On to Wisconsin

After our 6-day visit in Chicago with Brian, Ardy and grandson Cedro, we hopped back on the tandem for the next leg of our trip, heading northwest and back to the Mississippi River. We're now in Wisconsin, over half-way to Winona MN, our next destination on the Big Muddy.

Rail trails made the escape from Chicago reasonably easy, although most of the surfaces of the trails were packed limestone. It's a surface that looks like a dirt road but is quite hard, and in fact feels similar to a clay tennis court, with good reason since the trail is made of a mix of crushed limestone and clay. Here's a view of the Sugar River Trail in Wisconsin to see what one looks like. Since packed limestone creates more surface friction, we tend to ride 1 to 3 mph slower than on good asphalt, though that disadvantage is often offset by three big advantages. First, any rail trail is either flat or gently graded, so no steep hills. Second, a rail trail keeps you out of traffic, and quite a few of the ones we rode out of Chicago passed under or over busy roads, saving us from having to stop for traffic lights. Unless the trail runs right next to a highway, it also makes for a quieter and more nature-filled experience.

Last and sometimes most important of all, rail trails tend to have a lot of vegetation next to them. Even the low bushes next to the trail above will help, and many are virtual tunnels of trees, as you've seen in photos in past blog entries and which you'll see much more of in the next few weeks as we ride many more rail trails here in Wisconsin. When the wind is blowing in your face on the highway, it's usually calmer and sometimes close to dead still on a nearby rail trail.

We reached the Fox River valley at the end of our first day, and enjoyed this beautiful bike bridge over the Fox with views down to kayakers. A short while later we hopped onto the River Bend Bike Trail, which as you can see was much pleasanter than riding down the edge of that busy highway.

Of the 70 miles we did in the first two days out of Chicago, 55 were on bike trails. Eventually we were back on roads, but they either had adequate shoulders or were fairly low-trafficked. They also brought us by a rather impressive grain storage facility near Rochelle IL and past this bucolic scene of hayfields, farmhouses and nuclear reactors.

We had booked two nights at yet another Illinois state park, White Pine S. P.  As at Pere Marquette and Starved Rock state parks, we had a cozy cabin and a restaurant that served us some good meals. We had not, however, booked temperatures and humidity both in the high-80's, but that's what we got. In fact, it's what we've had all but a few days since we left St. Louis. When you're moving at 15 mph on a bicycle, at least you're creating a cooling breeze. Even though biking sounds like the more intense and therefore hotter activity, hiking is actually less comfortable on a muggy day, especially in a breeze-free forest, and we didn't do as much of it as we would have liked to do here.  But what we did do, before the full heat of the day descended upon us, was enjoyable. You just wouldn't have wanted to give either of us a hug right after we were done, shall we say.

It has actually been a very hot and wet summer in these parts (we read recently that it's been 5 degrees above average), and while we've been sweating a lot during the day at least we haven't gotten far wetter still from rain.  And there have been some doozies either at night or nearby or both, including one that broke the all-time record for rainfall in 24 hours in a town 25 miles from us. On our last night in Illinois a powerful storm passed through and led us to skip most of the Jane Addams Trail that runs right into Wisconsin's Badger State Trail. We were mostly worried about flash flooding closing the trail but when we did try riding 5 miles of the Jane Addams, we had to stop four times to negotiate our way around downed trees. Thunder clouds continued to threaten, and a little further down the road we took shelter from a lighting-filled downpour for 1 1/2 hours in this barn. It smelled wonderfully of new hay, but our time there was a sort of dance fest as we kept in near constant motion trying to avoid being a landing site for the hundreds of flies also enjoying the new hay.

 At last we got onto the Badger Trail, which did not have any downed trees and which brought us to New Glarus and its attractive train station, now a trail headquarters and visitor center for the town.

