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dougsmith51

Wisconsin

Updated: Jul 21, 2023


After finishing our tour of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, we moved to the other side of Lake Michigan for some exploration of Wisconsin. Driving through the Chicago area is never fun, but at least we were on interstates. We settled in for the Independence Day holiday in Racine, Wisconsin, a lovely town on the Lake, south of Milwaukee.


Racine is the headquarters for the S.C. Johnson company, makers of Johnson's Wax, Pledge, Windex, Drano, Off, Ziploc, and other consumer brands. It's a family-owned company now in its fifth generation (it is very rare for a family-owned business to last through that many generations, especially one where family members actively run the business). In 1936, S.C. Johnson hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design their headquarters buildings. We signed up to take a tour, and were taken through the science research tower, and also the administration building. Each had classic Frank Lloyd Wright elements, even including some outdoor sculptures, and deliberate touches in the canopies connecting the buildings.

The administration building is open and airy. The roof is held up by pylons that resemble trees and lily pads (we were not allowed to take photos inside, so the photo below is a stock one). Ever the stickler for detail, Wright designed the furniture as well. The building was used up to the beginning of the COVID pandemic - it will be maintained as a historic structure by the Johnson company.

The tour visitor center has incorporated S.C. Johnson's pavilion from the 1964 New York Worlds Fair. We remembered visiting it as kids.

After our S.C. Johnson tours, we drove to visit the small but charming Racine Zoo, which was about to celebrate its 100th anniversary.


The next day, we drove north into Milwaukee. an easy drive since it was a Sunday. We spent several hours at the Harley-Davidson Museum (the company is based in Milwaukee). We are not motorcycle people, but the museum was fascinating, telling the story both of the evolution of motorcycles and the company. H-D has been the only American manufacturer of motorcycles since the 1970s, and has had a couple near-death experiences but is now going strong.

Early Harleys were essentially bicycles with a motor added and a leather belt to help drive the rear wheel - they still had pedals like a bike.

The museum traced their evolution up to the present day. We were surprised at the variety of models offered. There was even a section of the museum dedicated to custom bikes made by chop shops.

We could also see the evolution of motorcycle engines from the beginning to the present day.


As part of the museum visit, we also saw the Harley-Davidson vault (archives), where they have just about every model built by the company since its founding.


After our museum visit, we took a two-hour cruise along the Milwaukee River, through downtown, and ultimately out into Lake Michigan.


We went through many, many drawbridges (it must not be fun to drive through that section of Milwaukee). Coming back into the river from the Lake, we were behind a large tugboat-driven barge bringing materials to the port.


The next day we drove to Grant Park in South Milwaukee and hiked a beautiful trail through forest and along cliffs overlooking Lake Michigan.



On July 4th, we drove to Racine's downtown for the Independence Day parade. Besides the usual firetrucks, politicians, and high school bands, the parade featured the local HOGs (Harley Owners Group), farm machinery, cement mixers, and "living statues"! The parade route was about 2.5 miles long, so some of the marchers looked like they were losing steam by the time they reached us near the end of the parade route.

FUN FACT: The shortest Independence Day parade we've seen was in 2021 in Haines, Alaska. Downtown is three blocks long, so the marchers went down the whole parade route, then turned around and came all the way back so the parade wouldn't be over so quickly. Oh... they also had a UFO retrieval van - there was not one of in the Racine parade.


We returned to Racine's North Beach in the evening to watch the fireworks being sent up over Lake Michigan.



It was time to move on again, and we headed inland and northwest to the Wisconsin Dells. On the way, we stopped for a tour of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's home and architectural school. Taliesin means "shining brow" in Welsh (Wright had Welsh ancrestors), and the home projects out of the brow of one of the hillsides in the 2700 acres of the estate.

Much of the rolling land is still farmed today.

We first toured the school, opened by Wright as an additional money maker during the Depression and active as a school until about five years ago when the Wisconsin students were sent down to merge with the students at Taliesin West outside of Phoenix. Wright's philosophy was to have students learn by doing, and so much of the building was designed and constructed by them. There is a nearby windmill, called the "Romeo and Juliet" windmill (because of its two towers and balcony)

The house had many elements of Wright's "prairie" architecture style, and was more spacious than other Wright houses we've visited. Since it was his home, not just one designed for someone else, there were many personal touches, artwork and large oriental prints on many of the walls, and numerous musical instruments.


