more things, but it won't really matter. 

 At home, I time laundry loads by the Premier League's matches on Sunday. Our washer takes about 45 minutes for a load, the dryer about the same. The washer here took about 50 minutes, but the dryer went on and on and on until finally I just said The Hell with it and took the clothes out. They were all dry, as they damn well should have been after an hour and a quarter on medium heat.

 On this occasion the vehicle for timing the laundry was the big match of the weekend, Liverpool v Arsenal. Even though it's only three matches into the season, it already feels like a must-win for both teams. They finished last season first and second, and when this one kicked off they were level on points at the top of the table. The match was cagey, even a little dull, but a good opportunity to see how new players are fitting in, and measuring up. Arsenal had Madueke on the left, matched up against Kerkez, who just joined Liverpool in the last week or two. I'd say Kerkez didn't have the pace to match Madueke, but in the end it did no harm, and I'm guessing Kerkez learned a thing or two about defending against a faster player. At the end, it was a magnificent 82nd-minute free kick by Szoboslai from 30 yards out that made the difference when it slid past the inside of the post for the only goal. 

 Once that important business was dispatched, we loaded up the truck and headed off to see the Joan of Arc chapel at Marquette University. Well, three of us did: it appears that the leftover coleslaw Jeff had for Saturday night dinner was an unwise choice, and he stayed at the hotel after barfing all night. Seems that choices do sometimes have consequences. 

still a pretty little thing

 Back when I was through Milwaukee twelve or thirteen years ago, I had been told, or read somewhere, that the Joan of Arc Chapel at Marquette was (a) the oldest building in the United States, having been built in the 1200s in France and moved to the US in the 20th Century; (b) that it was originally from Domrémy, where St. Joan grew up; and (c) that it had been her church in childhood. Turns out none of that is true. It was originally built in a village near Lyons; it was in ruins when it was bought by a rich obsessive francophile in Connecticut who wanted it to go with her French chateau, which she'd bought and had disassembled and reassembled on her estate. When the chateau burned down, she donated the (reconstructed) chapel to the Jesuits, who transported it (presumably disassembled again) to Wisconsin. And it's a 15th-Century chapel and wouldn't make the Top 10 list for oldest buildings even if it had been brought over intact. 

 According to materials we found on line, there is a stone that St Joan actually knelt on to pray, and even kissed. It's buried inside the back wall of the chapel, supposedly. Its provenance as a relic of the Saint was attested to by an official document from the French government in the 1920s, when, flush with cash after World War One, the government of France was happy to expend its resources on in-depth research and then lend its dignity to any old request for certification from wealthy Americans who would pay the requisite fees. 

 I have never faked a sarcasm in my life.

Mitchell Park Domes

 Our next stop was to have been the Mitchell Park Domes Horticultural Conservatory, but first we decided to find something for lunch. Google Maps, bless it, led us to Oscar's Pub and Grill, a short distance from the gardens. OMG! Wonderful burgers, good beer (Spotted Cow), good prices, good service, a convivial atmosphere ... We all loved it. I had the Big O burger and rate it five chili peppers; Sherry had the Big Foot, with bleu cheese, and Nancy had the Big Aloha. They were all, truly, big burgers, and soooooooooo good! Even the fries were excellent.

 Thus fortified, off to see the trees and bushes and flowers. What can I say? This stop was for other people's enjoyment; I just wandered along behind. I wasn't feeling it; though I will admit that some of Sherry's pictures of the things in the conservatory are really amazing.

City Hall

 The conservatory closes at five, so we only had an hour there. It being still early-ish, we went downtown for a look at the City Hall, a Flemish Revival building built after a court case determined that an architect who had submitted his proposal early had "cheated"; his rival won about $200 in damages and the right to design the building. (This according to a guide on a later tour, who said the winning architect "never met anyone he didn't want to sue.") The building that resulted is a landmark in every sense of the word. 

 Right across the street is the late 19th-Century Pabst Theater, a beautiful show venue, not terribly large, but popular for well-known stage acts. We also drove by the Empire Theater in a gone-to-seed neighbourhood north of downtown near the lakeshore, but the theater seems to have gone to seed even faster than its neighbours.

 We got back to the hotel and collected Jeff, then went just down the street (admittedly by an unnecessarily complicated route) for ramen at a place called Osaka. I've heard about how the poor-college-student standby that I used to buy for a quarter a pack has become a culinary meal of choice among young people, and I wanted to see for myself what it was all about. I was pretty sure they didn't just dump a package of dry noodles and a seasoning packet in hot water. 

