Day 15 - Quiet Time At The Hotel With A Little Visit To The Pabst Mansion

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The blog will be short today as this is a rest day and we're not doing much. We both intended to sleep in this morning and we had good intentions, but the older I get, the more difficult I find it to sleep later. So we were both up by 6:30. After a quick breakfast, we headed back up to the room to relax and watch a little politics on television. We normally don't watch any television while we're on these road trips, but we both wanted to see this. It only lasted a couple of hours, and we were ready to find something not to strenuous to do for the afternoon. We mailed another package of stuff back home, and decided to tour the Pabst Mansion before tackling the laundry.

The Pabst Mansion was the home of the founder of the Pabst Brewery and it's the last of multiple mansions that used to be located on Grand Avenue that is mow just Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee. Evidently, the Catholic Church owned the property for a number of years until it was bought back some years ago by a trust who have been restoring it over the years back to its former glory. It was built in 1892 and is about 20,000 square feet with 37 rooms. Most of it has been restored back to original, but there is another $6M restoration currently under way that should complete the entire project. There were only 5 of us on the tour - Jody and I, a mother and daughter and a single young guy. The tour guide was excellent. An older woman who seemed to know everything about the house and family. The tour took about 90 minutes, and we went through most of the rooms of he main house and parts of the servants quarters There was a lot of beautiful woodwork, and beautiful furniture, but the artwork and stained glass were the best.

It was beginning to look like rain as we headed back to the hotel, and Jody wanted to get back to finish the laundry before dinner. The hotel doesn't have a guest laundry, but we are right next door to a coin laundromat. So I came back to the room to work on the blog while Jody headed next door to do laundry. It only took her about an hour, and when she came back we were off to dinner. I looked around and found there wasn't any good restaurants nearby other than the one we went to last night. It's called the Athena and is really an old Denny's, and the food is good but nothing special. Jody had the ham steak, and it was a huge piece of ham covering the entire plate. She tried, but she couldn't eat it all. I had the meatloaf and it too was too much, but I did a little better.

Tomorrow we are off to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. First stop is the Painted Rock National Lakeshore, it's supposed to be really pretty up there, but it's also supposed to be cold. I looked at the weather for tomorrow and the low will be 45 degrees and the high will be 55 degrees. Brrrr. That's a little cold for us Floridians, but we will bundle up and deal with it.

26.9 Miles Today

2034.0 Miles Total

4.873 Gallons Today

50.856 Gallons Total

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