The Hampton Inn and Suites - downtown Milwaukee
I didn’t really intend to write a travelogue about this trip, and I didn’t jot down any formal notes of the sort I often do when I travel. When I set off I basically thought of as just a little weekend getaway. Reflecting further, though, I realized it was actually a longer vacation than last year’s Easter trip to New Orleans or my Easter in Alaska the year before. While not so exciting as either of those excursions, unseasonable weather certainly made this a trip to remember. I dug out a Christmas font for the header to this, because snowflakes were definitely the theme of the weekend.
We had our annual retreat at school this year, a day when the kids “find themselves” and learn about religion and the world. We reprised a program we’d done a few years back on prejudice, and I was thankful that—while it’s even more dated now than it was then—it went over remarkably well.
I checked the forecast on the computer at school, and it got worse and worse through the day. What was to be light rain changed to ice followed by heavy snow. All the weather websites agreed a storm was coming. What they disagreed on (and what was important to me) was exactly when and where the storm would hit. My original plan for this trip was to head over to Winona, Minnesota (one of the nearest Amtrak stations) Friday morning. With the predictions becoming dire, though, I decided to change my plans. I made a last-minute reservation at the Sleep Inn by the Rochester airport, about 130 miles from Algona and 40 miles from Winona. While that might mean I’d have to fight bad weather after dark tonight, I would at least get the bulk of the trip out of the way without an absolute deadline.
School dismissed around noon. In the early afternoon my quiz bowl team answered questions as part of a “Think-a-Thon”, a fundraiser for our trip to nationals this summer. When that was over I spent a couple of hours getting the communion elements ready for my church’s Easter Sunday service. While I would not be at that service myself, as chair of the worship and music committee, I was responsible for seeing that things went off without a hitch. I got everything ready and placed (sealed in plastic) in the refrigerator of the church kitchen so it could be easily arranged on Sunday morning.
I had one other responsibility at church on Thursday. Our interim pastor was doing a “tenebrae” service (apparently the correct spelling, though that’s not how he spelled it) for Maundy Thursday. This is a downbeat “service of the shadows” that strikes me as really more appropriate for Good Friday. The main part of the service consisted of eight people reading downbeat Bible selections and extinguishing various candles. I had agreed to be one of those readers, so I needed to be at church for the 7pm service. Most forecasts predicted the snow should be starting right around 7:00, so I was more than a bit fidgety as I waited for all the candles to go out. Eventually they all did, and I rushed to the door the second the service was over.
I stopped briefly at home and then got ready to set out. When I returned to my car, I panicked a bit when my headlights wouldn’t turn on as they should. Since it was now night, it was pretty much impossible to get any problem looked at before I left, so I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I jiggled the switch a few times, and they did finally come on. I worried the whole way to Rochester, though, lest they should go out and leave me in darkness.
While the forecast was bad, it was merely overcast when I left. The roads were dry as I headed east on U.S. 18 to Garner, north on U.S. 69 to Forest City, and then east on highway 3. The trip was uneventful, though I was a bit annoyed to find the vast majority of people on the road carefully obeying the 55mph speed limit. With gas prices skyrocketing, it certainly makes sense to drive slower. Since I wanted to beat the storm eastward, I wasn’t in a mood to dawdle, though.
I turned north on I-35 and sped up to 70mph. (I pretty much never exceed the speed limit on interstates, so my fellow motorists were less annoying here.) I passed the lone landmark along the interstate in northern Iowa, the Diamond Jo Casino, a monstrosity in the middle of nowhere near the little town of Northwood. Why anyone would want to go to Northwood, Iowa to gamble is beyond me, but the place seems to be making quite a go of things. Before long I entered Minnesota, and I soon turned eastward onto interstate 90.
There were flakes of snow in the air just past Austin, Minnesota (about 45 miles from Rochester), and I decided to follow the advice of highway signs and call 511 on my cell phone to check on road conditions. Unfortunately, for no reason I can figure out, calling 511 in south-central Minnesota connected me with a recording in Madison, Wisconsin. The recording apologized that Wisconsin’s 511 service would not be available until fall of 2008, and then the phone disconnected. I tried three different times to get Minnesota road conditions, but each time I ended up getting the recording in Wisconsin.
There were just flurries until I got about 15 miles west of Rochester. Quite rapidly it started snowing heavily. Fortunately the road was not frozen (in fact the air temperature was actually still above freezing), so while visibility was a problem, the road surface was just wet. I slowed down a bit, but still went along at a fairly good clip.
I reached the hotel at about ten minutes to ten. I was using a Choice Hotels gift card to pay for my bill. The girl at the desk was unfamiliar with these cards (a near universal problem at Choice Hotels properties), but she was pleasant about it. She called her manager, who told her to just clip the card to the folio so he could deal with it in the morning. Without checking the value on the card or asking for ID or a credit card, she just gave me a key and sent me on my way.
I’d stayed at this hotel on multiple occasions before, most recently when Margaret and I flew out of Rochester when we went to New Orleans a year ago. It’s a perfectly adequate hotel, but there’s certainly nothing much to recommend it. Booking at the last minute, I didn’t even get a particularly good rate, about $75 for a rather cramped room. It did have a TV, though, and I spent a lot of time watching the local news and the Weather Channel. Southeast Minnesota and all of southern Wisconsin were now officially in a winter storm warning. The snow was supposed to start sticking overnight and would continue—they said—until about 10am in Minnesota and until about 2pm in eastern Wisconsin. It was hard to estimate the possible accumulation, but they figured anywhere from 4 to 10 inches. The heaviest snow was predicted for morning, so I figured the earlier I was on my way tomorrow, the better.
The TV also gave an 800 number for Minnesota road conditions. I called it from my phone and was told that conditions near Rochester had “limited visibility with difficult driving in places”. That was actually pretty accurate for what I’d experienced, and I was glad to get a number that actually worked. I was also glad that the snow seemed lighter when I went to bed around midnight.
