Heeeeeey...get outta my town.

I took my in-laws on a Sunday stroll along Milwaukee's waterfront to visit the bronzed Fonz. Sara and Zoe and I played a pivotal role in the dedication of this statue, by way of showing up for the dedication. That was a year and a half ago, and Henry Winkler's brazen likeness has yet to grow to the size we were all expecting it to be. Is anyone else a little creeped out by the bronze blue jeans? Sara and I are yet to regret the hours waiting in line to meet the entire cast of Happy Days on that afternoon when the Fonz statue was unsheathed. That was truly the most magical of all Milwaukee moments.

This final walk along the river was sorta strange for us. It was early evening and downtown Milwaukee was completely dead. Not a soul was promenading with us along the banks, as they usually do. Comparing this rural experience with those we had in Chicago twice that same week, was like comparing an evening with Aunt Thelma's Bunco club to the 1 a.m. mosh pit at Death Metal Jam 2010. It seems the candle had reached the end of its wick for our time in Milwaukee and we left downtown for the last time in sort of a quiet state. It wasn't like we needed any sign whatsoever that leaving Milwaukee was the right choice for us, but it really felt like the city had pressed the pause button on us, and the next step was to walk out of the scene while the Fonz gave us the thumbs up. During those first few years in the area, going downtown was a thrill, but this time it was kind of a bummer, which certainly made it easier to head westward for hundreds of miles on I-90. But before we could leave town, we had another day-full of shoving possessions into boxes and cheering for the Brewers.

May I Be Crowned Mormon King of Beers?

OK, so I'm currently going for the World Record for most consecutive beer-related blog posts by a Mormon. I think this posting, which features pictures taken at the Wisconsin State Fair of 2009, will definitely put me in the running. I've always wondered if the border guards at the Wisconsin state line had a severe inner struggle over whether or not to allow the Budweiser Clydesdales truck into the state. On one hand Budweiser is the evil competing beer comapny from St. Louis, but on the other hand the truck was full of gigantic livestock, which would be the epitome of agricultural eye candy for the fair-going Wisconsin ruralite. In the end the clydesdales were allowed in, and we were all pretty glad because seeing one of those horses is a life changing event. They are incredible, and even moreso for short people like myself, my daughter, and my dear wife and mother-in-law. It was especially great for Randy and Diane because Diane is a life-long horse fan, and Randy was thrilled that they had been hauled in on a personalized semi truck. I thought it was a little ironic that these giant work animals, known world over for hauling huge barrels of beer in fancy carts, didn't have to walk a single mile to get here. I bet that'll come up at the bar later as the Clydsdales share pints of MGD with the Wisconsin horses. Wisconsin horses are very prideful, and are teaming with state pride...they're actually big pompous jerks. I'd say this all stems from the state's claim of being America's Dairyland, which really gets into the heads of the livestock. Don't even get me started about the cows.

Polka Party at the Lakefront

These are Donny and Amanda, two of our bestest friends from Milwaukee...not that they're actually from Milwaukee, but we met there. This picture was taken at The Lakefront Brewery as we enjoyed one last Friday Night Fish Fry before we headed out of town. That was a way fun night as we wished good bye to these two, and a few of our other friends from work and church. The Lakefront has some really good root beer too, as a matter of fact, this was the RB that Zoe once advertised on behalf of the Lakefront Brewery in The Onion. I think I posted about that a year or so ago.

We like the Lakefront Brewery because they have a gigantic hall wherein on Fridays a live polka band accompanies the fried fish fiesta. Not only that, but they only charge like 4 bucks for the tour and you get a really big glass with admission. Its on the Lakefront tour that a pretty young thing (PYT) among the tourists is officially designated as that evening's Bung Queen, a title sought after by every Milwaukee woman worth her suds. For those of you who need to brush up on their beer vocabulary, the hole in a beer keg is known as the bung hole. I ain't kiddin'. We weren't able to take a whole lot of pictures that night at the Lakefront because we were having waaaaay too much fun talking to our little frineds, and eating fish parts. Also, Zoe is a big polka fan, and demanded a lot of dancing time up by the stage. We really miss Donny and Amanda a lot, good friends like that are a rare thing. We were so blessed to have them out there with us.

Griffins, Glasses and Good Times

This vicious griffin is the mythological spokes creature for Sprecher Brewery. Touring this brewery became a favorite past time of ours because at the end we actually got to sample their wares. Sprecher Brewery is far more famous for their soda than they are for their beer, especially the Root Beer, which is on tap and generously distributed at the end of the tour. Not to mention this absolutely fabulous soda called Orange Dream, which is good enough to bathe in if it weren't so sticky. I can't even tell you how much I love that stuff.

