Grey mist and drizzle met me as I pulled apart the curtains the next morning, any remnant snow finally dribbled away. Having plotted a loose south-easterly diagonal return, I trailed the westerly edge of Lake Winnebago before pressing further south.
Around mid-morning I stopped at the town of West Bend. (It seemed to me from the map that the river bore East at this point, but who was I to quibble?) This place reminded me of an hour spent in Fort William, Scotland. It was based next to a river, there was a lingering grey mist, the size of the place was small and there was almost nobody else on the streets. However, there were no surrounding mountains here. The place was ghostly but part of what these trips are about: the missable in between places as well as the big, swaggering ones. I took a coffee and read my book in a small diner where I was served by a Hispanic waitress. She wrongfooted me with a “gracias” when I handed over the money. “Cheers” was my charmless reply.
Several wrong turns and U-turns alongside large fields finally put me on the freeway back south towards Milwaukee. Driving with only a loose sense of direction means you tend to make plenty of quick decisions. You beat yourself up for taking a wrong turn, before finding that you weren’t wrong in the first place and in trying to correct a perceived error you’d totally screwed yourself. Then you go momentarily mad and angry, which never helps anything. Darkness unavoidably invokes a greater sense of jeopardy, panic and uncertainty, as it did during my previous evening’s acquaintance with the suburbs of Oshkosh.
The freeways were simpler. I let myself be sucked into the heart of a misty downtown Milwaukee over the freeways, not a little smug that I was reading all the signs correctly here and everything was going smoothly. You just need to be cool and focused, I pompously applauded myself, entirely forgetting the numerous U-turns and frustrated wails while sitting stationary next to desolate fields the previous evening. The large freeways better signposted, more intuitive.
I parked at the lake-front art museum with little intention of going inside the museum. Has the internet killed museums? There’s a sense of stumble-upon discovery which perhaps isn’t as possible when browsing online, but it’s not like you can touch anything and the exhibits are often predictably samey. Narrow, inhospitable stone corridors led me up from the car park, offering a sense of the forbidden, and up towards the museum entrance. I walked past it, marvelling at an impressive white bridge structure which turned into a walkway above the road, and led into downtown.
With its clutch of tall tower buildings, Milwaukee had the sense of a scaled down Chicago, and was also bisected by a fat, Lake Michigan-fed river. Big but not that big. I paced round awhile, took pictures, took a coffee, then headed back to the car, wanting to give myself at least two hours to make it back to Chicago. And I needed to top up on gas in order to ensure I returned the vehicle with a full tank. Stress was simmering.
The ride back in was fraught, the density of the rush hour traffic immense. After avoiding the tolled routes by taking smaller roads, I headed back towards the freeway, laboriously programming the SatNav system with my final address. It delivered the route, but not before further stress and panic. The car was due for return at 5pm. At 4.40 I was still some way out of the city, and still needing to get gas.
I exited the slow, by now almost bumper-to-bumper freeway, which erased my route from the SatNav, found a gas station in a suburb and failed to figure out the prepay credit card system. I wanted to ask a customer on the other side of my pump but he seemed to be chatting, possibly flirting with the woman in the vehicle behind him. I finally secured his attention; he looked and shrugged. Ask inside. Thanks. I asked inside the kiosk and a guy swiped my card, before realising it wouldn’t work because the petrol nozzle wasn’t in its holster. I went to return the nozzle into the holster and the payment went through, allowing me to buy the ten bucks’ worth of gas. I felt stupid and panicked.
Having re-found the freeway, I painstakingly re-programmed my route: C-H-I-C-A – while weaving between traffic. Yes SatNav, it was the passenger at the controls, not the driver. As if. Once finally programmed (about four minutes which felt like an hour) I repetitively tapped its View button to reassure me I was heading in the right direction.
Gradually the city loomed up through the darkness around me, a gigantic, sparkling, throbbing, beautiful, terrifying urban monster. Its dazzling scale made me feel proud of humans, as if approaching a space station. Wow. Look what we’ve done!
Lulled by my reverie, I grew confident. SatNav lady seemed sure everything would work out, it’d all be ok. It was only 4.50. It might be ok. I hit downtown proper at about 4.57. As the crow flies it would’ve taken two minutes from there. As the traffic moved, jerked, honked and crept, it took about thirty.
“The tank full?” asked a young girl at the Hertz desk who I hadn’t encountered before. She didn’t mention I was half hour late. I said yes and she wished me a good night.
‘Stoked’ by my success, not dying or crashing or having too many people beep me, I paced off back down Michigan Avenue, ever-teeming with shoppers and tourists.
Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.
