We are stopped in a rest area about 40 miles west of Huron, MI, for lunch.   In an hour we’ll be crossing the border into Canada and dropping out of touch.   In Canada, my cell phone and cellular Internet are outrageously expensive to use, and for the 48 hours we plan to be in the country it’s not worth getting the international option that Verizon offers.   So this is my last chance to briefly post until we get back into the USA.

We left Milwaukee in the morning on Sunday, with the only aim of navigating the busy highways through Chicago before holiday traffic got too bad.   The drive was decent, and the trip was marred only by a minor mechanical glitch.   We had stopped about an hour south of Milwaukee at the Mars Cheese Castle, a small tourist attraction featuring (surprise!) a lot of cheese for sale.   Eleanor   made the requisite purchases, of course.

My habit is to always inspect the trailer at every stop. This prevents little problems from being big ones, because I occasionally spot something that’s not optimal and have a chance to fix it.   This habit paid off on this day because I could easily see from 100 feet away that something was hanging down beneath the trailer.   It turned out to be one of four straps that hold the fresh water tank in place.   A bolt had stripped out and the strap was dangling.

We weren’t able to effect a roadside repair, so Brett and I removed the strap entirely and saved the remaining good bolt from it.   We also used the tank’s exterior petcock to dump about 3/4 of our fresh water supply on the pavement, thus lightening the load on the three other straps.   I was glad that nobody spotted this, since it might have looked like we were dumping gray water on the ground and I didn’t want to have to explain ourselves to an angry property owner.

Tow vehicle report: With extensive construction zones in Illinois our speeds were kept down and the MB turned in an exemplary 15.0 MPG for the trip all the way to Grand Rapids, MI, where we courtesy parked with our friends the Fabers.   I’ll tell the story of that interesting visit in the next blog …

I finally got far enough along on the Fall magazine that I was able to take most of Friday off and explore Milwaukee with the rest of the crew.   With great anticipation, Brett and I headed over to Harley Davidson’s power plant facility to take the free tour.   Foolish us.   Upon arrival in the suspiciously-empty parking lot, we realized that it was Friday, July 3, and the factory was closed.   Doh!

Well, I won’t be seeing that attraction of Milwaukee, but there are many others.   We headed over to downtown to see the Milwaukee Public Museum.   This was a good choice.   We’ve been to many museums in many major cities, and I can say that Milwaukee’s ranks right up there with the best of them.   We spent most of the day and still hadn’t seen it all when the museum closed at 4 p.m.

Of course, to sustain a full day of museum-walking, one needs a decent midday lunch.   Brett suggested an old favorite of his, a place just across the river called “Real Chili.”   This scored with us on four points: (1) good food; (2) new culinary experience; (3) low price; (4) friendly staff.   I say that the culinary experience was new because I’ve never been to a place that serves only chili, and moreover I’ve never had chili with spaghetti in it.

You go up to the counter and order the chili Mild, Medium, or Hot, and then specify if you want spaghetti, beans, or both.   You can order “mixins” too: onions, cheese, jalepenos.   It’s about $5.   Refills are half price.   That’s it.   Dead simple, and seriously tasty.

I wish I had more time to explore downtown Milwaukee.   The architecture is widely varied and all interesting.   There are lots of interesting shops, walks, parks, and the river area.   We barely scratched the surface of this town.   I can’t say we’ll be back soon, but not because it isn’t worth a stop.   It’s more a matter of Milwaukee being not on the way to anywhere.   That big puddle called Lake Michigan blocks the way east.

Today we got up at 5 a.m. and headed back to Madison, to attend the final day of the International Rally.   As is usual, about 1/4 of the Airstreams had already departed and there was a trickle of aluminum slipping away all day.   But there were still plenty of people to make the flea market a big success, which was the reason for our visit.   We set up a table of our merchandise (back issues, t-shirts, hats, aluminum tumblers, silver slippers, etc.) and hawked it all until our throats were dry.   Emma was particularly good at promoting the tumblers, reminding everyone who came by that they were dishwasher safe.   We sold every single one, and went to Madison’s “Dave’s Famous Barbecue” for the post-market celebration.

There was a second Vintage Open House at the rally site, one to which the general public had been invited.   We hung around for a few hours, having final visits with the friends that we likely won’t see for months, or even years.   I had a chance to talk extensively to Airstream Life contributors, including John Irwin, Forrest McClure, Dale Schwamborn, Michael Depraida, and Michael Lambert.   Snapped a few good file photos, too.

A few people asked about the new tow vehicle, and so I had to deliver my “why I bought a Mercedes” lecture, which is getting pretty polished by now.   The fact that we got 25.7 MPG on our roundtrip from Milwaukee helped explain my interest in the new quiet & clean V-6 turbodiesels, but I’m finding that fuel economy is just the tip of the iceberg.   (Later I’ll write a blog post about why I like this technology.)

Toward the end of the afternoon I noticed that Airstreamer Freddie Davis was over at his Excella giving out haircuts.   Now that we’re back on the road, I have to resume my mission to try offbeat barber shops wherever possible.   What better place to start the experiment than in the shade of an Airstream awning?   So I plopped myself down in his chair and got a pretty darned good $10 haircut — all proceeds donated to the church mission for which Freddie volunteers his time.   I can recommend his services.

Tonight we are expecting fireworks over the state fairgrounds, which means that those of us parked in the campground will have a front-row seat.   We’ve received warning notices to take in our awnings, because they might be charred by sparks floating down.   Thus, our visit to Wisconsin will end with a bang, for tomorrow morning we will be heading down I-94 toward Chicago and around the southern end of Lake Michigan.