New Glarus was settled in the 1840's by 108 emigrants from Glarus Switzerland.  Despite the scarcity of tall mountains within the surrounding thousand miles of this place, they thought it looked kinda sorta like Switzerland. If you're searching for the look of a Swiss village, though, you'll be disappointed. There are a half-dozen Swiss-style buildings such as the so-called Chalet of the Golden Fleece, built in 1937, but Leavenworth Washington looks way more like an alpine community than New Glarus, even though it's a totally manufactured look. Surprisingly, a whole lot of tourists come to New Glarus, by the bus-load, to see this "Swiss village" in Wisconsin. Other than higher prices than in other towns nearby, we're not quite sure what they think they're finding here. Yes, we did have some good "bratwurst mit sauerkraut," but hey, this is Wisconsin, you can get brats & kraut almost anywhere in this state, thanks to the millions of Germans who settled all over the place.

After spending a rest day in our fruitless search for a New Switzerland, we headed back to the Badger Trail with its unusual picnic benches designed for those who feel compelled to read while they eat, and for its famous Stewart Tunnel.  The tunnel's claim to fame is that it is the darkest rail trail tunnel in America because it has a curve in the center, and you can never see "the light at the end of the tunnel" until you've rounded that curve -- at which point you're half-way into its 1200' length.  So that light you see below is not the other end of the tunnel, it's just a person walking through with a flashlight, which is pretty much mandatory if you don't want to examine the tunnel walls with your face.  It was built in 1887 and was actively used for 95 years, mostly of course by coal-burning steam engines but also by diesels in it's later years of service. Now of course it's a giant magnet drawing cyclists into its dark bowels. We can report, however, that some of them do emerge triumphantly at the other end.

Two days later we were 80+ miles to the west (well, indirect miles -- the proverbial crow could have done it in a little over half that), in Mineral Point.  Thanks to the Badger Trail and the Military Ridge Trail, only 7 of those miles were on roadways.  Mineral Point was everything New Glarus wasn't.  It was low-key, un-hyped, genuine, and fascinating.  It is in an area where first lead and later zinc were discovered in the early 1800s.  Many of the first miners dug small burrows in the ground to sleep in which were called "badger holes," leading to Wisconsin's nickname as the "Badger State."

While the very first miners were mostly from the southern states, by the early 1830s they were largely from Cornwall England.  The miners' wives used to shake a dish rag at the front door of the solid limestone cottages they built to signal that lunch was ready, and today the street with the largest number of these old homes is named Shake Rag Street.  We stayed in a wooden building that was built about 1840 as a stagecoach house and is now part of an arts community called Shake Rag Alley.  It's the one Louise is entering below.  Just down the street is a group of buildings saved in the 1940s by a local with a sense of history, when they were in danger of being pulled down.  It's now owned by the Wisconsin Historical Association, and our guide Nancy brought us into several of the buildings, including so-called Polperro House, then Pendarvis House, and finally a group of row houses.  She also showed us a great diagram showing how the miners were lowered into the mine in what looks like an oversized water well bucket.  That was one tough way to earn a living!

For dinner we walked downtown, and this was another experience in itself.  We've seen pictures of places that look like this in England, but we've never seen a downtown like this in the U.S.  Building after building made of solid limestone, with just a few others thrown in for variety.  There was even a 5 and 10 cent store, though we suspect there's not much there anymore for 5 or even 10 cents.  Our supper repast included a Cornish pasty, which is pronounced "pass-tee" not "pace-tee," as we've thought for years.  It was served open, and consisted of pastry dough, meat, potatoes and rutabagas in a dollop of gravy.  We can see how it would keep a miner going for a while.  For dessert we tried our first ever figgyhobbin, a confection with raisins, nuts, cinnamon and brown sugar wrapped in pastry dough and covered with caramel and whipped cream.  The promise of one of those as a reward could almost convince a lad to go back down the well on that bucket to do a bit more mining.

We're now on our way back to the Elroy-Sparta Rail Trail, which we wrote about in this blog in September 2009 when we rode it with our Victoria BC friends Don and Ericka.  Today we spent part of the day on back roads like this beauty, then on the Pine River Rail Trail past a pair of sandhill cranes that were astonishingly loud as they told us to bug off.  We'll write next from the Mississippi valley.

Chi-Town!

