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.