I don’t drink beer, much to the disappointment of many, and I don’t own a motorcycle, much to the disappointment of myself.   But I do like factory tours.   So while in Milwaukee it seemed incumbent upon us to go to at least two famous production facilities: Harley-Davidson, and Miller Beer.   Wednesday was designated Miller day (or as they repeatedly told us through the tour, “Miller Time”).

The tour was fairly amusing because it started with the usual over-the-top propaganda film that has become the hallmark of factory tours everywhere.   Whether Coca-Cola, Tabasco, Celestial Seasonings (tea), Tillamook cheese, Corvette, Nissan, or any other we’ve done, there’s always that introductory bit where they try to convince you that their product is not only a major part of American history, but an nearly spiritual experience.   Just to be near it is to become a part of something much larger than oneself.

In the case of Miller, the thing that really got us going was the reiteration of the phrase “Miller Time,” which (since I am an admitted beer cynic) particularly struck me as comical after about the 30th or 40th time I heard it.   But the tour was admittedly well done, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes factory tours, or who likes beer.   Like other factory tours, there is free product to be had at the end, and Miller’s samples currently take the form of three tall glasses. No skimpy paper cups here.

The sheer numbers of production are staggering.   This is only one of several plants across the US, and they ship massive quantities of beer to ten states.   Imagine 2.25 million cases per week, going out on 250 trucks a day and something like 18 rail cars, too.   Interestingly, they say that Chicago takes a large share of the production, equaling as much as five other states.   Draw your own conclusions.

If you take the tour, you’ll see the movie, a filling and capping facility, a warehouse, the kettles, the historic “beer caves,” the Miller Inn, and of course the gift shop.   For the price (free), it’s a heck of a deal.

Harley-Davidson will be another day.   We have one more day in Milwaukee, and I’m still working frantically on the magazine, so the current balance is about six hours of work and a few hours in the afternoon for exploration.   We’ll probably catch the tour on Friday.   On Saturday we’ll return to Madison for just the day, so we can participate in the WBCCI flea market, and then we’ll be on the road again.

Sometimes our progress on the road is glacial in pace, but I usually prefer it that way.   Driving only short distances gives us a better chance to explore, not to mention the cost savings.   When touring the Four Corners region last year we drove less than a thousand miles in a month.   Our big trip on Monday was simply to get from Stoughton to Milwaukee, which is about 80 miles mostly on the interstate.   It would have been an easy day but we were “behind the curve” all the way.

The day started innocuously enough, with a trip to downtown Madison so that Brett could have a scheduled business appointment.   While he was in the meeting, Eleanor, Emma, and I found a coffee shop on State Street with wifi, and settled in for an hour of reading and working.   I didn’t get the name of the place, but the chairs were deep, the coffee and chai drinks were generously sized, and the wifi was decent. Emma had her favorite, a steamed coconut milk.

While I was catching up online, and just a few minutes after posting yesterday’s blog, the entire AirstreamLife.com website began to fail.   I got our boy genius programmer on the job, but in a short while everything went down, including this blog, email services, customer service, and the main website.   There wasn’t a darned thing I could do about it.   (It looked at first like we were getting a denial-of-service attack, but later it was proved to be an internal problem with our database.)   So when Brett got back, I packed up the laptop and we went back to the State Capitol building to get a few more photos, and to tour the rooftop observation deck.

On the way back to the state park, we stopped in at the International Rally at the Alliant Energy Center to pick up that replacement awning arm I needed from Zip-Dee   ($84 was the price of my lesson; always remember to take in your awning when thunderstorms are possible.)   And there, standing in front of the new Airstream display, was Bob Wheeler, the president of Airstream.   We see Bob 3-4 times a year, sometimes at his home base in Ohio, mostly on the road at events, and always like chatting with him about the state of the Airstream world.

He suggested lunch, and although we were pressed for time because we needed to get the Airstreams out of the state park before 3 p.m., it was hard to refuse.   So we went off to some local cafe that is also a yarn store (a culinary first for us).   By the time lunch was over we had to rush to get back to the state park, and when we did arrive it was 2:54 p.m. and somebody was waiting to check into our site.   I started feeling rather behind the curve by then, because it was rush-rush to get the trailer hitched up and out of the spot.   Rushing a departure is never good because it’s too easy to overlook something small but expensive.   I have to be extra careful on the checklist in these situations.

Then it was off to the dump station, and then through construction zones to the highway, and then 70 miles of fairly dense traffic all the way to Milwaukee, where it became horrific 4-lane stop & go traffic.   The new tow vehicle really shined, however, yanking the Airstream forward 100 feet and then screeching to a halt when some idiot in a car cut in front of us … over and over again.

After about 30 minutes of testing our brakes with 50,000 Milwaukee commuters, we escaped to the State Fairground, where there is an RV park.   Huge dark-blue thunderstorms were on the horizon right behind us, and we wasted no time in getting unhitched and set up.   Ten minutes later we felt the first sprinkles…

So it was that sort of day.   Although a lot happened, I felt at the end of it all that I hadn’t really accomplished much.   But here we are, settled comfortably if not in the most beautiful spot.   The Fairgrounds are like Wal-Mart, but with hookups.   We’re on asphalt, the highway roars by just a short distance away, and there are few trees.   We’re not here for scenic beauty, but for practicality.   This location puts us close to downtown Milwaukee, and there are services we need nearby like laundry and a Verizon store to replace Eleanor’s phone. (It suddenly died yesterday.)   I need to spend a few days working intensely to get caught up on Airstream Life business, too.   Sometimes we trade beauty and travel glamour for the asphalt-coated realities of life.

PS:   The website problems seem to be resolved now.