We've now made it to Chicago, and more importantly to the world premiere of David Henry Hwang's play Chinglish, for which Louise's son Brian is an understudy, and to a mini-family reunion with Brian, his wife Ardith, our grandson Cedro, and Jeff's daughter Becky who arranged a pre-planned trip to Chicago to coordinate with our arrival.

To get here we followed the Illinois River 50 miles east, upstream, from Starved Rock State Park, then north 40 miles up the Fox River, much of that on the Fox River Trail seen here, then east again on rail trails to the suburb of Hinsdale and our motel home for a six-day visit.  On one of the side trails in the Fox River valley we encountered our first ever bicycle suspension bridge deep in the woods outside Aurora IL.

Getting back to the Illinois, the I&M (Illinois and Michigan) Canal was completed in 1848, more than two decades after the Erie Canal in New York State inaugurated a flurry of canal-building across the Midwest.  Just as the Erie Canal was built along the banks of the Mohawk and the C&O Canal alongside the Potomac, the I&M follows the Illinois, sometimes a block's distance away, sometimes a half-mile, before heading northeasterly to connect up with the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.  Most of the canal bed is now dry, but a few sections are still filled with water, though without canal boat traffic the algae has sort of taken over.  In this picture the canal is passing on an aquaduct over a stream, and the falling water you see is a sort of overflow valve, controlled by a dam gate at the end of the footbridge.

Of course at first no one could foresee the rise of railroads and what they would do to canal profitability, although it didn't take a lot of imagination by 1848 to see that they would eventually criss-cross even Illinois, which was still considered to be rather at the edge of civilization at that time.  The canal did succeed for a time in bringing a lot of midwestern trade to Chicago, and when railroads saw what a large and central location Chicago had become thanks to the canal, they headed there too.  Which of course eventually killed off the canal.  It lives on today as a well-maintained trail with occasional traces of its archaeological past, such as the locks pictured below, or the Seneca Grain Elevator that once loaded its products onto canal boats.

We chose to stay in the 'burbs for several reasons, chief among them the desire to avoid biking in Chicago traffic.  A series of bike trails got us within 20 miles of downtown, but shortly after we turned off from the last trail, it ends.  Needless to say, it's less than ideal biking from that point on down narrow and/or congested Chicago streets.  We found a wonderful motel that's part of a mini-chain, Clubhouse Inn & Suites.  For a very affordable price we got a comfortable room, an outstanding breakfast each morning, and a courtesy van to take us to or from the Metra commuter train station. 

We did six round-trips to Chicago and only had to walk the mile and a quarter between the motel and the train station three times, once on the weekend and twice when we came back after 8 pm when the van stops running.  The train line is perhaps BNSF's busiest line west from Chicago, and we saw Amtrak's Southwest Chief and California Zephyr whiz by on the middle trak, probably at their maximum speed of 79 mph, and a few 100+ long freight trains doing maybe 50.  The Metra commuter train is a so-called push-pull operation, with the locomotive always on the west end of the train so it stays outside the platform area when it arrives at Union Station -- that's an outbound train in the photo above.  One morning we sat in the first car and had an interesting and rare look straight forward through the blue-green safety glass on our 40-minute ride in.  As you can see, it's a busy line, and all those tracks get used, heavily!

We timed our visit to arrive midway through the run of Chinglish.  Brian was involved in a "workshop" production of the play in New York City, i.e. a performance of the work when it was still a work in progress, done with minimal staging and no costuming.  When the prestigious Goodman Theatre decided to mount the world premiere, Brian auditioned and won the challenging task of being understudy for three of the four male actors, one who plays an Australian who has lived in China 19 years and speaks fluent Mandarin, the others various Chinese characters.  About 40% of the script, and about 75% of the lines Brian had to master, are spoken in Mandarin and projected above the heads of the actors.  Brian still had pages of the lines he had to memorize taped to the kitchen cabinets in the apartment the theater provided (click on the photo to enlarge it, if you know how to read Mandarin).

The play is about the owner of a Cleveland sign company who shows up in a city in SW China to try and get a contract for signs in a new cultural center about to be built.  Much of the humor of the play involves "Chinglish," i.e. mangled translations.  For example, the businessman introduces himself as the head of a "small family-run business," which gets translated into Chinese for the Minister of Trade.  As he sits listening to the interpreter, we see in the supratitles what she actually translates that to: "His company is small and insignificant."

