I am on day nine of a ten-day stretch in Milwaukee. I don’t know how this happened, how I managed to schedule ten days here, but as a rule of thumb, ten days anywhere is too long. It’s also a problem here, because I always get sick, and the trip was long enough that I was able to catch a cold, get completely over it, and then catch another cold.
This trip, we’re staying at the Saint Kate hotel, which just opened this year. It is an “art hotel” and has various galleries and exhibits throughout the hotel. Very weird to be wandering down to find a cash machine and see a Damien Hirst print on the wall. So everything is new, the HVAC system is modern and didn’t give me an upper respiratory infection (like it did in Reno last month) and the WiFi works. Also the rates were absurdly cheap, either because they are new and underbooked, or they do mostly business travel and this is a dead week. Either way, it was half the price of the Iron Horse, our usual place, and much nicer.
This is the type of hotel that tries to be “hip” by putting a ukulele and a record player in every room. The uke was exactly what you’d expect if someone needed to buy 200 instruments just to say they had them, and I don’t think it had ever been tuned. We have one of those Crosley record players you get for fifty bucks at Target (or $100 for the same exact thing at Urban Outfitters) and it looks like they bought a giant battle-worn record collection at a garage sale and dumped a half-dozen albums in each room. I fired up an old Canned Heat record for kicks, and it was fun, but convinced me that vinyl is not an upcoming obsession.
Mostly did all the usual family stuff. Then yesterday I met up with John Sheppard for his birthday and went to the Brat Stop in Kenosha. We they drove to the Regency mall in Racine to walk around. I immediately got busted for taking pictures by an overzealous mall cop, but I posted my few pictures over at Instagram.
The mall is an interesting one: just under a million square feet, with former anchors of Sears, JC Penney, and the Boston Store, all of which are now dead. All but maybe two dozen of the stores inside have closed, so a recent “remodel” covered the cool-looking vaporwave tile floors with institutional carpet, and boarded over the vacant stores, with various “history of Racine” photos on the walls. I did a short dive on the place yesterday, and it looks like it’s getting redeveloped, probably leveled and replaced with a strip mall, although there’s already a Walmart and some semi-populated strip malls across the street, so who knows.
Also went to Mar’s Cheese Castle yesterday. Turns out they’ve nearly doubled the size of the roadside tourist stop. I originally went there in 2006 when it wasn’t much bigger than the average highway service station. They built a new building in 2011 when road construction forced a move, but made it look like an actual castle, with turrets and walls and everything. The place is now immense, almost overwhelming, with a giant restaurant, endless cases of beer, and of course a large stockpile of cheese and meats.
So I’ve been way off plan with diet, obviously. I do have a great gym here, and have been going every morning. Walking outside has been problematic, because it’s either freezing, raining, or both. At least it isn’t bone-cold freezing like it was a few years ago.
No writing at all lately. Deep in the post-partum depression of the last book, which of course you should buy (https://amzn.to/2svrSV4) but I don’t even want to talk about, and I have no idea what’s next.
No other mall visits, and honestly, I think 2020 is going to be a really bad year for retail in general and I should do all of my walking in the forest instead of following the depressing nostalgia trail and doing indoor laps.
One more day to kill, then I fly home and have a few more days to do all the dumb end-of-year summary posts.
Leave a Reply