I got up around 6:00 and immediately looked out the window. While there was snow on the ground, it didn’t really look all that thick. I next called Amtrak, where the recorded voice of “Julie” told me the Empire Builder was due into Winona right on time. I had a quick breakfast (a waffle and a banana) in the lobby and then called the Minnesota DOT 800 number. They said all the roads between Rochester and Winona featured “difficult driving” with deep slush on the pavement. The roads were open, though, so I figured I’d grit my teeth and give it a try.
Checking out of the hotel took no time at all. The manager had efficiently credited the gift card, and he gave both the card (with a small remaining balance) and my receipt to me with no problem. I hauled my bag out to the car, scraped ice off the windshield, made a little sigh of relief when the lights came on with no problem, and then set off.
The parking lot and the airport access road were both covered with slush, but I made it out all right. Right by Rochester I-90 was really in pretty good shape, mostly wet with a few slushy patches. I drove along at 55 or 60 mph without any real problem. Just east of Rochester things got much worse, though. The 800 number had been exactly right. There was in fact deep slush, and while I saw five different plows in the westbound lanes, it looked as if it had been hours since any of the slush had been scraped off of the eastbound side of the highway. It was snowing very heavily, and “difficult driving” was right on the money for a description of the conditions. It wasn’t impossible to drive, but I was not alone in driving very slowly—in most cases well below the theoretical minimum speed of 45 mph. Only heavy semi trucks went faster, and even they were only going 50 or so. It would take more than an hour and a half to cover what is normally about a 45-minute trip between Rochester and Winona.
I made one brief stop en route, partly because I needed gas and partly to soothe my nerves a bit. I pulled into an odd little Cenex station in the strange little town of Eyota. After filling up with gas (at $3.069 a gallon, quite a bit cheaper than it was in Algona) I set off again.
There was understandably very little traffic on I-90. This stretch of interstate is never all that busy, and in bad weather there were only a handful of other vehicles. That changed when I turned onto state highway 43, though. This is a shortcut that leads from the interstate up to Winona, and even on a snowy morning it was packed with commuters. That was actually a good thing. It was snowing more and more heavily (coming down at a rate of two inches an hour, I heard later). Without all that traffic the winding little state road would have been nearly impassible. All those cars kept it relatively clear, though, and we made our way in a slow-moving line for the nine miles from the interstate to Winona.
I’d left my electric shaver at home, so I needed to pick up another one. (I’d love to know just how many electric shavers I’ve bought over the years; it’s got to be dozens.) I pulled into the parking lot of a Target store, but was surprised to find the place wouldn’t open until 9:30am. That seemed a very late time, and they missed out on my business because of those limited hours. I instead went to an enormous but absolutely empty Wal-Mart store. Without having to fight through crowds, I quickly found what I needed. I used the self check-out lane and was pleasantly surprised that the shaver didn’t set off the alarm as I left.
I drove into downtown Winona and stopped briefly at a Kwip Trip, where I picked up some coffee and a danish. I again called the Amtrak schedule number and found the train was still due right on time. It’s honestly amazing how little weather affects the train, particularly when just about anything else you can imagine throws the schedule into chaos. I drove over to the station and found what appeared to be the last available parking space. I then made my way inside, confirmed with the attendant that the train was on time (due in about an hour), and had a seat on one of the ancient wooden benches in the lobby.
I was the first passenger to arrive at Winona station, but before long there were lots of passengers there. The vast majority were college students from Winona State University, and most had bought their tickets within the last twenty-four hours. The buses had cancelled their service out of southeast Minnesota, and travel by car was iffy at best. That left the train as just about the only option for those who wanted to go home or visit friends at Easter.
I did a lot of people watching at the station. It was absolutely floored by the number of people who seemed to have their cell phones permanently attached to their ears. One girl literally spent the entire time she was waiting talking to someone on the phone. I can’t say I eavesdropped much on her conversation, though. Mostly it was just “uh huh, uh huh” and similar responses.
Perhaps the most interesting people in the station were a middle aged father and his teenaged son. The son was apparently traveling alone. I gather the father was divorced but had primary custody of the boy, who was traveling alone to be with his mother over Easter. There’s lots of red tape involved when minors travel alone, and the station manager had the father fill out an extremely lengthy form before he would issue the kid a ticket. Once the form was completed, he asked to see both the father’s and son’s identification. When the boy got out his driver’s license, the station manager was suddenly most apologetic. It turned out the kid had just turned 18 (though he did look younger). From Amtrak’s point of view, he was an adult, so all the paperwork had been totally unnecessary. Fortunately the father was pleasant about things, and the kid seemed to think it was funny.
While I waited I sat next to an elderly woman who was visiting a friend in Glenview, Illinois. She had taken a cab to the station and apparently had to call three different companies before she found one that was willing to pick her up in the midst of the storm. It surprised me that there were multiple cab companies in Winona; I can’t imagine any of them does much business.
Amtrak’s ticketing policies made the line at the station all the longer. Almost everyone had actually booked and paid for their tickets on the internet. Unfortunately, unlike airlines, Amtrak requires you to get an actual tagboard ticket. The confirmation number isn’t enough. They used to mail out tickets that were booked online, but now they only send them by Federal Express, and they charge an arm and a leg for that service. In big cities you can get your tickets from a machine, but at a small station like Winona you have to queue up and have the station manager print them out. It was a very time-consuming process, and they were boarding the train before the last people in line had their tickets.
The train arrived a little bit ahead of schedule, and we all got thoroughly soaked walking through the slushy mess between the station and the platform. The train was nearly full before we boarded, and entirely full after. I ended up sitting next to a WSU student who was also headed to Milwaukee. He was an unusual young man, short and stocky and with a bright red pockmarked face that looked as if he had been splashed with acid. He spent much of the trip watching a movie he had downloaded to a laptop computer. I have no idea what the film was, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have paid money to see it. It was one of those college boy adventure flicks that basically pairs copious amounts of drinking with copious amounts of female flesh. Strangely, the kid basically watched the entire film without reacting in any way to anything in it.