Showing posts with label Wisconsin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wisconsin. Show all posts
Monday, 10 January 2011
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Wisconsin Wander: Day 1
As on the previous day, when I’d visited the large hotel to check my reservation, the Hertz car rental desk was unmanned. A young black guy joined me to form a two person queue. He mentioned out loud, to himself but not really to himself that he really needed to move to a warmer climate when he graduated. I was happy enough to nibble at the conversation bait and he told me about his study in Chicago, a general degree which would allow him to teach. He ultimately wanted to build his own school for under-privileged kids in Central America and strongly believed in a hands-on method of teaching employing music and touch.
A harried Hertz man returned to the desk and with minimal fuss, printed out forms for me to sign and told me to go wait outside for the car. This was the quickest, least paperwork-intensive car hire I’d ever experienced. So much so that when the Hertz man’s colleague brought down a small red Toyota Yaris from the car park, I just got in. Then I realised I didn’t know what any of the main controls meant, never having driven an automatic vehicle before. I beckoned a parking attendant over for a quick overview. Drive, Reverse, Park – was apparently all I needed to know. Don’t worry about the rest. With that I pushed the stick into drive and took my foot off the brake, which itself seemed to roll the car forward, gently easing myself into downtown Chicago traffic.
It was fine, all fine, keep on the right, it was all going to be fine, just concentrate, keep on the right, head for the Lake, hug it and head up the one side, simple, easy, cool. I gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary.
I slowly grew into to the Yaris and understood that driving it was easy; boring in fact. Automatics neuter the driving experience; they do everything for you and give you less control, like holidaying with a tour guide. Not once did I go to depress an imaginary clutch, although I did flap my left hand into the door from time to time, flailing for an imaginary gear stick. I also kept approaching the vehicle from the wrong side, expecting the driver’s door to be where the passenger door was, which didn’t make me look too clever. On a freeway I was momentarily alarmed to be overtaken by someone casually reading a newspaper, before realising it was a passenger.
With the assurance of an appropriate section of map spread haphazardly out across my lap, I covered minor roads skirting Lake Michigan, up through suburbs with Scottish names, Highland and Glencoe – where I stopped for a coffee and to applaud myself that I wasn’t dead. This Glencoe wasn’t much like the Western Highland mountain range where I’d driven a couple of years ago. Like much of the drive over the two days, it was a flat and unremarkable landscape. The later plains of Wisconsin mimicked this and chided me, as if I’d landed in London and decided to take a trip round East Anglia.
Still it was experience and the towns were interesting, many with a makeshift retail park feel to them, quirky stores like the dogs’ hairdresser ‘Canine Coiffeurs.’ The welcome signs also amused with their exact population figure: CITY OF NEENAH, Population 56,723. (That one isn’t accurate). They made me want to add a few tally marks to the sign or run to the Police station screaming I’VE FOUND ANOTHER ONE!!
Priority at open crossroads without traffic lights also foxed me. It often seemed that nobody moved at all, so I did.
Next stop was a small park on a tip of Lake Michigan near the city of Kenosha. Thick snow still lay on the ground and the closest edge of the water speckled with mini icebergs, as had been the case all the way down in the city. When the tide swept in, lapping sounds twined with the clinkling of ice, like rippling shattered glass or a wind chime.
From here I found the highway and ignored numerous junctions to drill on through Milwaukee, an impressive cityscape not on a par with Chicago but still not inconsiderable, before eventually stopping again at the small Wisconsin town of Sheboygan Falls. This was a very small town, replete with a Simpsons-esque Moe’s Liquor Store, where I bought a bottle of bourbon. Moe wasn’t very chatty when I complimented him on his strong range of liquor, or he didn’t understand my accent. A middle-aged lady assistant in a neighbouring gas station where I took a leak and got a cup of tea was much perkier.
It was hit or miss whether people understood my accent or not. Earlier in the trip I had to say ‘beer’ to an American air stewardess three times. She looked at me like I was retarded. I don’t have any strong regional English accent and don’t know how else to pronounce the word.
Now the light was beginning to fade beautifully. It had been a clear, cold, blue-skied day despite constant radio warnings that cloud was heading in. The radio stations had offered a strong sense of the locals, particularly a warm, mumsy DJ improbably named Robin Rock. She kept thanking her listeners for “working with” her and spoke a lot about her teenage daughters and how they’d do backflips if they won the station’s big competition prize of a trip to Disneyworld.