 Sho' 'nuf, they don't. It'd be better if they did, I think.

 Now, the others in my party all got rice bowls, that is, rice with some commonplace ingredient: one salmon, one tofu, one chicken teriyaki. They all thought it was fine, except the teriyaki sauce was thin. Those things ran fifteen bucks each, which seems a little high for what they got. I was the only one who ventured to try a ramen dish: Tonkatsu, which consisted of two slabs of pork belly, bamboo, mushrooms, bean sprouts, fish cakes and a boiled egg in a "creamy, rich pork broth" for $17.50. 

 Pork belly is normally like a cross between bacon and gratons. A little bit fatty, yes, but firm and so full of flavour that it's like the word "delicious" was invented just to describe it. This pork belly was nothing but fat, flabby and with the texture of a slice of toast that's soaked overnight. The mushrooms were some repulsive rubbery strips of black that looked and felt like tar pulled from a telephone pole in mid-summer. The fish cakes -- there was only one -- was about the size of a half-dollar and the thickness of a quarter. At least it tasted okay, and had a reasonably piscine texture. And there was half a boiled egg that looked funny -- it had a reddish cast to it -- but tasted okay. I was thoroughly revolted by the whole giant bowl of mess. I ate the fish cake (two bites) and the noodles (which were fine) and the egg (despite the colour), but the pork belly and the mushrooms, plus the terrible saltiness of the "creamy rich pork broth" made my stomach turn. I tossed it in the trash, rather than tossing it later on in my hotel room, while watching Irene Dunne movies on TCM. (I now can recommend I Remember Mama, even to non-Norwegians.)

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* The inscription on the plinth for St Paul's statue, Scio cui credidi, is from his first letter to Timothy. It means "I know him in whom I have believed."

The 2025 Condo Week Trip, part five

This is part of a series of posts, which you should read in order. Read the first part here. And you can see all the pictures from this trip in the Google Photos album here.

 

Thursday, August 28

 Seems no one slept well last night. I don't wonder why.

 I grazed leftovers for breakfast, just a few cheese curds and pistachio nuts from the winery that were still taking up space in the fridge. We got going around 11AM, and started with a stop at Denny's Diner, where it turned out the waitress did not have a Romanian accent, but did have tats and piercings that I hadn't noticed the day before. At least she didn't have those horrible big holes in her ear lobes. I went for the Works burger, a cheeseburger with all the traditional accoutrements like lettuce, tomato, onion & pickle, and a side of onion rings. Sherry had the bleu cheese & mushroom burger. Nancy and Jeff both had omelets. We all enjoyed it much more than I'd enjoyed my previous breakfast there. We took our time. I also ordered a caramel apple roll, which was very good.  

the Bennett studio skylight

 We went then to the H.H. Bennett photography studio and museum. Bennett was a local carpenter who, after being injured in the Civil War and unable to work as a carpenter, took up photography. He devoted the rest of his life to photographing and promoting the Dells of the Wisconsin River as a tourism spot, and was very successful at it. He also invented some photographic equipment, such as a shutter mechanism that allowed him to take quick exposures suited to the recently-developed dry-plate negative. He famously took a picture of his teenaged son Ashley leaping across the gap to Stand Rock, which, along with many of his other pictures, brought a tourism industry to the local area. The museum that fills the space adjacent to his original studio is a well-conceived explication of his life and work, and was one of the highlights of our entire week in the Dells.  

 By the time we were done, it was around 4pm. We decided to just head back to the condo for "a nap," though none of us did that. I wrote and helped plan our drive to Milwaukee in the morning, then we ordered a couple of pizzas from Moose Jaw. It was dry and salty, and not really as good as we'd hoped it'd be. I needed some antacid that night. 

 

Friday, August 29

  We got away from the condo about on time, roughly 10:30. I'd planned for stops at the Historic Indian Agency House in Portage; the Wisconsin Automobile Museum in Hartford; the Labyrinth Garden in West Bend; and Holy Hill in Huburtus, just outside Milwaukee. In the planning stage, I'd turned on the "avoid highways" option because I wanted to check something, then I'd forgotten to turn it back off, so the route started off going through the city streets in Wisconsin Dells. Fortunately, I realized pretty quickly what was going on, and changed the setting before we'd wasted too much time. 