The seats directly in front of us were occupied by a twenty-something long-haired guy from suburban Sacramento and an 86-year-old ex-Marine, both of whom were traveling to Portage, Wisconsin. The two appeared to have almost nothing in common, but they chatted with one another pretty much the whole way. The young man was into his fourth day of traveling, having first taken a Greyhound bus from Sacramento to Seattle and then spending two nights on the Empire Builder. He was en route to visit his fiancée and was very relieved that the trip was almost over. The old man also found travel tedious, though he had just been visiting relatives in Red Wing, Minnesota—just half a day away from Portage.
One thing the two had in common was their opposition to the war in Iraq. The Californian had a good friend who had recently been killed in the war, and the old man just thought it was a waste of money. Both of them also supported Barack Obama. The young man was exactly the type of person you’d expect to see as an Obama supporter, while the retiree had turned to Obama because of the war. He said he had voted Republican his entire life, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that in this election. He had been one of those crossover voters who had helped Obama win the Wisconsin primary.
I spent most of the trip listening to Jesus Christ, Superstar on the walkman I’d taken with me to Vancouver. I’m still not much of a fan of headphones, but at least music played through them doesn’t bother other people. I have a long tradition of listening to JC,S every Easter, and I was pleased to have the time to play through two different versions on this trip.
As I listened to the once scandalous and now classical rock opera, I also stared out at the snow. It snowed very heavily all across Wisconsin. It was relatively warm, and the rivers were flowing freely. Looking out the train window, it looked like a Christmas special on TV, though. There were fast-falling enormous flakes of snow, the trees were flocked in white, and puffy drifts covered everything. It was really quite beautiful, but I’m certainly glad I didn’t have to drive through it.
Most times recently when I’ve traveled by plane or train I’ve jotted notes to help me remember all the various experienced I encountered en route. I didn’t do that on this trip, but there were a few people on the train who stood out from the rest. A few rows ahead of me was a black couple who were traveling to Chicago. Neither I nor anyone else in the car could help but notice them, because they were so loud they demanded our attention. … Not that I understood much of what they said, mind you. The twosome most decidedly did not have the cultured oratory of Martin Luther King and Barbara Jordan (or even Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey). Most of their words were unrecognizable, and the few things I did understand were mostly vulgar. I mostly blocked them out with my music.
Two interesting passengers boarded in Tomah, which is apparently an unstaffed station. I looked out the window as the train made a brief stop in Tomah. The station was on the right (south) side of the train, though the platform, sidewalk, and street were all indistinguishable in the snow. Shortly after the train took off again, a voice came over the loudspeaker asking the engineer to stop because a passenger was outside the train. On the left (north) side of the train there was a woman in a parka holding a suitcase. I would bet she had run to a nearby grocery store while waiting for the train and ended up on the wrong side when it came time to board. They only open up doors on the platform side, so had a cook not noticed her as the dining car passed (that was whose voice it was), she’d have been left out in the snow.
The other person who caught my attention when boarding in Tomah was a middle-aged man who, like many on this train, had made the decision to take Amtrak at the last minute. He had no ticket on him, and when the conductor came around he said that he had priced things a week ago and thought the $87 one-way fare he had been quoted for a trip to Chicago was too expensive. He decided instead to take the bus. However (most likely because Greyhound was not running) he had opted today to take the train. The conductor told him the last-minute fare was over a hundred dollars. The man objected, but said he was willing to pay the $87 rate. The conductor got out his cell phone and called a reservations agent in Philadelphia. He said roughly “I’m with a gentleman who boarded in beautiful downtown Tomah, Wisconsin, in the middle of a raging snowstorm, with all the roads closed. We’d like to be as nice to him as we can.” The agent apparently got a laugh out of the call, and she authorized the conductor to charge the lower rate. From my point of view that was still a very high fare. I was traveling from Winona to Milwaukee (about the same distance as Tomah—Chicago), and the ticket I’d bought at Christmas cost only $70 for a round trip--$35 one way. I actually paid less than half of that ($30 total), with the rest covered by a credit Amtrak had given me. If I had to pay $87 or $100+ for a one-way ticket, I’d likely have made other plans.
Even with the horrible snowstorm, the train remained right on schedule through Portage, the Wisconsin Dells, and Columbus. Beyond Columbus we entered the suburbs that connect Madison and Milwaukee. The railroad tracks run right next to I-94 through this area, and it was really strange to see an almost deserted snow-covered interstate, with just a handful of cars crawling along this normally jam-packed artery.
The only delay on the whole trip came just shy of the Milwaukee train station. We came to a dead stop directly under the Marquette interchange at the southwest corner of downtown Milwaukee. The conductor soon came on to explain that switches in the Milwaukee yard had frozen up, and would have to be changed manually. After a brief wait we jerked ahead, then stopped again. We jerked and stopped two more times before finally advancing into the station. We’d have arrived about ten minutes early without the switch problem, and even with the delay we were only about five minutes late.
I grabbed my bag, made my way down the stairs, and trudged through deeply drifted snow on the platform to get to the station. I was pleased that the first thing I saw on entering MKE station was an advertisement for the Hampton Inn & Suites—Downtown Milwaukee, the hotel where I’d be staying for the next two nights.
Back in January Margaret and I had decided to take a train trip next Christmas out to Montreal (something I alluded to in my Vancouver travelogue). I’d bought the tickets online, but didn’t have any actual tickets. Since Milwaukee had a Quik-Trak ticket machine, I figured this was as good a place as any to print out the tickets so we could board quickly next winter. The trip out actually requires six sets of Amtrak tickets: LaCrosse to Chicago, Chicago to Schenectady, Schenectady to Montreal, and the reverse. I scanned my credit card, and the machine slowly but efficiently printed out tickets for five of those six itineraries. Unfortunately, it when I tried to print the Schenectady—Montreal tickets, it said it couldn’t find the reservations. These was actually the cheapest segment of the trip (mostly because the state of New York gives a major subsidy to Amtrak), but it was essential for completing the trip. I tried typing in the confirmation number by hand, but the machine still said it couldn’t find the itinerary. There was a huge line at the machine (and general mass confusion in the station—mostly due to bus travelers trying to re-book on Amtrak), so I figured this wasn’t the best time to worry about it. I’d try again to get the final tickets later.
