Events of Wednesday, September 1, 2010

          We had an eventful breakfast of French toast (from sweet Hawaiian bread made with real pineapple!) this morning. After taking a big bite, Abby spit out some of her French toast and shouted, “I lost it!” She picked the remains apart and showed us a slightly syrupy and bloody tooth. After hearing weeks of complaints “I can’t eat that. My tooth hurts,” and “I can’t chew this on the right side ‘cuz my tooth hurts!”, we were all glad that it was out quickly and without much trouble. We showered, came back to the RV, and worked out a new way to go through and edit photos we’ve taken. Hopefully, this will work and we will be able to post our pictures sooner. At 11:30, we decided that it was time to go on toward Milwaukee.

          Once in Milwaukee, we found the two spots we wanted to visit: Turner’s and Usinger’s. The Historic Turner Restaurant is a classy restaurant with great food. We turned out to be lucky to go there because it is closing on Sunday. We had the last order of potato pancakes ever to be served in the restaurant (they were really good). We also sampled the onion strings (delicious!), the fish fry, the chicken schnitzel, a sausage platter, and the Kassler Rippchen. The schnitzel came with a great side: spaetzel. None of us have had spaetzel ever before. It tasted like deep-fried Styrofoam. Enough said? Good.

          After this lunch, we walked through an alley to find Usinger’s Meat Market, which boasts over 60 types of sausages. We saw some good-looking types and some sausages that made no appeal to our stomachs whatsoever (Blood Tongue Sausage and Headcheese Sausage). We sampled beef hickory sticks and a sausage with caraway seeds in it. We next walked down the street to the Wisconsin Cheese Outlet, the biggest seller of cheese in the state. It was cool to note that all the cheese was made in the state. We tried some five year old cheddar, which was very flavorful, some Muenster and some Havarti cheese with horseradish and chives. We loved their little gift shop, full of cheese heads, cheese cowboy hats, udder mugs, and t-shirts about cheese.

                As we took a lovely walk on a bridge over the Milwaukee River, we saw a four-man and an eight-man crew team rowing down the river. Mom noticed the queer lightposts, which were sculptures made from kitchen equipment. Returning to Harvey, we drove on towards Theresa, WI, where our cheese factory tour awaits us tomorrow. We had originally planned to drive to the Kettle Moraine State Forest, but our timing fell through and we decided to scratch it off our itinerary. Since we were already on our way toward the park and hadn’t found a suitable RV park, we pulled over to research. We found Timber Trail Campground and, once we arrived, were content with it. While Mom cooked dinner in the RV, we all went for a swim in the pool. The pool was covered with a layer of dead insects, but we still managed to have fun. At the end of our time there, we found a frog caught in a drain, but were unable to determine if it was alive or not until we rescued it. Sadly, attempts at resuscitation failed. We showered and returned to the RV for dinner and then some planning for the days ahead.