Celebrating Summerfest in Milwaukee

We hopped back on the Empire Builder for the final leg of our Midwestern Amtrak journey, with our destination the lakeside city of Milwaukee.

This was a relatively short hop (just 6 hours), so we saved our pennies by travelling in coach class. This meant that unlike on our previous two journeys, we didn’t get a private compartment and we weren’t served three-course meals in the dining car, but we did still get a comfy reclining seat and access to the sightseeing lounge, so perfect for a daytime journey.

I’d heard lots of good things about Milwaukee (mostly about beer!) so it had been on our to-visit list for a while, but in our usual style we didn’t start planning our visit in any detail until we’d boarded the train and were well on our way. So, this is how it came about that we were about 20 minutes outside of the city when we realised that our visit would coincide with Summerfest, billed as the ‘the world’s largest music festival’. Whoops! This would explain one or two things about why we’d found it so difficult to find accommodation…

Anyway, we had found a place to stay and it just so happened to be within a couple of minutes’ walk of the Lakefront Brewery. Given Milwaukee has the nickname Brew City (because of its rich brewing heritage), this seemed like a great place to start.

When our friend Erin text us and emphatically recommended that we should go to exactly this brewery and eat the fried cheese curds served with garlic ranch, we knew we were onto a winner. Things got even better when we arrived and discovered that not only did they have a beer named Bumble Bear on tap (featuring a bear in a bumble bee costume, naturally), they also served tasting flights of sausages! Along with the excellent cheese curds, that was our dinner sorted. Of course, our food order was delivered under Oli’s American alter ego, ‘Holly’ (this happens often!), but even this wasn’t enough to upset Oli as we ate surrounded by the warm, yeasty, malty smell of brewing – this being an actual working brewery, unlike some of the places we’ve visited recently that are perhaps breweries only in name.

The following day, we began at Milwaukee Art Musuem. This might sound like an unlikely stop for us, but don’t worry – we just loitered outside! We’d read that the building opened and closed its ‘wings’ several times a day, which sounded intriguing, so we stood on the suspension bridge that led to the museum to watch it unfold. It was a beautiful piece of architecture and the movement was very cool, although extremely slow. So slow, in fact, that people were passing and we overheard them wonder what we (and a few others) were gathered for, speculating that something might be about to happen. In fact, it was already well underway! Thankfully Oli’s timelapse video captured it without you having to watch for a very long time, like we did…

After this, we wandered through the downtown area, which had a really lovely mix of mid-century and modern architecture.

Next, we made it to the Third Ward district, where we found a fun atmosphere, complete with a (somewhat gentrified) food market, lively bars, and a dog on a motorbike. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, but I imagine that this area was much busier than usual because of the festival in town. We embraced the festive atmosphere with some warm-up beers at Café Benelux, and then decided to head into the festival itself.

Sadly, our Milwaukee friends Alec and Sydney were out of town, but they were kind enough to give us lots of Summerfest tips and even share their tickets that they weren’t using for the weekend. We started at one of the smallest stages, watching Old Goat Skiffle Band, and then worked our way around four of the larger stages. At Sydney’s recommendation, we ended the night watching Fitz and the Tantrums, who were really good fun. Earlier in the day, we’d been baffled about how there were lines of benches in front of every stage and everyone was neatly sat down – it all seemed strangely civilised. By this point, people were actually standing on the benches and it looked a bit more like the type of festival we’d been to before!

  • Old Goat Skiffle Band
  • Tae and the Neighborly
  • The Love Monkeys
  • Fitz and the Tantrums

It wasn’t just music either – we also came across wrestling (with comically unconvincing choreography, of course) and some Freestyle BMX, which was Dad’s favourite part of the whole festival. I couldn’t watch, it was way too stressful!

A 1080 tailwhip. How?!

The one thing we were really puzzled about was how this could possibly be the largest music festival in the world – it takes place in the city centre and, although I’m sure there were some areas that we didn’t explore, we still found we could walk from one end of the site to the other in about 15 minutes! Glastonbury Festival comes to mind as being rather larger…

Anyway, some Googling after the fact gave us the answer. Firstly, it doesn’t hold the record any more – its record attendance is around 800,000, while Donauinselfest in Austria has around 3 million attendees 😳! Second, Summerfest takes place over 9-11 days and the Guinness World Record in 1999 was for total attendance rather than daily people at the festival, which is much lower. (Finally, in case you were wondering, Glastonbury is classified as a performing arts festival rather than a music festival – and even so, it’s way down the list with approximately 200,000 attendees.)