Completing our journey, we settled in at a campground just south of the Wisconsin Dells. The next day, we drove about an hour south to Madison - state capital and home of the University of Wisconsin - to meet up with our friends Cathy and Josh who we'd met on our Antarctic cruise earlier this year. It was great to see them and talking about past and future travels. They are both firefighters, and will be able to retire with full pensions after just 25 years of service, so they have a lot of travel ahead of them.

On our way back to the RV, we stopped at Devil's Lake State Park, where an ice age lake sits between 500 foot tall cliffs. We hiked the three-plus miles around the lake, through fields of boulders on one shore, watching a heron looking for fish at the far end of the lake, and along train tracks on the opposite short. It's really a beautiful state park and one we'd recommend if you make it to Wisconsin.


The next day we traveled into the Wisconsin Dells, the water park capital of the world and containing many other family-friendly things to do. It reminded us of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, which sits just outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We opted for a more sedate activkty: a boat ride through the Upper Dells of the Wisconsin River.


The Dells section of the river is noted for sandstone cliffs on both banks, and it was beautiful cruising between them on a hot day.


The cruise had two stops. The first allowed us to walk through a narrow slot canyon.

At the second stop, we visited Stand Rock, which is separated from the cliffs by a six foot gap.

In the 1800s, landscape photographer H.H. Bennett photographed his son leaping onto Stand Rock.

Nowadays, they recreate the jump using an eager dog for each set of cruise passengers that come by.



Leaving the Dells the next day, we traveled to Door County, which occupies a peninsula jutting out into Lake Michigan northeast of Green Bay.

Door County, a peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan

We stayed at a KOA located in the town of Brussels. Much of Door County was settled by European immigrants in the mid-1800s, and there are other towns named Denmark, Luxemburg, and so forth.


Unbeknownst to us, we had booked our arrival right in the middle of the Belgian Days festival.

We drove to the festival on our first full day in the area, and watched the parade (which included a lot of farm equipment and kids' baseball teams).

We stopped at the historical society booth to learn about the settling of the area. We also had a slice of the local delicacy: Belgian Pie (very sweet with a thick crust).

Door County is divided into its own lower and upper peninsulas, demarcated by the town of Sturgeon Bay. That afternoon we drove into the upper peninsula and visited Cave Point County Park. We hiked a pretty trail alongside the Lake Michigan shoreline connecting to Whitefish Dunes State Park. Cave Point gets its name from some shallow caves worn into the limestone cliffs.

The next day, we drove down to Green Bay to visit the Green Bay Botanical Gardens, where many flowers and plants were in full bloom.



We were impressed that just about every plant, no matter how small, had an identification tag.

After finishing in the botanical gardens, we decided to drive by Lambeau Field, where the Green Bay Packers play. Green Bay is not a large city (population of only about 100,000), and there's not much of a downtown. The stadium sits in residential neighborhood surrounded by small three-bedroom ranch homes. It turns out that many early NFL teams started in small towns and cities, and most moved to larger cities and got new names. The Packers have stayed in Green Bay, and are the only NFL team owned by a community-based non-profit.


On our last full day in Door County, we decided to explore the whole upper peninsula.

The area is quite rural, with a few small resort towns, most of them on the Green Bay (the geographical feature, not the city) side rather than the Lake Michigan side. A local told us that many of the homes are actually summer residences owned by people from Chicago and Milwaukee, and that the winter population is only about 10% the size of the summer population. We drove for a stretch of 10-15 miles punctuated just by dirt driveways to homes on the bayshore which we could just glimpse through the trees.


Door County is famous for its cherries, which had just ripened on the trees during the past week or two. We stopped at a farmers market and bought some fresh cherries to snack on as we drove.

We spent some time at Peninsula State Park, visiting a lighhouse, hiking a shoreline trail full of tocks and roots, and driving up to bluffs overlooking Green Bay.

We also climbed Eagle Tower, which provided a panoramic view of the area and included a tree canopy walk back down to the road.

While driving back to our RV, we stopped in the town of Ephraim, where we got got the most humongous two scoop bowl of ice cream we'd had on our entire trip.


It was time to move on again, traveling to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. More about our U.P. adventures in our next blog post.


Interesting historical fact: We wondered why the U.P. is not part of Wisconsin (with which it shares 200+ miles of border) rather than Michigan (the U.P. shares 0 border with the Lower Peninsula). It turns out this goes back to a dispute between Ohio and Michigan when they were both territories and approaching statehood. Ohio really wanted the Toledo Peninsula to be part of Ohio rather than Michigan. Congress approved a political compromise, whereby Ohio would get Toledo and Michigan would get the U.P.







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