The Amtrak station in Milwaukee is on St. Paul Avenue between 4th and 5th Streets, south and west of the main downtown area. The Hampton Inn was on Wisconsin Avenue at 2nd Street, two blocks north and three blocks east of the station entrance. It really wasn’t all that far to walk, but trudging through the deep, wet snow meant I got thoroughly soaked in the process of getting from the station to the hotel. My sister Margaret had given me a new hand-knitted scarf for Christmas, and I was glad to have it to provide a bit of extra warmth in the midst of this storm.
The Hampton Inn and Suites—Downtown Milwaukee is an elegant hotel in a somewhat iffy neighborhood. I opened the brass doors, stomped my feet on the carpet at the entry, but still dripped across the hardwood floor of the lobby as I made my way to the desk. A very suspicious woman looked at me as if I were a homeless beggar. Once she found my reservation, though, she perked up and welcomed me cheerfully. She checked me in efficiently and sent me to the extremely elegant elevators that would take me up to my room.
The ten-story art deco building that houses this hotel was originally built as a bank. It was converted to a Howard Johnson’s hotel about twenty years ago, and in 2006 the place became a Hampton Inn. In the hierarchy of hoteldom, that’s basically a step up, and this was really a very nice hotel—easily one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed. At roughly $100 a night, it should have been. It actually seemed worth that amount, though. My room (#414) was a true suite, consisting of a living room, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a bedroom. The rooms were arranged in “shotgun” fashion—with a long, narrow layout. The furnishings were quite modern, but they blended surprisingly well with the old architectural characteristics of the building. Everything was well lit, and there were two large TVs to entertain me during my stay. In addition to the usual bags of coffee, I was given a complimentary bag of microwave popcorn. There was also a wide assortment of toiletries in the bathroom. The major negative of the room was the view—or perhaps lack of it. My room overlooked an alleyway, with the boarded up windows of a building whose upper floors had been abandoned across the way.
Several aspects of this hotel room made me
think of an old book Margaret and Brian had called Motel of the Mysteries that
pondered what it would be like if a future civilization were to unearth the
ruins of an old motel and mistake it for a ceremonial burial complex. The
Hampton Inn had many of the classic hospitality industry features they made fun
of in that book. Among these were the “sacred point” and “sacred seal” (toilet
paper that had been folded into a triangular end, which was then sealed to the
roll with a metallic hotel logo). Most noteworthy, though, was “the plant that
would not die”. I’m not sure I’ve actually seen a fake plant in a hotel room
before, but my suite at the Hampton Inn had two pieces of plastic foliage, one
in the bedroom and one in the sitting room. One of them covered most of a desk,
rendering it essentially unusable.
Like many “better” hotels, the TV channels here were remarkably limited. They’d
have preferred that I buy pay-per-view movies or pay to play video games, so it
was pretty much the local channels they had available. I mostly watched the
Milwaukee ABC affiliate. When I turned on the TV, ABC was running local news,
and I found out later they’d pre-empted regular programming all day to run
nothing but news because of the storm. They had reporters all over the area with
periodic updates on how the weather was affecting different things. Pretty much
all the highways were closed, as was Milwaukee International Airport. Almost all
the local churches had cancelled their Good Friday services, and many businesses
had shut down early (often at noon). As of mid-afternoon, nine inches of snow
had fallen, and they were expecting from three to six more inches before the
storm ended. What’s more it was wet, heavy snow, not the powdery stuff you get
in January. The storm was pushing the 2007 – 2008 winter season into the record
books as the second snowiest winter on record in Wisconsin, with the potential
of being #1 if they got enough snow or if another storm happened even later.
The TV people were the first of numerous locals I’d hear mispronounce the name of their own city. It’s fascinating to me that in Wisconsin parlance the word “Milwaukee” has no “L” in it; it’s said more like “muh-WOKE-ih”, with the middle syllable somewhere between “woke” and “whack”, but definitely not “walk”. Having grown up saying the place as “mill-WALK-ee”, the local pronunciation was rather grating.
I relaxed a bit at the hotel and then set out to explore the immediate surrounding area. If someone asked me for a brief description that summed up , I’d say that above all this is a city of parking ramps. It rapidly became clear that about twenty years ago someone decided that parking ramps were the most efficient form of urban renewal. They’ve condensed pretty much all the true business downtown onto one street (Wisconsin Avenue), which is lined mostly with original century-old buildings. Away from that street, though, about all you’ll see are public buildings (museums, arenas, a convention center, etc.) and lots and lots of parking ramps. You’d think the Twin Cities had a parking shortage compared to all the ramps in Milwaukee. There literally seems to be a ramp on every block.
... While I didn’t dislike Milwaukee, it was frankly a boring city. It’s a big city (600,000, with a metro population of almost two million), but unlike a lot of cities, it seems smaller than it actually is. The twenty-second largest place in America, Milwaukee is bigger than Seattle, Denver, Miami, or Minneapolis. From a tourist’s point of view, though, all those places seem like big cities while Milwaukee looks like an overgrown small town. Of the places I’ve been, Milwaukee reminded me most of Omaha, a place about half its size. The lack of a skyline is reflected in the fact that the tallest building in Milwaukee is Miller Park, the Brewers’ stadium. The ballpark is in an industrial area way west, not even visible from downtown. In downtown itself there are only a couple of buildings taller than fifteen stories. Most of downtown is four to six stories tall, and the vast majority are boxy brick buildings with little architectural interest.
