Day 5: Wisconsin/Minnesota

Approaching beautiful downtown Milwaukee

We slept in a bit to recover from the late night before and made a quick stop at Walmart to pick up a bag for Allen (the zipper on his bag had broken off a couple days earlier), get some breakfast at the Subway inside, and pick up some supplies.

We had been planning on doing a tour of the Miller Brewery in Milwaukee, but based on a recommendation from a random girl who overheard our conversation at Bernie's yesterday, we decided to aim for a tour of Lakefront Brewery instead.  The drive from our hotel in Chicago should have taken 1.5 hours but was longer because of traffic from a nearby Six Flags and some construction in Wisconsin.  That was unfortunate because when we got to Lakefront Brewery, the people in front of us in line got the day's last tour tickets.  Since we were there, we decided to try some of the beers, and I found the Wheat Monkey most tasty.  We hung out for a bit, had some pizza, and then hit the road again, heading toward Rochester, Minnesota.

The 4.5 drive itself was fairly boring, mostly a lot of large, empty fields and some farms.  The one interesting part of the drive, however, was the ending of my 11 year streak of having never been pulled over for speeding.  Fortunately, I was able to muster up enough tears and sound apologetic enough and just got off with a warning.

Before leaving the state we stopped for some Wisconsin cheese at a rest stop, and then drove over the Mississippi River and into Minnesota.  We got to the Marriott in downtown Rochester at around 7 and hung out a little bit before venturing out for dinner.  Based on the area by our hotel, Rochester seems like a nice little town.  There was a live band playing outside earlier, and a lot of little shops and restaurants nearby. We ended up walking to City Cafe for dinner, which was alright.  After dinner we just took it easy at the hotel.

Miles traveled today: 371
Miles traveled total: 1,348
States traveled: 8