I am back, this time with Karen on a new adventure. This time it’s supposed to be about baseball and bonding, but we’ll see. 😃
You see, one never knows where the narrative is going to take you.
For instance, today. Our flight this morning from Avoca (aka Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, but its 3LA is “AVP” because it’s in this little burg between) was vvvvveeeerrrryyyy early: 6 am. We left the house at 4 for the flight. Rough day.
But that’s not the story. No. The guy who stumbled into the seat behind us was. !!!
K said she could smell the alcohol on him from her seat in front of him. He kept telling the poor woman next to him (who he didn’t know till the flight) that he was supposed to be on the 538 flight “PM” — you know what they say about lying and details. It seemed to exact to be made up. And he didn’t know how he got on this flight with this huge layover to wherever he was going.
Within moments he had told the woman that he now wakes up on two legs where he used to wake up with three, if she knew what he meant…(work that one out, I know it’s not really safe for work, but…)
Then he told her the president was a lying c***s***er who was two faced and etc. “Can’t be trusted.”
In case you think he was biased, he pointed out that he hated the Democrats, they had ruined the country.
He talked incessantly. Constantly. Every bleepin’ minute from the time he sat down till we got off the plane in Detroit, an hour and twenty minutes later. And loud enough that neither K nor I could sleep all the way.
So, that’s story number one.
Story number two was a bit more controlled.
After a trip to the Milwaukee waterfront, which was lovely, though it was 86 when we got to town at 830 am, I waited for K to determine what to do. She decided to go to a brewery tour before the baseball game. (I pointed out that one was scheduled for tomorrow, but she ignored that. Hummmm)
We went on the 1 o’clock tour. This was Lakefront brewery, which is one of the 100 largest craft breweries in the country (they make over 45,000 barrels of beer a year, all on the site were we at), and K found has one of the best tours…I don’t know…but we went.
If the point of such things is to get you lit, Lakefront has it figured out. For $9 you go the tour, but they gave you 4 wooden coins that filled a plastic cup they gave you at the bar (or the filling station along the tour — you know 45 minutes was too long to go without a refill). As it turned out, K liked all of their beer, which, come to think of it should concern me, as should her enjoyment of pre-lunch drinking (I’ve seen this phenomenon before with wine tasting). They actually had several pretty good beers, from my tastes (K thought she should help me with my 4 coins, rightly).
But, of course, the entertainment was the tour guide, Mike. You know you are in for something special when the tour guide, at 1 in the afternoon, shows up with a beer in his hand. Mike asked us all to say where we were from at once, because he “wanted to know where we are all from.” He only heard “Chicago.” Yeah, he was a comedian.
Then he wanted to know if there were any home brewers there; “so I know to keep my mistakes to a minimum.”
I wouldn’t know if he made any; if I could do chemistry…well, I might not be an English professor. 😃
His big set piece was when we got to the yeasting vat. “this is young beer; you know about teen aged boys…all they really do is eat, fart, poop, masturbate, and sleep.” I was mildly offended for teen aged boys, and my younger self, but then he explained the analogy as the yeast eats the sugar in the new beer, then farts CO2, poops alcohol, then has sex with…oh, the whole thing seemed to make sense at the time. Not sure it improved anyone’s desire to drink beer, but there you have it.
In the middle…errr…2/3rds of the way through…was the tap stop. They “only” had 4 kinds of beer (you had to use one of your 4 coins — K used her last one there) at this stop. Pity.
We finished at the bottling station, where we, no, I’m not making this up, sang the theme to Laverne & Shirley (if you have to look it up, don’t), and one designated woman did like Laverne (or was it Shirley?) did and put the glove on a bottle going through the line. K of course knew all the lyrics. SMH.
From that entertainment, to the suffering of the center piece of the day and the trip: the baseball game. It was hot out. The car said 91. And humid. The walk from the parking lot to the stadium at Miller Park (of course named for a beer, there’s a theme in Wisconsin ) was like marching across the Sahara. And then our seats, which the picture on stubhub indicated were in the shade, weren’t. ): I needed someone to come and use a spatula and flip me every ten minutes. I may have the grill marks. ):
As this is the centerpiece, a ballpark review is necessary. K and I are in agreement on ballparks: #1 is whatever they call candlestick park in San Fran. Can’t beat the architecture or the site, with McCovey cove right behind right field. Arizona, San Diego and DC are favorites too. We disagree on PNC.
Miller Park isn’t passing any of those. It of course reminds one of Diamondbacks stadium, with the retractable roof. The food seemed good — I had bbq’d bacon Mac and cheese — heavy on the sausages, of course (Wisconsin, right?).
All and all, enjoyable. A place worth visiting and even returning to, if things so transpired (this is my 3rd trip to Milwaukee, ever, two in last year plus; I am hard-pressed to imagine another any time soon).
The day finished with haute cuisine. Or rather, haute dessert. There is a Cheesecake Factory across the street from the hotel. I had the 30th anniversary, pictured, which is a mix of their original and fudge cake. The best of both worlds.
And that is day 1. I haven’t mentioned hotels…that will wait for another day, and, it seems, another brewery tour. Since that turn to b why we are here…are there breweries in Minnesota? Nah. Like Starbucks, they must be hard to come by.
Manana
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