Saturday July 1st to Monday July 3rd 2023 - July 4 Road trip to Chicago Part 1 - about 16 miles of urban walking

This trip has been on the books for a long time.  I contemplated having it be a train one way rental car the other trip but ultimately it has taken the originally planned form… Driving both ways.

We left Saturday from home quite early which was good.  We stopped at the casino in Nigarga Falls NY which was bad but somewhat fun.  The drive through Ontario Canada to Michigan was better than last time.  Why people near Toronto literally do almost the opposite of what their road signs say (slower traffic keep right) is beyond me, they have worse lane discipline than California or Illinois or any other state I normally hold in low regard for driving basics.  But it wasn’t all that busy and once we got onto ON-403 and later ON-402 there were so few cars it wouldn’t have mattered what lane everybody drove in at all.  It was truly very very quiet.  The (relatively) new 110 KM/h speed limit is a help too since twith even the slightest rounding up that’s easily 70 MPH.  Border crossing into Canada from NY took about 15 minutes but wasn’t chaotic.  Getting back into the US took about 10 minutes. Interestingly, our border checkpoint agent asked almost no questions and we seemed to take less than 1 minute to get through once we finally got through the slow line.

We stayed in Grand Rapids Michigan, a city we really enjoyed on last year’s Michigan trip.  The hotel this time wasn’t in a very good part of town but despite some sketchy clientele, our room was clean and quiet.  The weather was horrible on part of the drive between Ontario and Grand Rapids.  At one point I exited I-69 and we bought gas and hung out in the convenience store for about 20 minutes hoping the worst of the cloud burst would pass.  It was still torrential when we ran out to the car (which was immediately in front of the door of the mini mart yet still we were soaked as was the car door from being opened for 5 seconds).  I knew getting on the freeway with the 70 MPH speed limit was a terrible idea so I looked for alternative roads that would head in the same direction.  Our first attempt to get headed the same direction, we ran into a rapidly flooding underpass.  For the first time in my life I actually backed out of the underpass rather than risk trying to ford the water.  Other cars (mostly SUV’s) were forging ahead but I’ve seen and heard too many news stories of ALL sorts of vehicles and drivers finding out about the raw force or moving water the hard way.

The next morning we headed out again towards Chicago on I-196 which runs down Lake Ontario’s Eastern shore into Indiana. Again there was light traffic and Michigan’s high speed limits so the trip through Michigan was fast though not totally relaxing since some of it was single lane, shoe horning both sides of freeway onto 1 roadbed while the other is reconstructed,  Other long pieces of it were 2 lanes each direction but no shoulder and very bumpy since they were a different version of the same single roadbed rebuild scheme.  The run through Indiana was brief and soon we were on I-90 and the Chicago Skyway which is when the thunderstorms and monsoons started again.  This was *really bad* rain and hydroplaning. About 1/3 of the cars were driving with their hazards on.  I certainly wasn’t enjoying the rain either but by focusing intently and not just focusing on the rain I avoided getting into clumps of panicky drivers and was able to largely go as fast as I felt safe going since the hazard flashing 30 MPH crew was pretty good at staying to the right.  All things considered, it was amazing to get through the entire trip including the awful last 30 miles without any stop and go traffic.

The rain was coming down so hard that once we got checked into the hotel we really had to get all of our motivation together to even go literally across the street to eat.  We waited for our table outside under the awning for a few minutes and were then seated at a very tiny table jammed in a corner where the food runners drop their huge trays of food for the servers to distribute.  It was a very ‘cozy’ urban experience that we wouldn’t have anyplace near home.  My chicken sandwich and especially my Mac and Cheese were very good.  Brian didn’t love his grass-fed Australian beef burger but it was ok.  We then returned to the room for a nap as we tried to wait out the rain.  It finally calmed down about 4 pm and we headed to Rainbow Cone for some ice cream then, at my insistence, Northwestern University in Evanston for a sunset campus walk along with some Lake Ontario waterfront walking.  Getting to Evanston from out hotel was time consuming since the hotel isn’t near an L stop (about .5 miles away) and the station we first tried to board the red line at had a lot of police activity and no trains for at least the 20 minutes we were there.  It felt very sketchy and crowded so we walked a few blocks to a Brown line station and rode that as far North as we could before boarding a Red line train to its terminus at Howard then a Purple line stop a few stops to one of the 3 stops near Northwestern University.  

