Looking for a latte got me into quite an exploration before we left this morning. I got casual directions from a couple of people saying there was a coffee store in a building just down the street, not mentioning that it was located in the skyway shopping center. This required that I go up an elevator and cross a bridge to a place called Baker Center, which is shopping center in the form of a maze. By asking several people for directions, I finally procured a latte and got myself out of there, but I came out through a different building than the one I had entered. I was a little disoriented, but a doorman set me in the right direction. I took movies of the whole process and the striking cluster of skyscrapers I was passing, but no still shots.
The I-94 corridor that connects Minneapolis to Milwaukee and Chicago is one of the most heavily trafficked highways we have ever traveled. The pace was slowed several times by long highway projects and one serious accident, that we did not see. The situation was aggravated by two types of bad driving. Tail-gating is pretty commonplace but we frequently saw long lines of cars traveling at 70 mph with hardly three or four inches between them. Often what was hanging them up was a car in the fast lane going at the same speed as the semi in the slow lane, seemingly just out of stubbornness. This just drove the other drivers crazy, and we frequently followed, at a respectful distance, a frenzy of cars jockeying for advantage, while the slow car held its position defiantly. The one advantage of this intense but tedious exercise was the slow speed improved gas mileage: the display showed as much as 31 mpg at times.
The sky was gray most of the way. The road was through farm country. The land in Wisconsin is hillier and more heavily wooded, so the corn fields were smaller most of the way, though we did see some vast fields. Instead of groups of huge silver grain elevators like they use out west, in Wisconsin, each farm has it own silo, a silver tower with a round top, sitting near a red barn; sometimes there is a farm-house tucked amidst the trees. It is all a long way from the highway, un-really bucolic compared to the competitive grind we were caught in.
When we got to Milwaukee, we found out that traffic was especially heavy on a Friday night because the State Fair was open had some big music act was making an appearance.
We got in to our Ramada Inn around 7 p.m. There was a row of shiny Harley-Davidson motorcycles in front and a bunch of bulky, leathery people wearing do-rags were fussing about them. We discovered that the Harley-Davidson Museum is nearby.
We worked out a perfunctory meal at the hotel restaurant, and I called it a night, but Dan took a short exploratory walk to the nearby Hilton, a huge brick building that excites curiosity.