But the play is not just about funny translations, it's also about the virtual impossibility of translating centuries of meanings buried inside our language, or of truly understanding another culture.  Even when the words were correctly translated, meanings were lost.  The play also had a carefully constructed plot with breathtaking twists and turns that were not only unanticipated and therefore fun, but also often remarkably insightful as Hwang played with the cultural assumptions of both his Chinese, American and Aussie characters.

The day after the play opened and received rave reviews from both Chicago and national drama critics, the producers announced that the play will move to Broadway this fall.  It's still too early to know whether or in what capactity Brian might continue to work on the play, but we're keeping our fingers crossed.

Jeff's daughter Becky arrived a day after us, and met Ardy and Cedro in front of the Goodman and got a backstage tour of the theater from Brian, including a look behind (and above!) the set and a preview of part of the set from the audience side.  We also got a bit of walking in despite temperatures around 90 each day and what felt like near-saturation humidity.

Becky also introduced us to a tradition she has kept up through all her visits to Chicago, a drink at the top of the John Hancock building, 76 floors up and 2 flights above the main observation floor.  Once the tallest building in Chicago, it's long been #2 to the Sears Tower (now renamed the Willis Tower), and it looks like another building to the south might have edged the Hancock into the #3 spot.  But the view is just as good as ever.

Needless to say, we also spent a lot of time enjoying 11-month-old Cedro.  And there were a few memorable meals along the way, including a great stir fry whipped up by Brian and a trip to Chinatown (what else, when in town to see Chinglish?) and what may have been our best dim sum ever.  Alas, it was so good that the food kept getting grabbed before we could get a decent photo of the cornucopia of delicacies.

On our last day in Chicago, and after Becky was already back in Austin TX, we were joined by the other understudies for -- what else -- a Chinese dinner at a small place near the theater.  It was so good that Cedro started us doing a wave, although we're sorry to say that Norm was a little slow on the concept.



With our interest in art, we of course spent a whole day at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the world's great art museums with great and famous painting after great and famous painting.

Besides Grant Wood's American Gothic from 1930 and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks done 12 years later, you might also recognize Vincent Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles done in 1889 shortly before his death -- actually the second of three versions of this scene that he painted -- and Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, completed in 1884.  The detail shot shows his "pointilist" style of using tiny dots of color, revolutionary in his day.

Another painting you may recognize but perhaps not by the name of the painting or the painter is Gustave Caillebotte's 1877 masterpiece Paris Street: Rainy Day.  And then there's an 1875 Renoir, Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise, that looks familiar, but only pehaps because it is so evocative of the Luncheon of the Boating Party done 5 years later and now hanging as the star attraction at the Phillips Gallery in Washington DC.

Another painting that astonished us as we looked at it from a distance and then up close was Camille Pissarro's Haying Time, which he painted in 1892.  When you look closely at the stalks of hay, you have to wonder how he had the genius to see all that color in that field!

We'll close our art tour with a few of Claude Monet's paintings.  Many museums are giddy with pride to have one or two, but the Art Institute has a roomful of them.  And when you have a roomful, as only a few museums this side of France enjoy, you get the chance to see something that you don't see when there's only one or two.  Monet was a revolutionary who saw that a scene was never the same, no matter how many times you saw it, for the light was always different.  Here are two paintings done three years apart, in 1900 and 1903, of the same scene, Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather and Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect.

Similarly, Monet painted dozens and dozens of haystacks, playing with this same discovery about the mutability of light.  Here are three all done in 1890-91, entitled respectively Stack of Wheat (Snow Effect, Overcast Day), Stack of Wheat (Thaw, Sunset), and then, simply, Stack of Wheat.

Well, that snow looks good.  We're now off to the northwest of Chicago in weather that will be in the high 80s and maybe even low 90s for the foreseeable future as we head to another rendezvous with the Mississippi around Winona MN.  We'll write to you next from Wisconsin, which we'll first hit in 5 days of riding.