Either way, Summerfest was a lot of fun – it was definitely the right decision to embrace the festival while it was in town. And overall, we absolutely loved Milwaukee – what a cool city! We’ll be back one day, but for now, it’s time to head north towards Green Bay for the beginning of our Lake Michigan road trip.

Mill City on the Mississippi

From Whitefish, we hopped back on the Amtrak Empire Builder to cross the states of Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota, before reaching the Twin Cities of St Paul and Minneapolis.

Our train was running way ahead of schedule as we steamed across North Dakota, which meant that we ended up with a one-and-a-half-hour “fresh air” break in the city of Minot. As we stepped down from the train, the conductor informed us that the only thing to do in Minot was visit a coffee stand, but that it was already closed. He wasn’t kidding either, and we soon confirmed that indeed, every other business in the city was also closed for this evening. It was quite the contrast to some of the rail journeys we took across Central and Southeast Asia, where arrivals were big business and enterprising food/drink vendors set up to meet the train. Still, we enjoyed stretching our legs along Minot’s Main Street as the sun set, with many of the intersections revealing quaint painted advertisements on the sides of big brick buildings.

We finally arrived into St Paul’s Union Depot Station the following morning – 24 hours and nearly 2,000 km after departing Whitefish and Glacier National Park. St Paul is one half of the St Paul / Minneapolis Twin Cities – two cities that grew up separately on the banks of the Mississippi river before merging into a single metropolis in recent years.

Although we’d left our train in St Paul, we were actually staying in Minneapolis. Having read that St Paul was worth a day’s visit, we left our luggage with the nice chap at the station’s Amtrak desk before heading out to explore St Paul for the day.

St Paul, Minnesota

The temperature was already approaching 30 degrees as we left the station and set off for a stroll along the Mississippi’s riverfront. In search of some respite from the blazing sun, we meandered into the leafy and very well-heeled neighbourhood of Irvine Park. Here, the houses ranged from cute and tasteful to full Fresh Prince of Bel-Air mansions. We also got our first taste of “Minnesota nice”, whereby almost every passer-by greeted us with some incredibly wholesome smalltalk.

  • Mississippi riverfront
  • Irvine Park
  • Irvine Park
  • Irvine Park

Our improvised walking tour continued up a steep incline to reach Summit Avenue, where the mansions turned into super-mansions. Here, houses seemed to fill whole city blocks, and we were starting to tire in the heat after passing only a handful of properties!

Last on our St Paul itinerary was a visit to the State Capitol building – the seat of Minnesota’s government. The building was huge, immaculately maintained, and almost entirely empty on the day of our visit. The ground floor consisted of a central rotunda, topped by a beautiful dome and surrounded by a series of restored battle flags. The upper floor contained the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court. Just before leaving, we took a quick peek into the basement and came across a Ratskeller – a German-style restaurant where politicians ate and became merry. We were really tickled by the drinking-related mottoes that were re-written during prohibition (last photo below), although some seemed to lose their charm during the translation!

  • State Capitol building
  • Central rotunda
  • Battle flags were carried by Minnesota soldiers
  • Senate Chamber
  • House of Representatives Chamber
  • Supreme Court
  • Ratskeller
  • “Wet” German mottoes rewritten during Prohibition to reflect a “dry” sensibility

Despite the building being free to enter, I was half expecting it to cost us our trusty penknife, but bizarrely, there were no security checks at the entrance at all. I’m starting to wonder whether we might even still be in possession of it when we make it back to London!

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minneapolis sits in a convenient spot beside the fast-flowing Mississippi, where sawmills and flour mills once made use of the abundant hydro power. However, these industries all but moved away from Minneapolis in the mid-1900s, leaving the huge riverfront factories to fall into disrepair. More recently, the abandoned buildings (that are still standing) have been redeveloped into housing, offices, artist spaces and a city park. We spent a lovely morning diligently following a self-guided Heritage Trial along the regenerated riverbanks and learning about the city’s past.

Our heritage trail ended at the Guthrie Theatre, where we watched literally bus-loads of older folks trickle out of an afternoon matinee performance of Murder on the Orient Express. We weren’t here for a show though, but instead were keen to gain a new perspective across the Mississippi River from the theatre’s “infinite bridge” – a walkway extending straight out of the building’s fourth floor. As we emerged into the blazing sunlight, I had a sudden flashback to a conference I’d attended almost exactly 10 years earlier in St Paul. Somehow, I’d completely forgotten about visiting this very same viewing platform, although to be fair my last visit came immediately after a clearly harsh winter. The weather couldn’t have been much more different this time!