More striking than the lack of architectural interest was the lack of diversity among people on the street. Almost everyone in Milwaukee is either black or white. In the downtown area the mix is about 50–50 between those two races, and I’d bet that away from downtown the place (like almost all of Wisconsin) is overwhelmingly white. It’s very weird these days to be in a major city and not see any significant number of Hispanic or Asian Americans. In fact, having compared the place to Omaha in the previous paragraph, I must point out that Nebraska’s metropolis has a much more diverse population than does Milwaukee. The place was mostly German a century ago, and it remains that way (with a few blacks thrown in) today.
The commercial focus of downtown Milwaukee is The Shops at Grand Avenue, a surprisingly successful downtown mall that uses skywalks to connect existing anchor stores and office buildings that have been converted to house nondescript stores you’d expect to see in the suburbs. The name is bizarre, since there is no street in downtown Milwaukee named Grand Avenue. The mall (and its many associated parking ramps) instead straddle a four-block stretch between Wisconsin and Michigan Avenues. At the east end, next to the Milwaukee River, is a large Borders bookstore housed in what used to be Marshall Field’s main Wisconsin store. The mall stretches westward to the Boston Store, an upscale department store owned by the same company that owns Younkers in Iowa and Carson Pirie Scott in Chicago. (It’s actually Younkers that bought out the other stores.)
I spent quite a while browsing through a variety of stores in the mall. I almost dropped a fair amount of money at a T.J. Maxx store when I saw a Brewers jacket there that I really liked. Unfortunately they had every size imaginable except what would fit me. That’s probably as well, since I really didn’t need to spend anything. I did have a late lunch (or early supper) at a Culver’s in the food court (the only Culver’s I’ve ever seen that wasn’t free-standing), and I picked up some juice at a Walgreen’s store.
I stopped back briefly at the hotel and watched more of the local news. Then around 6:00 I set out for the evening. Before leaving I’d checked what was going on in Milwaukee over Easter weekend. I noticed there were two sports events scheduled, a minor league hockey game tonight and an NBA basketball game tomorrow. I was able to find affordable tickets to both events, so tonight I was on my way to see the Milwaukee Admirals play the Iowa Stars in hockey.
The Admirals and the NBA’s Bucks both play at the Bradley Center, one of the few major sports arenas that isn’t named after some big corporation. Built in 1988, the Bradley Center was a gift to the State of Wisconsin by one of two families that are the philanthropists in Milwaukee. (The other is the Kohl family that founded the department store chain of that name.) It is the newest part of an enormous complex of indoor facilities in the northwest corner of downtown. At the south end of the mess is the Midwest Airlines Center, which is the city’s main convention complex. North of that are the Milwaukee Civic Theatre (which seems to be mostly empty) and the U.S. Cellular Arena (formerly MECCA Arena), a 1950s stadium where the Bucks and Admirals used to play. It now hosts arena football (the Wisconsin Bonecrushers) and indoor soccer (the Milwaukee Wave). On the east side of the complex they have the Milwaukee Athletic Hall of Fame (featuring about three people I’d heard of an dozens I hadn’t) as well as a marker commemorating the QWERTY typewriter keyboard, which was invented on this site back in the 1860s.
With the snowstorm still raging, the whole area around the sports and convention complex was pretty much deserted. Both the Bradley Center and the U.S. Cellular Arena were having events tonight, but pretty much no one seemed to be going to either place. When I reached Bradley Center, there was almost literally no one there. They were having a promotion where they would give away free boxer shorts to the first 3,500 fans in attendance, but there were well under 1,000 fans in an arena that could hold almost 20,000. At one of the intermissions, the owner of the team got on the P.A. and said a heartfelt thank-you to those fans who had come. He noted that with the freeways closed, it was impossible to get in from the suburbs, so “we’re thankful to the die-hard city fans for being here”.
The nice thing about being at a minor league hockey game was that I could afford one of the best seats I’ve had for any sports event anywhere. For $17 I was able to sit right behind the glass (the “boards”) by the home bench. (An equivalent seat at tomorrow’s NBA game would have cost $180.) I sat directly behind player #40, a number that stood out because it is the number Brad Nelson, my baseball playing former student, has worn more often than any other. I made a point of rooting specifically for this player, Finnish left winger Antti Philstrom, and he had a very good game.
The game began with a really bad rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. A rather hoarse girl raced through the song and slaughtered the high note near the end. She interrupted herself, exclaiming “oooh” when she missed the high note, but she still got a smattering of applause at the end.
The Admirals are hockey’s equivalent of a AAA baseball team. They are affiliated with the NHL’s Nashville Predators (interesting since Nashville is home to the Milwaukee Brewers’ AAA affiliate), and about half the players either have played or will play in the National Hockey League. The Admirals have really ugly uniforms, with a strange black and teal color scheme and a cartoonish picture that looks more like a pirate than an admiral. The uniforms also feature the old Milwaukee Brewers logo, a light blue “M” stylized to look much like a catcher’s mitt with a yellow baseball in the middle. The Brewers haven’t used that logo in decades, but here it was on 21st Century hockey uniforms. The announcer referred to the team as “the boys of winter”, so perhaps having a baseball logo on their uniforms was appropriate.
The game was really very good. Since the arena also hosts the Bucks, they were able to give the Admirals a “big league” treatment in terms of announcements, Jumbotron video coverage, promotions, and the like. One annoying aspect was that they also charged big league prices for their concessions, which was why I made due with a bag of peanuts ($4) and a single cup of pop ($5) for the whole game.
Hockey games consist of three 20-minute periods separated by intermissions. The actual game was fast-moving, and they filled the intermissions well. Probably the most interesting thing between the periods was watching the zanbonis condition the ice. While the two monster ice machines made their laps around the track, they played this country-style song over the loudspeaker:
Well I went down to the local arena
Asked to see the manager man
He came from his office, said, "Son can I help you?"
I looked at him and said, "Yes you can..."
I want to Drive the zamboni...hey
I want to Drive the zamboni...Yes I do!
Now ever since I was young it's been my dream
That I might drive a zamboni machine
I'd get the ice just as slick as could be
And all the kids would look up to me
I want to drive the zamboni...hey
I want to drive the zamboni...Yes I do!
