Wisconsin or bust

Now i put off this post for various reasons mostly that my internet in michigan is super crappy and constnatly disconnects making it really hard to download pics. But i'm at home now and the internet is a bit more stable so here it is. For memorial weekend orges and i made plans for me to drive out to chicago which we would use as a jumping point for "vol1 of 50: All gone to look for America." We learned many things on this trip but the two main purposes of the trip were revealed to us quite early on. They were 1) find our spirit animals and 2) discover what it really means to live life in miller time.

I drove out of michigan on an early friday evening. My 4 and a half hour drive consisted of this
very dull. a few observations i made:
- michiganders love wendy's the way that californians love jack in teh box. Seriously, it was on every exit. they also love bob evans which is like an unglorified denny's only with a smoking section
- There are 2 waffle houses on the way to chicago, very exciting
- waiting to pee until the very last minute and then getting stuck for 45 minutes in stopped traffic with no air conditioning in humid weather might be up there with child birth. It was teh kind of moment where i looked around, saw some tupperware in my car, and fashoined in my mind how i would go about relieving myself into said plastic ware. Luckily cathy stopped me by letting me know that seh woudl in fact judge me if i did such a thing, so i held it because cathy judges very few things.

So i arrived late and we decided to drink some reisling and watch apocalypto. I confess this movie was unexpectedly awesome. I thought i was gonna get all chicana and start talking about all of the cultural inaccuracies and how natives are always misportrayed but no. you know how there are those moments in life when you know things are happening for a reason adn you are right where you need to be? this whole weekend was like that. it was all very spiritual. Case in point watching jaguar paw get in touch with his inner animal spirit brought on major theme of the weekend: orges and i would travel the midwestern countryside to find our animal spirits.

Our first stop was a farm called "apple holler" orchards. It was very campy.
Golden GOAT bridge! get it! get it! yeah, i know.
Orges touched goats
i acted like a tourist
we procured some apple wine, apple butter, peach honey, apple pie, caramel, and finally cheese curds. Another moment when i knew being at apple holler was fate. As i caught a glimpse of their selection of strawberry wine the song "strawberry wine" started playing. fate? i think so!

anyways to all of my california friends, this is a cheese curd. It kind of tastes liek nacho cheese if nacho cheese were solid but a bit sweaty and kind of squeaked when you ate it. That really is not a good description but seriously it's good, and i don't even like cheese. We later realized that the bag contained 12 servings so in the end we each ingested 6 servings which was liek 10,000 calories.
We continued to drive and ended up in milwaukee. Milwaukee is a really depressing place and i was starting to feel kidn of down when another sign hit us, a literal and figurative sign. Actually this spurs a convo we had where orges said it cracks him up when people misuse the term "literally" like if i were to say "a sign literally hit us!" clealry a sign did not hit us but i'm trying to make a point. So anyways i noticed a sign that said "kite festival, today!" ahhh how fantastic!! So we bought kites (orges a jolly roger and me a ladybug) and made it just in time for the grand kite releasing celebration.
there were signs everywhere that said "danger! stunt kites!" how awesome is that!!

So we flew kites and the speakers in teh park blasted "let's go fly a kite" from mary poppins and i swear to you i started to tear up from sheer joy. It was quite possibly the most magical moment of my life.

You can't see my face but my body language is expressing my euphoria. This was the moment, running with my kite, that i realized what my spirit animal was. I am a ladybug. The rest of teh weekend orges tried to get me to get a lady bug tattoo and for a few seconds i considered it. It was that awesome. I suggest you all go fly a kite this weekend.
We then drove around some hipster part of milwaukee trying to find wifi access which was a bust. Then we it started raining and the microbrewery we were going to visit was sold out. I started to freak out "worst road trip EVER!" But then we reassessed teh sitch and decided to fuck this micro shit and head to the miller brewery. 2 words, "miller time." Seriously miller time truly is a state of mind and i think that is the greatest lesson i learned from wisconsin.

