what about the plastic animals?

Boathouse

The Urban Ecology Center of Milwaukee made a bunch of bicycles available for attendees of the conference I went to last month.  Given that it was the Ecological Society of America conference it was a good match.  The bikes were free!  You just had to leave your driver's license while you borrowed one.

I had a few hours free the last morning of the conference so I borrowed a bike and went for a ride.  It was a good way to see much more of Milwaukee than I would have by walking.  I saw the art museum, then rode north along the lakeshore for several miles before heading inland and eventually back toward downtown.

The boathouse was a serendipitous discovery when I decided to turn right instead of left.  It is nowhere near the lake.

Milwaukee Art Museum

Let's go back to Milwaukee!  Virtually, not for real. 

The striking Milwaukee Art Museum sits on the shore of Lake Michigan in downtown Milwaukee.  The "wings" on the central building opens and closes twice a day.  The architect is Santiago Calatrava, who has also designed a bird-like transportation hub for the World Trade Center site.   Because of delays, and the complexities of construction Calatrava's original design has been altered several times and faces future changes.

Ladybugs

The ladybugs in downtown Milwaukee were huge!

World's Most Overbuilt and Top-Heavy Parking Lot Attendant Booth

I don't know what is going on at the world's most overbuilt and top-heavy parking lot attendant booth, but there it is in downtown Milwaukee.  Is it an incompleted bridge support?  Last remainder of a vast network of elevated train tracks?  World's most overbuilt and top-heavy Fotomat booth?  I don't know but I sure was impressed.

Famous Parking Lots and Friendly People

Birthplace of the American League

Birthplace of the typewriter

Never let it be said that Milwaukeeans are without a dry sense of humor.  Around the corner from each other, and just a block from my hotel are two historic markers. 

Ann, Jeff and I were reading the baseball marker when a Postal Service worker driving a delivery truck stopped for a red light and shouted out to us "That's where the American League was founded.  Not in the parking lot.  There used to be a big hotel there."

A couple days later I saw a historic marker for the invention of the typewriter.  The sign began "At 318 State Street, approximately 300 feet northeast of here..."  I turned around and took a parking lot across the street for being the location of said invention.  As I lifted up my camera a guy going into the Journal Sentinel building said "You must like our parking lots."  I explained the whole typewriter thing and he told me "Oh, you want the parking lot that's in the middle of the block."

Photoless Bonus:  David Blaine was doing magic tricks on the corner of 116th St. and St. Nicholas Ave. this evening.

Wisconsin State Fair

The Milwaukee trip was mostly work but I had some free time on Sunday afternoon to go to the Wisconsin State Fair in West Allis.  The Wisconsin State Fair is about half the size as the Minnesota State Fair, and there are virtually no foods on a stick.  Those shortcomings are countered by the giant cream puffs in the Cream Puff Parlor. 

You get in a long, yet fast-moving, line and watch the cream puffs get assembled.  In the first set of windows opens upon rack after rack of pastry shells.  Two people are kept busy slicing the shells in half.  A third person whisks the cut shells to the filling windows.  There, rows of shells are lovingly filled with freshly whipped heavy cream and topped with the upper half of the pastry.  From there it is on to the sales counter where fairgoers can purchase one for $3.50 or a box of six for $18.   A plastic sheet of ice is also available for purchase if you want to carry the puffs of cream around with you for a while.

We figured out that the best, least messy, way of eating the cream puffs was to first scoop out half the cream with the top of the pastry before tackling the bottom portion.

The New York State Fair begins on the 21st.  As a kid we never went to it, even though it was less than an hour's drive away.  I'll be near Syracuse next weekend.  We'll see how things go.

Inside View

This was the warm and cozy interior of the Milwaukee Hyatt.

Wisconsin's Only Rotation Rooftop Restaurant

Hyatt Regency Milwaukee from the Culver's terrace in the Grand Avenue Mall

Milwaukee City Hall through a murky window

There's nothing like a good night's sleep to ready one for photo processing and witty blog entries.  If you want a good night's sleep may I suggest the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee.  The Hyatt has Wisconsin's only rooftop revolving restaurant.  I don't know why the Hyatt needed to add the rooftop qualifier to all their literature, perhaps there's a ground floor rotating restaurant in Rhinelander.  I never did make it to the rooftop.

Sleeping at the Hyatt wasn't going to be interrupted by a desire to look at downtown Milwaukee.  Well, you could have the desire but, given the filthy window, it would be an unfulfilled longing.  There were workers doing something to my side of the building every day.  If they were cleaning the Hyatt was getting ripped off.

Moonlight Madness

On the same evening we saw the amazing moonrise, Jeff and I also saw this ad in the Ashland, Wisconsin newspaper.

Sea Caves

Jumping back to the Wisconsin diversion of the Minnesota trip...  As we were driving along the northern tip of Wisconsin Jeff saw a sign indicating a lake access point and turned off the highway.  At the end of the road was Meyers Beach.  According to a sign there were sea caves a couple miles in, so we took a hike.  The Apostle Island sea caves are well known but I wasn't aware of the ones on the mainland. 

Even though you can't really tell from my photos the caves were quite amazing.  Some cut inland a couple hundred feet.  That's a lot of wave action!