Here's Sara in front of some sort of beer cart. So are there any other cities out there in the world that have more than a few breweries open for public tours? I submit that there are not. Even though Milwaukee didn't end up being our forever city, I gotta raise a glass to the town for knowing how to have a great time...at least during the warm months of the year. Milwaukee is one of those American cities that most of the country couldn't point out on a map, unless they happened to live within a 200 mile radius. There aren't a huge amount of people there, and the downtown really isn't something many postcard companies are publishing pictures of. Yet over the summer there is always something going on there and people come from all over the world to participate in the local goings on. I'm really proud of Sara and I for getting out and having a great time in the city while we were there, and Sprecher Brewery was a great locale to mix up a great big vat of entertainment. I love my little Sara so much for always being willing and excited to get out there and see our world with me.
And here's Zoe atop a barrell of beer. This is in the little sitting room the brewery tourists are corraled into at the end of the tour to drink stuff. All the adults get four beers each, while the kids and Mormons get all the soda they can pour into their stomachs. These beverages are served in a great little glass you get to take home with you for later use in orange juice consumption. Brewery touring has instilled inside of me a passion for collecting drinking glasses every where I can get 'em. Sara used to not be such a big fan of souvenir shopping with me because if I can't see a use for the item, I ain't buying it. But you'd be surprised how many gift shops sell hurricane glasses for a pretty good price. Now when I'm sitting at home in a deep and dark December, eating my lemon chicken, I can stare at my glass o' water and wish I were vacationing. It's awesome.

The McOlympics

Now here's the dilemma I'm having about the Olympics right now. I'm experiencing an Olympic Overdose. I think Olympic coverage is the only show that you actually feel morally guilty for not watching. I mean it only happens once every two years, so missing it is like skipping the moon landing. I find myself watching people skiing until midnight thanks to DVR. We're halfway through the Games and I think I've seen enough, but what if I miss something fantastic? My other problem is I feel like such a loser watching those athletes. I'm sitting there on my couch for three hours a night eating ice cream and wearing sweat pants while these beautiful people, who look pretty awesome in spandex, go flying down a mountain at like 80 miles per hour. The worst of it is those few seconds a night where my brain actually says, "Pffff, I could totally do that." I thought the McDonalds in Vancouver, all bedecked as a shrine to physical strength and endurance, is a great symbol of my current thoughts. If only there were a gold medal for Dorito consumption. I'd be the pudgy prince of the podium.

As Zoe was running across the bridge from the parking lot she came across this sign painted on the ground. We are all still confused about what it means. I think we finally decided that the bridge only allows bike riders if they stand atop their bikes. This seems very unsafe to me, but perhaps it was this extreme spirit that landed the Olympics in Vancouver.

Vancouver 2010 minus one week

Given the Olympic Fever that has clutched the nation and the frozen portions of the world, I figured I should take a little pause in the story of our summer and post some Olympics pictures. We heard the Olympic call (probably written by John Williams) from 120 kilometers north of us starting several weeks before the games began. Farbeit for any travel fan to not visit the site of this international event when it is so close, so we loaded up the car and went international. We weren't foolish enough to go up there during the actual games, instead we scoped the place out the weekend before. Vancouver is a plenty nice place, it's kinda quaint like a European city. Compared to Seattle though, Vancouver is the Freshman who keeps trying to eat his Cowboy Delight at the same cafeteria table as his Senior brother and the LaCrosse team. Its not like we hated the place, but it just wasn't as inviting as the metropolitan areas we've fallen in love with in the recent past. I think the strangest thing about Vancouver is that all the "tall" buildings look exactly alike. I think the problem is that no construction workers can get any unique materials into downtown because there are a total of zero freeways within a 30 kilometer radius of the city center.

I was outta the country during the Salt Lake Olympic Games, but Sara said it was much better organized and the people were way nicer...and there was actual snow. Here's an example of what I mean. After we finally found a parking space (it literally took an hour and a half), and walked across this really cool, really long bridge, we found ourselves just outside the BC Place Stadium. We weren't completely sure if this was where the Opening Ceremonies were going to be because there's a similar building close by. We asked a group of construction workers, a crossing guard and a police officer (the non-royal, non-mounted variety) and each of them said they hadn't the foggiest idea if that was where the opening ceremonies were going to be. Hello? How could you work in front of that building and not know? Weird. Sara tells me that if we had asked this same question to a Salt Laker the week before the 2002 Olympics we would have been given brochures and a guided tour in Swahili if we stopped the right person. Utahns know how to throw a party!