This reminded me of the chatty old lady sitting one seat along from me on the short connecting flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. She’d been excited to tell me and the girl sitting next to me how she was going back there soon, this time to see ‘the adult things’ which the kids don’t like. Interest piqued, I had bitten my lower lip slightly and enquired further about what exactly ‘the adult things’ at Disneyworld were. Apparently reading descriptions in the galleries and things like that.
The radio songs didn’t range too widely: old classics to Americana, with edgier stations going for tracks with indulgent, rapidly boring guitar solos.
Fearing darkness, and the distance I had to cover the next day, I impulsively decided not to go as far as the next big city, Green Bay. Instead I took an A-road to chase the dipping golden sun across a wide expanse of plains towards Appleton, on the other side of Lake Winnebago. Although I missed out Appleton itself and found a couple of small, hospitable seeming towns with a pleasant buzz of life about them: first Menasha and then Neenah, where I stopped. Disappointingly no motels or any places of accommodation other than a Holiday Inn could be found. So, after a brief stroll I headed on. Growing faintly edgy about a final destination with the draping darkness, I flicked on an internal light in the car and studied the map to see Oshkosh was the next large looking town. There was bound to be something there.
By this point I was tired and not thinking straight. I spent about ten minutes finding the correct direction out of Neenah, then at least twenty more getting lost in the suburbs of Oshkosh, eventually finding its downtown area and only hotel. It was more than I had wanted to pay for a room but my will to look further had evaporated.
Later in the trip it was explained to me that the place-names had connections with the native Indian past and weren’t, as I had suspected, made up by drunken infants. You often forget about the historical significance of the Indians to these parts. Or at least I did. There’s a theory that the word “Chicago” has native Indian origins, while the overtones in Milwaukee are even more obvious.
An evening stroll up an icy, sludgy Oshkosh Main Street suggested more life than I’d imagined from my route into the downtown area: plenty of samey dark bars with neon signs advertising the same drinks. One dumping of snow seemed to have lingered for days across a vast global latitude. I stopped in one and chatted to a welcoming barmaid who served me a small bottle of Newcastle Brown of the type they don’t serve at home. A symptom of the tipping culture is that it makes you think naturally friendly people are just playing for their tip, even when they might just be naturally friendly. Young guys sat round watching sport. I intermittently chatted to the barmaid, watched the American Football and Basketball playing on the screens, (however much I tried, I was unable to cultivate any genuine interest), and flicked through a Harry Hill jokebook app on my iPod.
Another bar further down the street had more people and a faux urban kind of buzz about it. I took a Guinness and again sat at the bar, this time with a music fanzine – it seemed the area had a vibrant scene. I spoke to nobody and shortly after headed back, nothing challenging my suspicion that I was one of about four guests in the large, deeply uninspiring hotel.
Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.
A harried Hertz man returned to the desk and with minimal fuss, printed out forms for me to sign and told me to go wait outside for the car. This was the quickest, least paperwork-intensive car hire I’d ever experienced. So much so that when the Hertz man’s colleague brought down a small red Toyota Yaris from the car park, I just got in. Then I realised I didn’t know what any of the main controls meant, never having driven an automatic vehicle before. I beckoned a parking attendant over for a quick overview. Drive, Reverse, Park – was apparently all I needed to know. Don’t worry about the rest. With that I pushed the stick into drive and took my foot off the brake, which itself seemed to roll the car forward, gently easing myself into downtown Chicago traffic.
It was fine, all fine, keep on the right, it was all going to be fine, just concentrate, keep on the right, head for the Lake, hug it and head up the one side, simple, easy, cool. I gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary.
I slowly grew into to the Yaris and understood that driving it was easy; boring in fact. Automatics neuter the driving experience; they do everything for you and give you less control, like holidaying with a tour guide. Not once did I go to depress an imaginary clutch, although I did flap my left hand into the door from time to time, flailing for an imaginary gear stick. I also kept approaching the vehicle from the wrong side, expecting the driver’s door to be where the passenger door was, which didn’t make me look too clever. On a freeway I was momentarily alarmed to be overtaken by someone casually reading a newspaper, before realising it was a passenger.
With the assurance of an appropriate section of map spread haphazardly out across my lap, I covered minor roads skirting Lake Michigan, up through suburbs with Scottish names, Highland and Glencoe – where I stopped for a coffee and to applaud myself that I wasn’t dead. This Glencoe wasn’t much like the Western Highland mountain range where I’d driven a couple of years ago. Like much of the drive over the two days, it was a flat and unremarkable landscape. The later plains of Wisconsin mimicked this and chided me, as if I’d landed in London and decided to take a trip round East Anglia.