The campus was everything I hoped it would be.  Grassy, peaceful, full of rabbits and other urban wildlife.  The buildings range from modern architectural statements to grand Ivy lined classics. It was almost 10 by the time we got back to the room but both our trains back to the hotel came with almost no wait time.

Monday morning we headed out early again, on foot, and boarded an Amtrak train for Milwaukee Wisconsin.  The walk to the train station was kind of brutal because we had JUST enough time to get there and it was 1.5 miles.  If I had remembered to grab my sunglasses out of the car before the valet took it upon arrival it would have been a little more leisurely but we made it including a quick stop for bagels to go along the way.  The train ride was smooth and uneventful.  We went on a very full and very information packed tour of the Pabst mansion. The walk to the mansion was mostly up Wisconsin Ave which apparently used to be ‘the’ street for mansions and high wealth families.  The scene is a little different now but Marquette University makes up a good number of the blocks we needed to get through and while it isn’t Northwestern, it was still leafy and nice to walk around.

After the tour we had almost 4 hours to kill until we went to the…. Other tour… This time of an actual brewery, Lakefront brewery.  After a very ghetto lunch at Taco Bell and a failed attempt to go to the Marquette’s Art Museum (the Haggerty is closed this week for the holiday?), we walked though some truly awful areas to get to the RiverWalk district.  The urban decay we walked through was seriously only a half step better than Detroit or Saint Louis.  Sidewalks with trees growing out them, half demolished roads that are supposedly being rebuilt but look abandoned, no businesses and plenty of really sketchy housing. Even the park we walked through (King Park) was in sorry shape.  After scrambling through almost 2 miles of awful, we were relieved to get to a more touristy section of town where we found a nice grocery food store with a seating area where we could buy and eat some snacks and have a break from being in the hot sun and on our feet.

The brewery tour was great.  Our tour guide was very enthusiastic and had good comedic instincts.  They  give you 4 (!) beer tokens with each tour ticket and they actually tell you that you SHOULD have a full beer with you while you go on the tour.  Very festive.  

After the tour we had a light dinner at the brewery’s pub.  Cheese curds and a. BBQ chicken salad shared made for a nice pre-train meal.  Thankfully, we were able to cross the river (which, confusingly is what Lakefront brewing overlooks) on a very bizarre pedestrian bridge which has been retrofitted to the bottom of a very old road bridge.  After that it was barely half a mile to get to the nearly useless Milwaukee Streetcar which somehow worked pretty well for our needs despite being a whopping 2.1 miles end to end.

In basic terms we absolutely enjoyed the attractions we selected and attended in Milwaukee.  The people we went on the tours with and those employed in providing the tours were all really likable fun polite people.  Unfortunately, the random local people we came into contact with weren’t as endearing.  Basically every time we tried to cross the street on a marked but not controlled crosswalk, cars hurtled at us with no intent to yield to us.  This happened over and over since we walked almost 9 miles through a lot of different areas.  The Taco Bell had the most ridiculously ghetto people in it with loud cell phone conversations that sounded right out of a Saturday Night skit.  About 25% of the cards in Milwaukee look like salvage titles that shouldn’t be on the road.  I just see so many obvious problems and such a lack of prosperity and ambition in much of Milwaukee. Chicago has a ton of problems too but it’s a gigantic city with a lot of very nice areas and a huge amount of cultural capital.  Milwaukee shows some signs of trying (their transit provided better real time arrival info for example than Chicago’s) but it just has a very long ways to go before it will be on very many people’s tourism to-do list.

I’m on the train headed back to Chicago now.  All I can say is that after 22600 steps of walking today, we’re taking a freaking taxi back to the hotel when we get back to Union station.  I have to get up 5 am (!) to prepare some IT stuff in Rochester for a planned 4th of July power outage.  The fun never ends.