Milwaukee

Israel and I recently took a trip to Milwaukee to see Animal Collective (a band we both really like). We left Monday and stayed the night with my grandparents in Hinsdale, Illinois, which is where I grew up. With two drivers the trip was super easy and really fun.
This is the world's largest truckstop, on I80 in Iowa. We stopped there and I tried on moccosins while Israel checked out the XXL t-shirts with pictures of howling wolves and Indian chiefs. This place is seriously huge. It even has a dentist and a movie theater inside. I do wish I'd bought the moccosins though.

Once we got to Hinsdale, we had supper with my grandparents and chatted a while. Then we took a walk around the neighborhood and stared at all the ginormous houses. We found the catwalk and got the trucks to honk at us as they passed under on the highway, just like when I was little.

We took it easy again on our drive from Chicago to Milwaukee Tuesday morning. Israel has a friend named Mar from Arkansas so we stopped at Mars Cheese Castle in his honor. Mar is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet and befriended me when I've visited Arkansas. Mars Cheese Castle wound up to be a fun little tourist trap with good local things to buy. We got a 12-pack sampler of New Glarus beer. I wish we'd bought more, because it wound up being amazing microbrewed beer, bottle conditioned and just really tasty. We also bought postcards and maple syrup, because Israel had never had any before!

Once we got to Milwaukee, we found the venue and parked the car nearby. We walked the rest of the day, and it was beautiful out. We found an uppity indoor marketplace to walk through, and even stopped at a Borders bookstore and read for a while--very peaceful.

For lunch in Milwaukee, we ate at Water Street Brewery. It was more of a restaurant/brewpub. We got their sampler of beers, which came with nine little glasses: six of their regular beers and three seasonals.
Here is Israel sampling what looks like maybe their black lager. We also had a pizza, which we didn't get a picture of, with tomato and basil and garlic.

We weren't overly impressed with the beers. It may look like a lot, and a lot of variety, but really they were just all wheat beers and lagers. Light and boring, even for a warm summery day. I actually kind of liked this raspberry wheat beer though.

After lunch, we walked a few blocks to The Harp Irish Pub, which I'd found online the night before. The bartender was really nice and chatted with us a lot and told us all about where we should go next. He wound up advising us to walk down to the Lakefront Brewery Tour, which we did, and I'll post about some other time.

Israel got a Guiness 250, the 250th anniversary edition of Guinness. Unfortunately, it's made entirely for Americans--they're not even selling it in Ireland. It's much more like a black lager than a stout. Bleh. I got a hard apple cider on ice. I'd never had one before and it was super tasty!

We walked a lot around downtown Milwaukee. These ladybugs crawling up a building were always the sign that we were getting close to the car.

Here we are waiting in line to get into Animal Collective! We only showed up a couple of hours early, but we were really close to the front of the line.

Because we got in line early we got wristbands to let us into the pit. So we were pretty close to the front. At the beginning, and during the opening band, I was feeling really hot and claustrophobic so I sat in the front rows of seats. But I managed to shove my way back up to Israel for Animal Collective, and it was soooooo gooood.

We could actually see a lot better than it looks from this picture. They were projecting different and cool images up onto that white ball overhead, and the background, which just looks blue in the picture, was actually the album art from "Merriweather Post Pavilion," their newest album.

After the show we were exhausted but we drove back to Chicago and went straight to sleep. The next day we slept in a little and then headed back to Lincoln, but we made stops along the way. I'll post later about our stop at Starved Rock!