I even bought a shirt that said "milwaukee's best." Seriously, who am i?!
at the end of teh tour they give you 3 pretty hefty sized beers for free. Since i don't really like beer i gave mine to orges and he found that the only way for him to chug it was to hear the clinking of teh glass so he toasted himself. It was all very pavlovian (yes i did just go there)
We drove to madison, hoped to find a white castle, but apparently white castles do not exist in southeastern wisconsin. After checking into our hotel and getting a nice buzz from the apple wine orges had a brilliant idea. We seized the day and crashed the wedding downstairs. When in madison do as teh madisonians do.

Here we are dancing at said wedding to what else but "shout." We also drank free beer from teh open bar.
i was having a really good hair day
Then we drunk dialed everyone we knew and told them how our lives were better than theirs. yes, we are assholes. We met a really cool shuttle driver named Pauli who i kind of wanted to join us for dinner just so i coudl be liek "pauli!!" but alas. We ended up at a couple of very loud undergrad bars and orges was so drunk that he literally lost his train of thought jumping from "Alec was on the jungle gym" straight into "and then he killed everyone!" he later told me he was talking about sara's boyfriend and then accidentally started talking about battlestar galactica. very strange. Anyways we got in a cab with a very nice lady who talked alot about falafals and orges said something about how awesome it would be to have the biggest falafel in teh world, and i was like, seriously how drunk are you, my friend. Then i got sick from the afghani food and vomitted all night in teh toilet while orges passed out.

We woke up and it was like our dreams had been answered because legally blonde and the wedding planner were both on TBS. Thank you, tv gods. then we ended up at some place called lake wingra and went kayaking. Another few key observations. I am extremely out of shape. I rowed for like 5 minutes before my arms gave out. And orges kept yelling that i was getting water in his face because it was very windy and teh water was blowing off of my oars. Realization, had i been alone out there i might have died. I made up for my lack of athletic prowess my serenading him wiht some celine dion "my heart will go on." There is something about being stranded in teh middle of a lake with the wind blowing against your row that is just very moving.
so let's just zoom forward. We stopped at a sex shop and bought salvia. then we went to a museum of modern art, v. cool. then we headed to chocolate city, usa, aka burlington wisconsin.
What happened next was by far the most moving part of the weekend for me at least. We drove through lots of rolling hills an farm country and came upon this old lutheran church that had been built by some norwegian settlers in the 1800's. It had this adjoining cemetery taht you could tell was one of those really local cemeteries where generations of families had been burried. Some of the tomb stones were so old that the words had worn off, and we both wondered if anyone ever came to visit them. Which then prompted a discussion of teh "if a tree falls and no one hears it" variety. if you are burried somewhere but no one ever comes and visits you what does that mean? Orges's answer: you need to do things worthy of building monuments in your name so people will remember you.
someone with my name.
then we kept driving and encountered racial hatred. I was wearing a very ethnic shirt and i stopped at a stop sign and 2 men in a pick up truck yelled "go home!" to me. I wasn't sure if it was because i was not driving an american car or because they thought i was an illegal immigrant. Either way i was shocked. This is me in shock.
we drove by this guys house who collected old gas pumps and had them all in front of his house almost like a gas pump modern sculpture. If this were SF it would have been in the MOMA and tehy would have said it was a statement on modernism (ie oil) and nature (ie gas pumps on his land). We finally made it into burlington and followed the crowd to some place called Fred's. it claimed to have the best burgers but that was questionable cuz clearly these people have never had in n out.

The choclate festival that had been hyped turned out to basically be a local fair with rides and fun houses and shit. there were all of these teenagers running around. We ate corndogs and stuff and it reminded me of being a kid. Isn't it strange how things can remind you of "childhood" in a broad way even if it was not your childhood. Like i never ate corn dogs at fairs in my childhood yet eating that meat on a stick made it feel liek someone's childhood. i don't know
they randomly had tehse white tigers that you could pet or take pictures with or something but anyways here was teh sign in front of their cage. notice anything odd? Oh wisconsin, you slay me.
we rode bumper cars and teh ferris wheel and some crazy rotating machine thing and i found out that orges is afriad of heights which is odd considering his spirit animal might be a parrot.
So then we came back to chicago and i passed out. I woke up early and drove back to michigan, but not before trying my very first white castle. it was really good.

And that was teh end of our journey. It felt liek years but really was only 2 days of sheer bliss and childhood wonder. I feel liek we learned so much about each other and life and most importantly about ourselves (cue end credit music) Next state, ohio.