Still it was experience and the towns were interesting, many with a makeshift retail park feel to them, quirky stores like the dogs’ hairdresser ‘Canine Coiffeurs.’ The welcome signs also amused with their exact population figure: CITY OF NEENAH, Population 56,723. (That one isn’t accurate). They made me want to add a few tally marks to the sign or run to the Police station screaming I’VE FOUND ANOTHER ONE!!
Priority at open crossroads without traffic lights also foxed me. It often seemed that nobody moved at all, so I did.
Next stop was a small park on a tip of Lake Michigan near the city of Kenosha. Thick snow still lay on the ground and the closest edge of the water speckled with mini icebergs, as had been the case all the way down in the city. When the tide swept in, lapping sounds twined with the clinkling of ice, like rippling shattered glass or a wind chime.
From here I found the highway and ignored numerous junctions to drill on through Milwaukee, an impressive cityscape not on a par with Chicago but still not inconsiderable, before eventually stopping again at the small Wisconsin town of Sheboygan Falls. This was a very small town, replete with a Simpsons-esque Moe’s Liquor Store, where I bought a bottle of bourbon. Moe wasn’t very chatty when I complimented him on his strong range of liquor, or he didn’t understand my accent. A middle-aged lady assistant in a neighbouring gas station where I took a leak and got a cup of tea was much perkier.
It was hit or miss whether people understood my accent or not. Earlier in the trip I had to say ‘beer’ to an American air stewardess three times. She looked at me like I was retarded. I don’t have any strong regional English accent and don’t know how else to pronounce the word.
Now the light was beginning to fade beautifully. It had been a clear, cold, blue-skied day despite constant radio warnings that cloud was heading in. The radio stations had offered a strong sense of the locals, particularly a warm, mumsy DJ improbably named Robin Rock. She kept thanking her listeners for “working with” her and spoke a lot about her teenage daughters and how they’d do backflips if they won the station’s big competition prize of a trip to Disneyworld.
This reminded me of the chatty old lady sitting one seat along from me on the short connecting flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. She’d been excited to tell me and the girl sitting next to me how she was going back there soon, this time to see ‘the adult things’ which the kids don’t like. Interest piqued, I had bitten my lower lip slightly and enquired further about what exactly ‘the adult things’ at Disneyworld were. Apparently reading descriptions in the galleries and things like that.
The radio songs didn’t range too widely: old classics to Americana, with edgier stations going for tracks with indulgent, rapidly boring guitar solos.
Fearing darkness, and the distance I had to cover the next day, I impulsively decided not to go as far as the next big city, Green Bay. Instead I took an A-road to chase the dipping golden sun across a wide expanse of plains towards Appleton, on the other side of Lake Winnebago. Although I missed out Appleton itself and found a couple of small, hospitable seeming towns with a pleasant buzz of life about them: first Menasha and then Neenah, where I stopped. Disappointingly no motels or any places of accommodation other than a Holiday Inn could be found. So, after a brief stroll I headed on. Growing faintly edgy about a final destination with the draping darkness, I flicked on an internal light in the car and studied the map to see Oshkosh was the next large looking town. There was bound to be something there.
By this point I was tired and not thinking straight. I spent about ten minutes finding the correct direction out of Neenah, then at least twenty more getting lost in the suburbs of Oshkosh, eventually finding its downtown area and only hotel. It was more than I had wanted to pay for a room but my will to look further had evaporated.
Later in the trip it was explained to me that the place-names had connections with the native Indian past and weren’t, as I had suspected, made up by drunken infants. You often forget about the historical significance of the Indians to these parts. Or at least I did. There’s a theory that the word “Chicago” has native Indian origins, while the overtones in Milwaukee are even more obvious.
An evening stroll up an icy, sludgy Oshkosh Main Street suggested more life than I’d imagined from my route into the downtown area: plenty of samey dark bars with neon signs advertising the same drinks. One dumping of snow seemed to have lingered for days across a vast global latitude. I stopped in one and chatted to a welcoming barmaid who served me a small bottle of Newcastle Brown of the type they don’t serve at home. A symptom of the tipping culture is that it makes you think naturally friendly people are just playing for their tip, even when they might just be naturally friendly. Young guys sat round watching sport. I intermittently chatted to the barmaid, watched the American Football and Basketball playing on the screens, (however much I tried, I was unable to cultivate any genuine interest), and flicked through a Harry Hill jokebook app on my iPod.
Another bar further down the street had more people and a faux urban kind of buzz about it. I took a Guinness and again sat at the bar, this time with a music fanzine – it seemed the area had a vibrant scene. I spoke to nobody and shortly after headed back, nothing challenging my suspicion that I was one of about four guests in the large, deeply uninspiring hotel.
Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.
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