The Lonely Planet described Minneapolis as being “all in on the local brewing trend”, and it would have been remiss of us to skip this clearly important cultural experience. Our venue for the evening was the worryingly-named Dangerous Man Brewing Company, whose taproom sat right next door to a pizzeria. Slightly embarrassingly, we arrived minutes after the brewery was due to open but before they’d even unlocked the front door, so we found ourselves rattling the door handle a bit too eagerly. Still, the extensive beer menu was well worth our blushes, with hoppy IPAs and super-sweet stouts coming out as favourites. Our dinner from the neighbouring Young Joni pizzeria was similarly well executed, and served us a trio of Neapolitan pizzas to help soak up the incredibly strong beer – Sara’s peanut butter stout was 10.5%! 😬

St Paul and Minneapolis far exceeded our expectations. They largely made it on to our itinerary as a convenient place to break our 3,412 km trans-continental journey, but made for a very enjoyable few days. Having said that, Sara and Mick were a little disappointed that they didn’t get to see the famous Gateway Arch, which after much confusion, turned out to be located 543 miles away, in St Louis, Missouri. 🤷‍♂️

From the Twin Cities, we hopped back on the Amtrak Empire Builder for a third and final time to make a daytime journey to Milwaukee, also encouragingly known as “Brew City” 😋

Eating like a grizzly in Glacier National Park 🗻🐻🥧

“Old Duffer’s got it!”

This was the phrase with which Mr. Duff, proprietor of the oldest Hertz rental site in the United States, greeted us (repeatedly) as he sorted out our rental car for our trip into Glacier National Park, Montana. We’d disembarked our Amtrak train from Seattle at the historic Whitefish Railway Station just a few minutes earlier, bleary eyed from our early start and night on the train.

We were excited to head straight into the park, having secured a coveted vehicle reservation the day before. Even better, we read an update as we headed towards the park that the famed Going to the Sun Road had fully reopened for the summer just a couple of days before! Both of these were incredibly lucky, as without the reservation or the road opening (which was tentatively scheduled for the second half of June – we arrived on 15th), we weren’t exactly sure what we were going to do with our time in this remote corner of Montana…

To get into the park, we had to negotiate 9 miles of extremely rough and potholed unpaved road before picking up the tarmac again. The hire car looked like it had seen some things within about an hour of us collecting it! We made it through without a puncture (surely due to my helpful squeaks and yelps while on pothole watch in the front passenger seat) and headed straight for the hiking trails of Avalanche Lake.

This was bear country, and we’d diligently read lots of advice on what to do if we came across a bear, which depended on which type of bear you were dealing with. One of the major ways to distinguish a Grizzly from a Black bear is by the length of their claws, which didn’t sound hugely promising…

But actually, one of the best ways to avoid an encounter in the first place is by hiking in a group and making plenty of noise while you are at it – chatting, singing and clapping all count. This warns the bears of your presence and gives them time to move away if they’re feeling unsociable. I’m sure our fellow hikers enjoyed our renditions of Teddy Bears’ Picnic! But soon, we ran out of steam singing and wanted to find another way to make noise as we walked. We’d seen a lot of bear bells attached to backpacks when hiking in South Korea and found them pretty funny (South Koreans being noted for being super-prepared in all situations, even though they have so few bears in the wild that conservationists have launched a recovery programme) but all of a sudden we wished we had one after all. So Oli fashioned himself a ‘bell’ out of his camping cutlery and a pair of Air New Zealand headphones. Early tests revealed that it did require quite a jaunty walk to jingle at all, but thankfully Oli was happy to oblige.

In the end, we didn’t see any bears on our way to the lake (which was probably for the best, although I was desperate for a sighting from a safe distance), but we did see plenty of other wildlife, including deer, chipmunks, foxes, and a family of ducklings toddling down to the lake for their daily swim. The lake was beautiful too, surrounded by snowcapped mountains and waterfalls of glacial meltwater descending into turquoise waters.

