A New View of Milwaukee

Another whirlwind weekend.  We started off on Friday in Madison meeting with some of the renovation team to begin making some of the selections needed for our condo redesign.  We managed to get most of the kitchen designed in terms of what cabinets are going where, but now we need to figure out the fun details of what countertop and tile floor to install.  Since we are both such great color mavens, that is sure to be easy - NOT.  We have found that we tend to gravitate to brown cabinet colors with green colors in our counters and tiles.  No idea why those colors speak to us - but most of our selections seemed to be moving in that direction.  And just to make our color choices even more complex we found out late Friday night that we can change the color of our wood floors - oh fun, since that now means another color we have to select.

We came home late Friday night so that we could be up bright and early for a bike ride out to the State Fair grounds for another visit to the Wisconsin State Fair.  We enjoyed a beautiful, sunny day and started off with a fresh Danish kringle for breakfast.  Then it was time for Jo to get her annual dose of cows with the obligatory petting of a few of them (being a city boy, I find cows a bit scary and very smelly - why would anyone want to actually pet one is beyond me, but it seems to touch some deep peaceful part in Jo).  We spent some time watching the cow judging trying to understand the subtle rules that makes one cow better looking than another - something to do with the size of their haunches (or loins, or some other cow part) along with how straight are their spines.  Not sure what school gets you an degree in cow judging but since you spend a lot of time around the wrong end of the cow lifting their tails, I'm very sure it is not in my future.  

Since we biked to the fair we felt virtuous enough to enjoy some deep fried, bacon wrapped tater tots.  They were really, really good (but then what deep fried thing isn't tasty) and not all that large so we we didn't fall too far off our diets (we saved that for later in the day, see below).  We spent the rest of our fair time checking out some of the other animals (almost got run over by a pig for the second time at the fair), the 4-H projects, and the expo hall before heading back home.

Later on Saturday, John and Linda came up to Milwaukee with their boat.  John had always wanted to cruise the Milwaukee river and this was finally the time.  We launched out of McKinley marina which is quite close by and cruised around town enjoying the sites from a completely different view.  We did go outside the breakwater so we can officially say we were on Lake Michigan proper and went up both the Milwaukee and Kinnickinnic rivers.  Lots of other boaters were enjoying the nice weather along with us including quite a few kayakers.  After boating we tucked into a pasta dinner (you know boating burns a lot of calories - even if it is a motor boat) followed up with a visit to Kopps for frozen custard.  There isn't too many times that John is in Milwaukee with out finding him at a Kopps.  Of course, it isn't exactly like he had to twist our arms to get us to go.

Sunday we headed back out on the river picking up John's friend from grade school, Chris, and his wife, Sandy.  We cruised the river some more enjoying the solitude, since it wasn't anywhere near as crowded, before boating to Lake Front Brewery for lunch.  After that, it was time to cruise home and pack up the boat for their trip back to Lake Geneva.