Now the manager said, "Son, I know it looks keen
But that right there is one expensive machine
And I've got Smokey who's been driving for years."
About that time I broke down in tears.
‘Cause I want to drive the zamboni...hey
I want to drive the zamboni...Yes I do!
(Click here for a sample of the first verse of the song in .wav format.)
Performed by a group called the Gear Heads, “I Want to Drive the Zamboni” is apparently as much of a standard at hockey arenas as “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” or “Cotton-Eyed Joe” is at ballparks.
Hockey probably has more substitutions than any other game. Except for the goalies, pretty much all the players come out after just a couple of minutes on the ice. There are entirely different offensive and defensive combinations, and—at least at this level—every player seems to have one or two others with whom he shares playing time. Sitting behind the bench I could constantly see players getting ready to go in, literally jumping over the barrier, landing on the ice, and skating on into the pack. Meanwhile the players coming out would skate through the narrow gate by the bench, remove their mouth guards, and find their place on the bench in one motion. It was really fun to watch the guys go in and out.
I stayed through the whole game, which the Admirals won handily. Then I made my way back through slightly lighter snow to the Hampton Inn. The hotel’s back entrance was via a parking ramp just to the north. A security guard was patrolling the entrance to the ramp. He eyed me very suspiciously when I didn’t scan a parking ticket in the machine before going up in the elevator. However, he didn’t say anything, and I made it up to the hotel entrance without incident. I watched some more of the storm news on TV and read through a variety of tourist brochures to figure out what I’d do tomorrow. Then I drifted off to sleep.
I was up around 7:00 this morning, but lounged around the hotel for quite a while. I spent much of that time having breakfast. Hampton Inns always have a nice breakfast spread, definitely superior to most other “midrange” hotels. This morning the main items were sausage patties and miniature waffles. I also sampled from an enormous tray of fresh fruit, and I had an individual cup of yogurt. Coffee, hot chocolate, and two types of juice completed a very hearty breakfast.
It was still snowing fairly briskly when I set out for the day. The TV people said the city of Milwaukee had already gotten about 14 inches of snow, with another inch or two expected this morning as the front moved out over Lake Michigan. Heavy as that was, it was actually slightly less than they had in the western suburbs along I-94. It was really kind of hard to judge the snow totals, because the snow was so wet it quickly settled. If this same storm had come in January, the same amount of precipitation would easily have yielded two to three feet of dry, fluffy white stuff.
It wasn’t easy to walk this morning. In addition to deep drifts, places where snow had been shoveled had developed a thick film of ice, making the sidewalks slippery at best and in some cases all but impassible. I definitely had to watch where I was going to get anywhere.
I first made my way back to the Amtrak station, which was now almost deserted. I went up to the desk and explained to the woman there the problem I’d had getting my ticket for Montreal. She punched a few keys and quickly diagnosed the problem. Apparently Amtrak had changed the schedule on the Schenectady—Montreal leg of the trip by something like 33 minutes. While from the point of view of a cross-country trip that was irrelevant, any change of more than a half an hour is considered “major” by the computer, constituting a different itinerary than what I’d booked. She quickly identified that there was no connection problem (we’ll have an overnight layover in Schenectady) and printed up the tickets. She also stapled them with the others I’d gotten and put them in folders for convenience. This was definitely a good start to the day.
* * * * *
While it wasn’t particularly good out, there were lots more people out this morning than there were last night or yesterday afternoon. I made my way north and west to the convention center, where I enjoyed the shelter of a block-wide skywalk that covered the street and sidewalk.
My destination was just west of the convention center, the Milwaukee Public Museum. Operated by Milwaukee County (an entity that seems to be more important than the city government), the public museum is an enormous institution that combines various aspects of history and science under one roof. I paid a rather hefty admission and made my way up the stairs to the first of three main levels.
The first thing I saw is an exhibit they call “The Old Museum” that re-creates what the original museum was like when the place was founded over a century ago. The eclectic combination of stuff (from dinosaur bones to Japanese dolls) was displayed in elegant Victorian cabinets. Most people just whizzed on by this exhibit (which mostly was just filling an awkward space at the landing of the stairs), but I found it fascinating.
Just to the right of this was the entrance to the museum’s temporary exhibit space. The current temporary exhibit was one I could have seen three years ago when I took the quiz bowl team to Chicago. “Body Worlds” had a year-long run at the Museum of Science and Industry then, and it has since been touring the country, with shorter stays in a variety of lesser-known museums. (It reminded me of when Margaret and I went to Portland and visited the same “Chocolate” exhibit I’d seen earlier in Chicago.) I found Body Worlds too expensive when I was in Chicago before. It still was ($20 admission), but I splurged today, as much to have something to do indoors as anything else. Body Worlds is a collection of human bodies that whose “owners” donated them to science with the understanding that they would be used specifically for this project. The bodies were preserved for eternity through a very new process known as plasticization, which essentially amounts to extracting the blood and replacing it with plastic resin. The bodies have then been deconstructed and reconstructed to highlight the various anatomical systems. The final specimens are then posed like sculptures and accompanied by good explanatory text. In addition to the humans, there are also plasticized animals ranging from small birds to a horse.
The plasticization process yields a result that honestly looks fake. The exhibit looked more like an art museum filled with resin sculptures than an exhibit of actual human bodies. That may be just as well, because it’s honestly just a bit creepy to be walking amid all those dead bodies and more realism might have just added to that feeling.
While the exhibit was more than a bit bizarre, I must say it was also fascinating. I also learned a lot about the body and came away with a greater understanding of health and disease. It probably wasn’t worth the money, but it was a very interesting exhibition. I picked up some postcards and a coffee table book in their gift shop that are interesting mementos.
