I get to check off another city in my Travel Log.  Yesterday I drove up to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to attend an Architecture Best Practices Forum at a large company headquartered in the area.  Ironically living only 4 hours away, I have actually never been here before.  I am not sure if there is a connection or not, but first off, it is COLD up here.  Get this, it is the end of April and I had to drag out a heavier coat to come up here because it is 38 degrees out.  This clearly must be a figment of my imagination since we are currently in a death spiral brought on by Global Warming. 

Warning….. quick tangent… speaking of Global Warming, I was eating dinner in the hotel last night and an add came on with Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich whining about the political vogue topic of global warming.  Since I didn’t really have the opportunity to change the channel like I usually do, I had to sit through the stupid commercial which as expected ended up disgusting me (This is exactly why I try to avoid commercials whenever possible).  Turns out, that the two politicians were communicating their concern for the environment and how they are going to do something about it.  So, here’s a start Nancy – how about NOT flying to SYRIA in a provate jet with your personal entourage in order to talk to the head of a country considered to support terrorism – oh, and this environment damaging trip … is considered AGAINST U.S. LAW.  In fact, how about not flying in a personal jet to visit the Dalia Lama and since you were not authorized to speak on behalf of U.S., stating it was a personal visit. 

Now with that off my mind, I just wanted to comment that Milwaukee appears to be a surprisingly nice place to visit (although it would better if it was not so cold).   Driving downtown was a little interesting since my Garmin GPS was totally confused and kept wanting me to turn left for apparently no reason – there was a lot of construction around the downtown area which may have changed traffic patterns from those in my GPS (purchased only last November).  I was a little disturbed about how high some of the new highway overpasses are going to be – it looked to be about 4 – 5 stacked lanes high.  As it turns out we simply drove through downtown and eventually arrived at the Radisson on North Shore.  Fairly nice hotel, but clearly a former Holidome.  I am going to cut them some slack since they had fresh cookies, but the two ladies checking in myself and coworker need to pay a little more attention to their directions.  My coworker was given a room number and told to go out and around the outside of the building to an entrance in the back.  Not wanting to make him walk that far with luggage, I drove him around there and then drove all the way back to the front in order to get to the elevators for my room.  After walking through the lobby, making the appropriate lefts and rights I came to the indicated elevators, took it to the third floor and walked down two hallways to room 357.  Get this, my coworkers room number turned out to be…. 356 (right across the hall and straight up from the location I dropped him off at earlier.)  Good thing I didn’t have a 357 at that time. 

Anyway, pretty impressed with this area of Milwaukee –  local parks (lots of joggers out), above average homes nestled in the trees and an incredibly nice outdoor mall (good thing my wife didn’t come 8^) .  Among all of this was the company HQ I was up here to visit.  Definitely a place I would like to come back to and spend some more time exploring.  Van Halen was playing the Bradley Center yesterday, but I found out too late to hunt down some tickets.

 Well, off to find out how to turn up the heat in my room – oh, bonus points for naming the movie the title of this post comes from.