It's Miller Time!

I apologize for the cliche title on the post, but how could I resist? As a last minute cultural binge we spent our last week in Milwaukee touring three of the local breweries. My favourite part of touring the breweries are the endless jokes about how much the tour-goers like their beer. Being non beer drinkers we often find these jokes super corny, but we're sure that they cause just as much knee slapping among the drunk as those horrible pulpit jokes do among the Mormons. To each their own, you know. The Miller Brewery is a gigantic operation which actually ships out 500,000 cases of beer daily. The number may not look like a lot on paper, but when they show you the room containing the day's half a million cases of beer you can't help but wonder where in the world all that is going. The answer is Chicago. Yep, 40% goes to Milwaukee's big sister to the south.

Yeah, I'm a huge fan of factory tours. Something about seeing all the engineering and planning that is required just to make one single product. What I like the most about watching beer getting made is that not only do you get to see the gigantic machines that get the job done, but there's so much chemistry and history behind the product as well. That picture there is of Zoe and I in one of the beer sampling buildings along the tour. I asked one of the beer ladies if the stained glass window was made of old beer bottles, but she said no. I think she's full of it, because that's got to be a bunch of melted down bottles. I love the drunken friar motif.

Frederick Miller started up his brewery clear back in 1855, and somewhere along the way he and his creamed cronies dug a gigantic cave in the ground and packed it full of beer barrells and huge chunks of ice they hauled in from Lake Michigan. This enabled them to make huge quantities of beer and store it for a super long time so that it could be sold months later. This is the sort of thing that makes me so proud of man-kind. People are able to accomplish such a gigantic endeavor just to make a beverage available to the masses. I think it's pretty cool. Sara points out that the beer cave isn't symmetrical...they must have been sampling their wares while drawing up the blue prints.

Night at the Cloud Gate

Finally, its the last posting in Chicago! Now we can move the blog back up north to Milwaukee to say our last Auf Wiedersehens to the locals. Might this have been our last visit to our fair Chicago? Not if Sara has anything to do with it. Like I've mentioned before, if you're in the area, you are obligated by international tourist law to take at least 25 pictures of your distorted reflection in the Cloud Gate. I thought these night shots were worth posting. Yeah, we stuck around until pretty late, it is quite rare that you see the giant bean not surrounded by people. Good bye Chicago!

One Last Round in the Crown

We made the horrible mistake of letting Zoe see the barefoot children playing in The Crown Fountain. Soon thereafter she became a barefoot child playing in the fountain. I was less willing to go naked-footed because I've heard rumours that there may be harmful microbes in many of the fountains of gigantic metropolitan areas. As you can tell by the sunlight levels in these two pictures, Zoe and I spent a lot of time splashing about in the one inch of water. Every ten minutes or so the Chicago resident pictured on the gigantic walls would spit water at us and we'd get as close as we could to the stream without touching our fellow wet members of the public (also covered in microbes). It took a small miracle to get Zoe outta the fountain and into the car, especially after her grandpa got done museum enjoying and started fountain walking with us. Needless to say, it was a sobby and soggy ride home.

Thursday in the Museum without Zoe

Here's Sara with a painting done by our friend Georges. This painting has always been one of our favorites because we spent the summer living in Levallois - Perret, France, which is the city wherein lies the actual Isle of La Grande Jatte. We took a few walks on the island, and would you believe that the place is full of domesticated honey bees? Yep, bees. Nothing like a jaunt on the Jatte.

We sent Zoe off to paint the town with her grandparents while my wife and I took a Sara-guided tour of The Art Institute of Chicago's brand new modern art wing. When we went through the museum a year ago all the modern stuff was hidden away in a shed somewhere while the new wing was being built, so it was like we were going through a whole different museum this go around. Of course we had to go into the depths of the museum and see our favorite less-Modern paintings while we were there - a task much easierly done sans Zoe. I think it's pretty cool that the new addition includes a back entrance which is accessed by a super long ramp that goes all the way to the middle of Millennium Park. We did miss out on seeing the lions at the front door though.

The views of Millennium Park from inside the new wing of the museum were spectacular. We were looking out at the amphitheatre from the museum when we noticed Zoe clear out there with her grandparents. The picture at the left is the zoomed-in version of the one above...see the red square I drew directly below the amphitheatre up there? Boy was it nice to actually be Zoe-less in a museum for a change. Randy and Diane took their museum shift while we entertained the Zoe later on. Good grief, we tackled Chicago with a fury that day!

