Over Labor Day weekend Cliff and I took a quick road trip to Milwaukee. Airfares have been so expensive lately that we have been doing short road trips instead of flying places. St. Louis, Nashville, and now Milwaukee. I have always complained about the lack of good road trip destinations in the midwest. People that live in California are so lucky. There are so many great places to do quick road trips and we have like Springfield. Nothing against Springfield, i’ve never even been there. But lets be honest I doubt Springfield, IL has anything on San Diego or Santa Barbara or anyone the cute beachy towns in California. Milwaukee may not be that cool but we found tons of great stuff. We didn’t even get to do everything we wanted. And we definitely didn’t get to eat everything we wanted!
We stayed at the Intercontinental, which is Downtown Milwaukee. It was fine. Good location, good price but the room was just ok. It could use an update. From the hotel we were able to walk everywhere. We don’t mind walking a couple miles to get wherever we are going. Especially considering all the food we ate. We each picked a couple of things we wanted to do.
On my list was the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Milwaukee Zoo. On Cliff’s list was the Lakefront Brewery Tour and drinking beer. Things didn’t exactly work out as planned for one us. Guess which one?
The first thing we did after checking into our hotel was eat lunch. Priorites. More about where we ate next week. After lunch we walked the Milwaukee Art Museum. We got there around 3:30pm and it closed at 5pm. But there was a huge line and I didn’t want to wait in line and pay $17 each for only 1 hour in the museum. There was a special Kandinsky exhibit so maybe that is why it was so busy. Or maybe its always busy? Instead we just looked around the lobby, which was actually really cool. The Milwaukee Art Museum is a very iconic building. Even though we didn’t get to see much art we still enjoyed the views.
That evening we went to a local beer hall and had some drinks, snacks and the best apple struedel ever while listening to Polka music. We both had massive headaches–not blaming the polka– but we headed back to the hotel early.
The next morning we went to the best brunch place ever where I got chicken and waffles. There was an art fair in the area so we took a stroll and looked at all the art. There was a doughnut place in the area that I wanted to check out. But for the first time in my whole life I went to a doughnut shop and didn’t buy anything. It was miraculous. It was like 11am and they were mostly sold out and what was left didn’t look that special. They were even sold out of iced coffee. Weird place, don’t need to go back. Then we went to the Milwaukee Public Market. There were a about 30 or so stalls and we bought cookies (delicious) from C. Adam’s Bakery. It is not as good as the Ferry Building in San Francisco but it was still really nice. There were tons of people at the market.
After a quick nap we headed to the Lakefront Brewery tour. It was quite a hike to get there but it was a nice walk along the river. We did a brewery tour in St. Louis and I have done the Heineken one in Amsterdam and the Guinness one in Dublin. This was probably my favorite. I don’t even drink beer but the tours are still fun. And this one gave me maple root beer instead of beer so that was a plus. They had a really nice beer hall with an interesting menu as well. We didn’t eat there but everything looked great.
The next morning my Mom and Kelly were supposed to drive up with Winnie so we could all go to the zoo but it was a rainy stormy mess so we skipped it. Instead, Cliff and I drove home early.
We had a lot of fun in Milwaukee and it is a great place for a weekend getaway. It is fun to discover new restauarants and sites in other cities. We are obviously spoiled living so close to a big and diverse city like Chicago but we still found fun, new things to do in Milwaukee and we will definitely go back. Check back next week and I will show you all the great stuff we ate and drank while we were there.
