Chapter 9

We were so happy to learn that there is a farmers' market in downtown Madison, because it meant we could skip the motel breakfast! Not only that, but the Madison farmers' market is huge! It has 300 vendors, and that is just food and flowers, not including crafts or food trucks. The produce was beautiful, and beautifully displayed. There were lots of apples, rhubarb, beets and garlic, as well as many other items. We walked all the way around, and ended up getting mini quiches and scones, which we ate on the capitol steps.

Then we drove to Milwaukee, which is only an hour away. The freeways on approach were a mess of poor road, construction, and lane closures, but we have phone service now, which means Google maps, which is a big help.

Our first stop was the Milwaukee Art Museum, in an interesting building right on the lake, which would be Lake Michigan. We let Nora pick her favorites, which is the contemporary art. This also had a display of paper art (remember shadow puppet Thumbelina? it looked like that).

The "wings" of the museum close and reopen at noon, and our free parking expired at 12:15, so we looked around till then, and went out to see the wings move, which takes 4 minutes to close and 4 minutes to reopen.

We noticed a group of people gathering nearby, which turned out to be an anti-white supremacist rally, so we joined in that for a few minutes, until we had to go get our car. White supremacy is terrorism, and everyone driving by seemed to agree, because lots of drivers honked and waved. The older woman next to me asked what
was going on, and when I told her she said "Well, I agree with that!"

We drove a few blocks, reparked the car for 2 more hours of free parking, and walked through the Third Ward neighborhood. It is a former warehouse district, now filled with interesting shops and lots of restaurants, which many people sitting outside. We went into the Milwaukee Public Market, which is like Pike Place, except much smaller. We bought some much needed iced tea and looked around. The spice shop was interesting, with 5 kinds of cinnamon, and many varieties of vanilla, among other things.

Then we walked along the river walk, a pedestrian path that follows the Milwaukee River for many miles. We only walked part of it, but it was fun to see many pleasure boats, kayaks, etc on the river. There are bridges pretty much every block, which lift straight up when a taller boat goes by. They were constantly moving up and down. We had to walk down a few streets to look at buildings. I think Milwaukee has some of the most elaborate buildings I've ever seen!

We went back to the car before that 2 hour parking expired, moved the car a few more blocks, and went to the Milwaukee Public Museum. Elise had been to this museum in the winter, and told us we had to go. It's probably the primary reason we sent to Milwaukee at all! And ... it was totally worth it. It was huge! We looked a several streets of recreated Old Milwaukee, which had homes and businesses, including a real log cabin from the 1830s. We looked at the European village, which had "houses" filled with items from the counties of Europe.

We saw lengthy displays for each continent, with people, artifacts, and animals. The museum has so much stuff. There were some displays we didn't get to, because we had to get back to the car.

We drove a few miles south to Humboldt Park, where Indiafest was going on. We got delicious, different Indian food while watching Bollywood dancers on the large stage they have in the park. Even the rice was interesting and different -- it had something like non-sweet rice krispies in it.

We drove half an hour south to our motel in Racine. When we got off the freeway, we saw directions for 2 Frank Lloyd Wright buildings -- the Johnson Foundation building, plus the SC Johnson Company headquarters. We drove a long way to the foundation, but we couldn't see it because the gates were closed and it was behind lots of trees. The gates were also closed at the headquarters, but we were able to see though the. Johnson makes various products, including Windex, Scrubbing Bubbles, Ziplock, and lots of bad insect killers, like Off. And now we're at our motel.