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.

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

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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.