Once I’d seen Body Worlds I explored the rest of the museum. The place really is enormous, though there’s not much there that’s exactly “must see” material. They do have an interesting display on life in old Milwaukee (a romanticized look at an unspecified time in the vaguely distant past), and there are some interesting exhibits on various ecology-related topics. Then there’s ethnology. About half the museum’s display space is devoted to what in another era would have been called “strange lands and funny peoples”. They’re politically correct enough not to use those words, but that’s still essentially what they’ve got on display. There were some of the featured people I knew quite a bit about. The way they treated those groups led me to believe that all of their ethnology displays were dated at best and fictional at worst. They implied, for instance, that the Inuit lived in igloos, and they had a walk-in polystyrene snow-dome that was supposed to give the feel of Eskimo life. There was a similar fake hogan showing how the Southwestern Indians live. While the Navajo may have traditionally lived in hogans, not very many of them do today. Pretty much no Eskimos ever lived in igloos except in emergencies. They used to live in wood or eathern huts, and today’s Inuit mostly live in pre-fab mobile homes. I found similar errors in their treatments of people from Mexico, the Andes, and north Africa. Given that, I can only assume the treatments of cultures I knew less about were equally bad.
I spent most of the morning at the Milwaukee Public Museum. By the time I left it had stopped snowing, and the temperature had gone up dramatically. The streets and sidewalks were all covered in slush. I trudged westward through the stuff to the Marquette University area, which also features a lot of stately old homes. Were it not for all the slush, this would have been a very pleasant walk. Unfortunately, after going just a couple blocks cold water had seeped through my shoes and completely soaked my socks and feet. The jeans I was wearing had about a five-inch ring of water at the bottom, as if I’d forded a creek in them. While I was having a good time, I must also say I was cold and wet and miserable.
I decided to warm up by having a sit-down lunch. I went to a place Rachel Ray recommended when she visited Milwaukee on $40 a Day, the Midwest Diner. While “diner” describes their menu, it really doesn’t describe the type of establishment the place is. It’s an absolutely enormous restaurant that fills most of the first floor of a large office building. The décor is attractive, if dated. Every surface is covered in either fake blue marble or blond wood veneer. They had vases of plastic flowers on every table, and plastic greenery decorated the windows. They’d placed plastic Easter eggs among the greenery, and they’d strung paper garlands of alternating egg and bunny ear shapes all over the ceiling. It made for an interesting atmosphere. Rachel Ray had a Wisconsin cheese omelet here, and I had one as well. I added ham bits to the omelet, and I also had some good coffee and some very bad canned juice. My bill was about double what Ms. Ray had paid, (around $10, plus tax and tip), but then those $40 a Day shows were made a few years ago; everything is a lot more pricey than it used to be.
They served both breakfast and lunch selections at the diner. At the next booth down from mine a family of four was seated, and they had a wide variety of orders. The mother ordered eggs benedict, but requested that they be prepared with no meat. Her teenaged daughter followed that theme by ordering vegan lasagna. (I have no idea what goes into that, and I probably don’t want to know.) The waitress approved of their orders, saying that while she wasn’t a vegetarian herself, she couldn’t bring herself to eat pork. She was less approving of dad and the young son, though. They were definitely carnivores—and, worse, they both had pig meat. The father had barbecued spare ribs, while the boy had pancakes and rather disgusting looking sausage links (they looked like miniature bratwursts). When their meals came, everyone in the family seemed to like them. There was definitely no sharing across the table, though.
There were three waitresses working at the Midwest Diner. Two of them seemed very efficient, the sort of people who could balance five plates and a coffee pot, all while taking someone’s order. Unfortunately, I had the third waitress. She only had two tables, but that was two too many for her. She seemed to do everything in slow motion. Once I was seated, it was nearly ten minutes before she offered me coffee and another ten before she finally took my order. She never did refill the coffee, and I had to ask another waitress for the check. I gave a chintzy tip, but honestly I think anything was probably too much.
I got even more soaked walking back to the hotel. In addition to sloshing through the slush, I got sprayed by cars that whizzed by on Wisconsin Avenue. I was literally shivering when I finally got back to my room.
I used the same creative method of drying things out I’d used in Florida when I had clothes that were drenched in sweat—the hair dryer. By pounding my shoes, socks, and jeans with hot air, I managed to dry them out. I steamed up and stank up the room in the process, but at least my legs and feet could be dry again.
… Not that the dryness lasted all that long. When I set out again, I managed to keep my jeans relatively dry. The shoes and socks were hopeless, though. I was reminded of when I was a little kid and I’d run around the neighborhood in Mt. Pleasant when everything was flooded in the spring. My feet were wrinkling up and my waterlogged shoes sloshed just as they did back then.
I left the hotel and crossed the Milwaukee River to the area known as the East Side. This is the most residential part of downtown, though no one will ever confuse the place with Manhattan or the South Loop. There are lots of old warehouses that have been converted into loft apartments, though, as well as countless coffee bars and sandwich shops catering to the local residents.
While I knew exactly where I was going, it was a little bit tricky to find my destination. That’s because there are many intersections in Milwaukee where the street signs are missing. At others the signs were there, but they were obliterated by snow. I was able to walk up Water Street to Pleasant, though. I then re-crossed the river and walked a bit further north on Commercial Street, an oddly-named street that is almost entirely lined by newly build condominiums.
The lone exception to the condos was my destination for the afternoon, the Lakefront Brewery. Milwaukee is, of course, known for its beer. Two of the biggest breweries, Pabst and Schlitz, went bankrupt back in the Reagan years, leaving Miller as the only major company making beer in Wisconsin. Years ago I’d seen the outside of the Miller Brewery, which is across the freeway from the ballpark in a bleak area at the west edge of the city. They offer tours, but every source I’d seen said those tours weren’t nearly as interesting as the Anheuser Busch tour I’d taken in St. Louis. They said instead I should tour this microbrewery. Having done the tour, I can say to anyone reading this that if you find yourself in Milwaukee with time to spare, the Lakefront Brewery tour is just about the most interesting thing there is to do in the city.