Us with Statues of Stuff

Yeah, so I'm getting really tired of typing about Chicago, but I've still got about 10 cool pictures that I wanted to put on the blog, so its time for less yakety yak and more picture postin'. Here's Randy next to the gigantic facsimile of American Gothic by the river. How could you not take a picture?

Zoe and I came across this red Tyrannosaur down by Crown Fountain. The first animal sound Zoe ever learned was that of a dinosaur, so we've always been drawn to them. I can still remember the beginning of each science class as a third grader hoping and praying that this would be the day we finally began learning about dinosaurs. I don't remember if we ever did. There should be an entire semester of dinosaurology in elementary schools just for boys. Meanwhile, the girls can go to their own class and learn about like princesses or high heels or something. There were no giant pumps in Chicago so Zoe and I stuck with the Trannosaurus. Rarrrr!

This is the Cloud Gate in Millennium Park. She's purty. We've taken loads of pictures of this piece of public art, and they all seem so different. This one merited blog postage because of how awesome the sun hits the buildings in the background.

Chicago's history - for us anyway

This is Diane next to a bunch of old looking buildings in Chicago. Way out there behind her in the distance is the Wrigley Building, which was built clear back in the 1920s. It was the first sky scraper North of the Chicago River, and the city's first air conditioned office building. I just think it's a pretty neat chunk of rocks, that's all. This city has been alive and running for a century now and it is a thrill to be part of it. Every time I walk down the streets I'm a part of that same unbridled force that's been around since the Capone days...without all the terror. I think the only other city that I've really felt that way is New York. Just by walking down those streets you've been injected with success, its impossible to fail if you can fit in with the hustle bustle of a megalopolis. That's saying a lot for a guy from Cache Valley!


This is Sara next to a bunch of new looking buildings in Chicago. On this day in Chicago we parked right next to the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, as seen behind the Sara. We sorta stuck around in that area for most of the day, and occasionaly walked on down Michigan Avenue to the Trump Tower and back. There's so much to do in that small area that we could have stayed for several days, and probably would have, if Sara had her way. That great big building with the pointy hat marks the spot where we eat pizza. A lot of pizza. Just beyond the Jay Pritzker pavilion is the giant silver bean featured in so many blogs of yesteryear.

My Good Byes to Chi's Pies

Might this have been the last time we ever eat Chicago style pizza at Giordano's? Not if I have any control over my own destiny. Over the summer we went and saw a movie at The District, and we came across a restraunt called "Sweet Home Chicago" right next to the theatre. I went in and talked to the owner, and he claimed to make pizza which is the spitting image of the stuffed version we fell in love with while in Chicago. You know, they really shouldn't use the word "spit" when describing their menu items. We never got around to testing the restraunt owner's claim while in the Salt Lake area, but Randy and Diane have had a share of the fare there, and say these proxy pies could potentially pacify our pizza poorness. I'd have to eat it to believe it though. Fact is, if I'm not waddling outta that restraunt so full that I'm about to puke up liquid heaven, than I'm never going back.

Really though, come on, they certainly could have come up with a more creative name than "Sweet Home Chicago". I've been thinking about this more than I probably should, and I came up with a better one - Chi Pie. Locals often call Chicago "Chi Town" (at least the ones in the movies do), with "Chi" pronounced like "shy". The assonance in the pronunciation would be required for admittance, this way we could keep out the non-Chicago riff raff. We could even take it further and just spell the name using the two Greek letters Chi and Pi...you math nerds know the ones I'm talking about...the big fancy 'X' from the Chi distribution, and the pi that math posers try to work into conversations to make themselves feel smart. That is, if the greek letter chi weren't pronounced like "kai". But I digress. I like pizza, and if I weren't such a wuss I'd seriously consider owning my own pizza joint, just so I could say I own my own pizza joint.

And speaking of Zoe next to a giant beer sign, here's a funny story. Sara and Zoe and my dad and I took a trip to St. George over the summer to visit relatives and recreate. Yes, we recreate by visiting cemeteries and climbing on rocks, but it was certainly a change in scenery. Anyhow, dad took us to dinner one night and Zoe requested Pepsi. Now before you call Child Services, be it known that Zoe refers to all bubbly beverages as Pepsi. Dad thought he'd help Zoe to ask for more child friendly beverages, so while Sara and I were away from the table he taught her to say "Root Beer". Dad's plan backfired as Zoe now refers to soda as "beer". Thanks Dad. I guess since she was born in Wisconsin, this is not an unexpected addition to her toddler vernacular.