Indian Agency House

 The Indian Agency house was much more interesting than I'd expected, and instead of the half-hour I'd planned on, we spent nearly 3 times as long there. It was built for the first agent assigned to the Ho-Chunk tribe in the early 1830s, then restored in the 1930s. In many ways it was just a typical old house of the era, but the stories the guide told about the agent and his wife and the tribe were fascinating. The agent was a guy who'd grown up in the Old Northwest, and spoke a number of tribal languages; his wife was a blue-blood sort from Connecticut who had a desire for some adventure; she wrote a book about her experiences, which I bought a copy of for Nancy, who will probably actually read it, where the rest of us won't. (In fact, she started reading it to us on the drive, but we only got a little way in before she decided to save her voice and knit.)

 We stopped for lunch at a restaurant not too far from there, called Clark's. We've had a lot of hash browns on this trip, more than in the previous five or ten years combined, and the ones at Clark's were easily the best. I had an omelette with bacon and sausage in it; Sherry had one with mushrooms and cheese; and we split a piece of Tuxedo cake, which is layers of different kinds of chocolate with a middle layer of some kind of vanilla. Very good.

 After that, we realized we'd have to ditch either the auto museum or the labyrinth, and we'd barely make it to Holy Hill before it closed. We opted to ditch the labyrinth, a place for meditation, and went to the auto museum instead. It, like everything we do on these Condo Week trips, took a lot longer than we expected. I'd figured an hour; we were there for closer to two hours.  

 

turn signal on a 1923 Kissel phaeton

 Hartford, Wisconsin, was the home of the Kissel Motorcar Company, which made upscale cars (mostly) from around 1908 until 1931. They were fairly nice cars, selling mostly for around $3,000 (at a time when a Model T could be had for about a tenth of that). One notable feature was that, from fairly early on, they had turn-signal indicator lights, when no one else had anything, not even semaphore flags. This museum has almost 30 of the surviving Kissel cars on display.  

 

spare tire on a '50 Kaiser

 It also displays quite a few Nash vehicles, which were also built in Wisconsin; and an assortment of other vehicles. One of the more unusual vehicles on display is a 1950 Kaiser Vagabond, an early iteration of a "hatchback." The rear door on the driver's side is welded shut at the factory, because inside of that is where the spare tire is stored. 

 Despite having skipped the Labyrinth in West Bend, we still arrived at Holy Hill too late to have a good look around. It's the highest point in the area, and you can see the towers of downtown Milwaukee, 35 miles away, from the porch of the church; but the buildings closed at 5 and we were there just a few minutes later. A monk gave Nancy permission to take a quick look inside the sanctuary, and she said later that she preferred its relatively spare decoration to the more elaborate look of the Basilica of St Josaphat, which we visited the next day. Jeff and I weren't able to walk up the five or six stories of stairs to get to the church, and we didn't know at the time that there was an elevator. Not sure if it was still operating after hours.

 We drove down to our hotel, in Brookfield, a suburb west of Milwaukee. Nancy is such a nice person, she always gets upgrades, and this was no exception. Our rooms are very nice: suites, in fact, with two huge televisions (each) and high ceilings with a ceiling fan. First thing I did was go check on my convertible, which had been sitting in the back of the parking lot for a week. It was fine. I moved it to the parking area outside our room, ready to load up for the trip home next Wednesday. I'm very much hoping to be home in time to collect Carly from the kennel on Friday afternoon instead of having to wait until Saturday morning, but it'll be close, especially if I feel fatigued on the drive, which is common these days, and have to stop for naps.

 None of us felt like going out for dinner, so we chose one of the two restaurants attached to the hotel, a sports bar called Champps. (No, that's not a typo.) It was advertised as having a "buzzy" atmosphere. That, it turns out, means unbearably loud. I had to hold my head a certain way in order to hear the people at our table talk, but could hear the conversations of both adjacent tables pretty clearly, even over the commentary blasting from the PA system of the Brewers' game on most of the TVs in the room. (I could only see a screen reflected in the kitchen window.) The food was mediocre at best. Mine was so salty I couldn't eat it. I told the waiter, but he didn't care. I should have sent it back, I guess, but I just didn't feel like dealing with it. It wasn't terribly expensive, but it wasn't worth what they charge. Needless to say (and yet I say it anyway) it got a pretty poor review on Google Maps.