The Lakefront Brewery is housed in a very nondescript building located literally under a bridge northeast of downtown Milwaukee. After crunching my way up their salt-covered walkway I paid $5 and was given four wooden tokens and a large plastic beer cup. The hostess told me I could exchange the tokens for free samples of their product, and I was free to drink before, during, and after the tour. She also said that at the end of the tour I could exchange the empty plastic cup for either a free pilsner glass with the company logo on it or a six-pack of one of their lesser-known beers (one I think they’d overproduced and were trying to get rid of). While I did have their standard product, if I didn’t drink, I could have also gotten home-brewed root beer in exchange for the tokens. They also had free snacks to munch on with the beer samples, and they gave out a coupon (which I didn’t use) for a free draw of Lakefront beer at any of a dozen local bars. Put together with a tour, that’s very good value for a $5 admission.
I got a draw of India pale ale and had just taken a couple of sips when they announced the tour was starting. There were about twenty people on the tour—most about my age, but ranging from college age to senior citizens. We followed a very portly gentleman down some narrow steps to the basement, which is where all the actual brewing takes place. The man began by saying, “The Germans used to call beer liquid bread. As you can see, I’m very well fed.” He kept the tone light throughout the tour, but he also did a good job of explaining and showing us what goes on in the brewery. The basic process really isn’t all that much different than what goes when they make Miller or Budweiser, but the tour here was much more “up close and personal”.
Lakefront was started in 1987 by two guys who got tired of their neighbors constantly asking for samples of their home brew. While they have grown rapidly, they still produce, as the guide pointed out, “about as much in a year as Miller spills in a day”. Today the place has six employees, all of whom can do every job—brewing, packaging, shipping, and giving the tours.
We spent about half an hour walking past the tanks where malted barley, water, yeast, and hops come together to make beer. The man explained that the different varieties of Lakefront’s beers come from combining these ingredients in different proportions and introducing each at different points in the brewing process. Three of their beers break from the four ingredient tradition, however. They have cherry and pumpkin flavored beers (the pumpkin was the one I could have gotten a six-pack of for free if I’d wanted to) that supposedly are designed to showcase Wisconsin ingredients. They also make a gluten-free beer that uses sorghum instead of barley as its base ingredient. While I have known people who were gluten-intolerant, I never knew beer was a concern for them.
One interesting comment the guide made was that the process of brewing purifiers the beer. This was important fifteen years ago when Milwaukee’s water was contaminated with cryptosporidium from raw sewage that had been dumped into Lake Michigan near the drinking water intake. Even though more than 100 people died and 400,000 became sick from drinking the contaminated water, beer made in Milwaukee remained perfectly safe to drink.
At about the midway point on the tour we passed a sight that was familiar to the Milwaukeeans on the tour, Bernie Brewer’s chalet. Throughout the history of County Stadium, whenever a Milwaukee Brewer would hit a home run, Bernie Brewer (a lederhosen-clad German stereotype of a mascot) would emerge from his chalet in left field and slide down into an enormous beer stein. They have a more cartoonish version of the same thing at Miller Park today. When County Stadium was razed, the auctioned off various items, including the chalet. Lakefront bought it, hoping to give visitors the opportunity to take a ride down Bernie’s slide. “We had dreams of an amusement park,” said the guide. “After all, Busch Gardens had to start somewhere.” He went on to say, “Unfortunately we soon found out the world is run by insurance companies—insurance companies and lawyers. Since we can’t let you go down the slide, as a consolation prize, why don’t you get out your tokens and have another beer?” At that instant another employee pushed out a portable tap, and the drinks flowed freely. I had a Riverwalk Steinbrau, which was darker than I’d normally care for, but not bad.
After we all refilled our glasses, we walked through a narrow door. “This,” said the guide, “is where brewing stops being an art or science and starts being a business. Even for a microbrewery, it’s not really about making beer, it’s about selling beer.” The room we were entering was filled with stacks of kegs, and beyond that was another room filled with crates of bottles. This was where the beer was packaged and prepared for shipment.
The guide showed us how the kegs were filled and explained the rather crude language used in the process. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll pass that explanation along to you. Each keg is sealed with a rubber cork-like device called a bung. The bung fits into an opening called the bung hole—and, well, you can let your imagination figure out what else was in the explanation.
The bottling room had a poster on the wall showing a scene from the TV show Laverne and Shirley, whose title characters supposedly worked in a Milwaukee brewery. In fact the place they theoretically worked in the ‘50s likely looked much like Lakefront’s bottling room does today. It’s not exactly state-of-the-art, but it does get the job done.
There was one more portable bar set up beyond the tasting room, and we all refilled our glasses with another pint. I had a traditional pilsner this time. This was the closest to generic American beer and was probably my favorite of the group. We made our way back up the stairs to the tasting room (where most people redeemed their fourth token—I kept mine) and gift shop. I finished my third beer and redeemed the cup for a very nice glass (one they were selling for $4 each, which alone covers most of the admission). I also picked up a T-shirt. I even toyed with the idea of getting a sampler pack of all their various beers, but I thought better of it. If I ever happen to see the stuff in a store, though, I may pick up more of it.
I took a slightly shorter route back downtown, heading west to Martin Luther King Drive (also known as Old World Third Street ...). I made my way back to the parking ramp by the hotel. The guard was not there this afternoon, but an electronic voice from the pay station commanded me to “pay for your parking before you go upstairs”. Since I had nothing to pay for, I ignored it and made my way back to my hotel room.
I decided not to dry out my shoes again yet, since I’d be going out almost immediately. This time I went over to Border’s, where I spent quite a while browsing. I then did a bit of window shopping elsewhere at the mall and got an early supper at Arby’s in the food court. Then I went back and did thoroughly dry everything out with the hair dryer.
* * * * *
The local paper had a front page article that got me in the mood for tonight’s game. It was telling the bad fortune of Milwaukee’s scalpers. Apparently the shaky economy, combined with the poor fortunes of the Bucks, had combined to make this a very bad time for quasi-legal ticket dealers. I’ve never bought tickets from a scalper in my life, and I certainly don’t intend to start now. It was interesting to read the article, though.
The background music on this page is the theme from "Laverne and Shirley".
(c) 2008 davidmburrow@yahoo.com