We spent the day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We walked into the beautiful old Mackie Building in downtown Milwaukee and a cleaning lady invited us to see if the doors to the 2nd floor ballroom were open. They were. Beautiful old paintings, woodwork, atrium ceiling, etc. When we walked out, Serry was taking a picture near a guy standing by his truck smoking a cigarette. The guy asked if we were tourists, and then told us the Mackie Bldg. hosted the stock exchange before Chicago. And it turned out this guy was a carpenter who had worked at restoring some of the fancy old woodwork in the building. He then invited us to go to an old building across the street with a copper staircase he claimed was worth more than the building itself. Beautiful.
From there we went to the Hotel Pfister, which reminded us of the Willard in DC. Very elegant. The concierge said the Pfister has the largest collection of Victorian paintings in the world. He'd still be talking to us if we hadn't had tickets for a boat tour of the rivers that run through Milwaukee.
The tour was fun, though the scenery left a bit to be desired: industrial areas, piles of coal, rail yards, etc. The woman seated in front of us moved to Milwaukee from Rockville, Maryland, 30 years ago.
After that, we started east again, through Chicago. Terrible traffic jams; worse than the Washington Beltway. We're now in Portage for the night. Not someplace to visit, I'm afraid. Tomorrow: Cleveland and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
More random thoughts:
- We're starting to detect regional accents once more.
- At home, we have the radio on before we leave the garage. At the start of our trip we had it on, too. Somewhere in the South, however, we became so interested in the scenery that we turned the radio off. Now that the scenery is pretty much the same as at home, we turned it back on this morning.
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