The remainder of the Going to the Sun Road didn’t disappoint, either. When we were planning this part of the trip, we found it hard to believe that it was scheduled to reopen by 1st July, being snowbound before this time. So much snow that a road is impassible in June?! It was pretty hard to imagine, especially as we could see that the temperatures in Hungry Horse, MT (where we stayed) were reaching 30 degrees, but there was indeed still plenty of snow around as we drove along the highest part of the route. We were just so lucky that the road reopened fully just as we arrived – our bet paid off!

Part of the Going to the Sun Road (cutting across the steep mountainside on the opposite side of the valley)

We made lots of stops as we headed along the 50-mile route, which wound through dramatic mountain scenery. Tourguide Oli even found us a ranger-led audioguide, which gave us some interesting snippets about points along the route and urged us to appreciate the engineering masterpiece that was the construction of the road in 1932.

At first I thought this was a bit tiresome, but actually it really was quite a feat of engineering, particularly for a road whose primary purpose wasn’t so much to actually take you somewhere, but more to go through somewhere beautiful with minimum disruption to the landscape. It must be a difficult balance to strike between preserving the wilderness and making it accessible for people to enjoy (two aims of the National Park Service), but they’d obviously put lots of thought into it here. If only the audioguide didn’t have such maddening introductory music that started without warning every single time we hopped back in the car after a stop, prompting Oli to yell, “Will you shut up, man!”

We had a strong second day of wildlife spotting (still no bears, though 🐻). First, we saw a group of bighorn sheep chilling out in a gorgeous meadow, and we heard from a ranger that they only turn up every couple of weeks, so we were very lucky to see them.

There was also a bit of a commotion in one of the pull-offs, with people frantically photographing some hoary marmots, who were parading around on the rocky mountain ledges above the road and showing off their athletic prowess. We were excited to see them (although we didn’t let anyone overhear us that we didn’t know what they were – we suspected marmots but we had to check later!), but even more so when one turned up within an arm’s reach at a viewpoint. Sadly I suspected that they wouldn’t enjoy a cuddle with me as much as I would with them 😔.

One of our favourite stops was at Saint Mary Lake, where we followed a short hiking trail along the lake shore to a waterfall and then back to Sun Point, the site of one of the park’s first chalets.

The chalets were long since dismantled, but had been built in 1911 by the Great Northern Railway company to serve early intrepid visitors to the park, who would explore by boat or on horseback. As part of their advertising campaign to encourage would-be visitors to ‘See America First’ (rather than going to Europe), the railway company referred to Glacier National Park as America’s Switzerland, and to maintain the theme, waitresses at the chalet wore Swiss-inspired uniforms. To be fair, this was less of a stretch than Dilijan, which was marketed as the Switzerland of Armenia…

Outside of the park, we explored some of the area’s other attractions, which ranged from the weird to the wonderful and the delicious.

The weird

I asked Dad to pull into the Ten Commandments Park at very short notice, so we screeched in on two wheels – probably not quite what those who built it had in mind. Anyway, I’m not even quite sure how to describe it because none of us really understood what it was! So here, have a video of a drive-thru billboard park of religious messages…

Only in America.

The wonderful

The town of Whitefish surprised us. While some of the other small towns in the area felt very ‘wild west’ (not a bad thing!), Whitefish was quite different, crammed full of craft beer places and appealing shops. In fact, I read afterwards (a recent habit being that I read the guidebook only after we’ve left somewhere – just in time!) that the Lonely Planet described it as “suspiciously refined”.

We enjoyed a wander around the town, drank some craft beer (obviously) and poked our heads into the railway station museum, which was run by volunteers from the local historical society. This had a little bit of everything, from an exhibit on the logging industry, to a local woman’s wedding dress from the 1940s, to photographs of Whitefish ski area’s opening season, also in the 1940s. We captured this extremely convincing photo of Dad in his full skiing regalia…

The delicious

We read that huckleberries were a local speciality and that the way to sample them was in a Huckleberry Pie, but it wasn’t until after we’d ordered that I saw an article on the wall of the Huckleberry Patch that compared them to blueberries, and I really dislike blueberries!

But actually, the article was at pains to describe their superiority, and they certainly were delicious in a pie, with a warm, almost smoky flavour on top of their berry tang. They’re also apparently a favourite food of the Grizzly bear – I knew we’d get along well!

We didn’t really know what to expect from Montana, but Glacier National Park was spectacular, the surrounding area was beautiful and the small towns were welcoming and comfortable, with just a touch of the wild west to keep things interesting. We’re so glad we made this our first stop on our cross-continental Amtrak adventure; next stop: Minneapolis, MN!