Walking Around Milwaukee - Our Birthday Adventure

 A little-known fact: in non-Leap Years, TaGeez and I celebrate our birthda ys two days apart! This year we decided to celebrate our birthday adventure in Milwaukee! ShelleyJean and I enjoyed exploring Milwaukee last year, and I knew it was TaGeez's kind of town.

You know we love a good road trip!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TAGEEZ!

Michigan to Indiana and Illinois to Wisconsin. Traffic was so bad in Chicago that Waze detoured us to Chinatown in Chicago! What a cool energy! We will spend more time here on our summer visit to Chicago.

And we detoured ourselves to downtown Highland Park. It's nothing like the one back home. Here's another area to explore during the daytime - there are so many restaurants!

HAPPY SATURDAY!

Saturday morning found us explore Lakeshore Drive in Milwaukee. What is it about Lake Michigan and our birthday adventures? Not really much ice on the lake after an unusually warm day the day before, but this morning the wind was brisk! Perfect day to visit a historic cemetery, water tower, lakeside park, and lighthouse. 

And part of the charm of this adventure is our antics in front of THREE webcams! Again, that wind was harsh, but we love a road trip! 

Milwaukee webcams

We are cold and hungry so it's time to turn inland and head for some food. No trip to the area is complete without a stop at the Tardis cache! It deserves the 1100+ favorite points!

We found out later that our good friend from back home, GeoConsumer, visited this cache just a few hours earlier!

Hey, TaGeez, I think it's time to head out for some food. Any idea where the spy bar is? 

This door looks promising!

The Safe House is definitely a place to spend the afternoon exploring! Check out this 1,000+ Fave point geocache, watch the magician at the bar, and visit all the rooms, reading the walls. Happy Birthday to us!

The Covert Cache

Afterwards, we explored the ladybug building, the Milwaukee Riverwalk, drove by the yacht-shaped art museum, sought the Pabst Mansion, and visit the Lego Store on release day!

One last sweet cache before we headed to our temporary home with some takeout.

Story Time

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SCRAPCAT!

We are starting early heading home so we can make many stops along the way. First stops were different travel bug hotels to drop off our birthday trackables. Then we found the Frank Lloyd Wright houses on the Burnham Block before heading to the Third Ward neighborhood for the Milwaukee Public Market!

We picked up vegetarian samosas and birthday cupcakes for a picnic lakeside before heading home.

TaGeez loved Wind Point Lighthouse in Racine - we had the place to ourselves! Too bad too cold for a quick dip!

We stopped in Portage, IN for caching and then dinner at Quaker Steak & Lube! We wrapped our caching adventure at sunset by grabbing Adventure Labs and puzzle finals at the Pure Michigan rest stop across the Michigan border.

What a glorious weekend! We drove 1,000 miles, sang in the car, enjoyed good food & great experiences. What more can you ask for? 

Lake Michigan Circle Tour: Webcams in Milwaukee

It's been a LONG while since I've posted. Life has interfered, and there haven't been too many adventures this year. TaGeez and I did attend Midwest GeoBash, but, due to work commitments, only for the day. But I did just return from a fabulous adventure with ShelleyJean. 

Did you know there are still three active webcams in the Milwaukee area? 

I'm a huge webcam fan! Not only is it figuring out how to find them, use them, get the best photos, but it's the camaraderie when you run into another Cacher there. It's, also, the fun of waving at a camera with passersby clueless why you're acting that way!

Last week ShelleyJean and I did a 5-day circle tour of Lake Michigan - leaving from Detroit, circling the bottom of Lake Michigan, going past Chicago, and heading to the Milwaukee area. There, we lucked out to find 3 working webcams.

Outstanding in Your Field GCE8E9

Posted coordinates take you to the side entrance of a TV studio, but the camera focuses on the shopping plaza completely on the other side and across the street. Not the best of shots - just as the camera clicked (snaps a pic every 15 minutes) - the clouds came out and covered the sun. 

Southeast of Milwaukee in New Berlin

• URL http://weather.weatherbug.com/weather-camera/?cam=WITIT 
• Parking for webcam: N 043° 10.934' W 087° 57.751'
• Webcam snaps pick every 15 minutes (:00, :15, :30, and :45) and saves image for 24 hours

:) Webcam GCPHVN

This one took a little more work. I could see from prior logs that there were multiple camera angles, and most of them seemed to be smudges versus real images. The Brady Street Bridge position, though, seemed the clearest position.

Downtown Milwaukee

• Click on link http://www.lakefrontcam.com/.  If you click the link and the image is blank, don't click random buttons across the top of the webpage. Instead, try a different browser. For me, I can see the image on my iPhone but not on my PC. Another Cacher (Hi Frogmore!), had to switch from Chrome to Firefox.
• Once you click on the blue button in the bottom right corner to take control of the camera. You will have control for 1 minute (don't worry - the camera will stay in place after that 1 minute - it does not revert to its original position - unless another Cacher assumes control).
• Once you have control, a menu appears in the upper right corner, click the menu option and select Brady Street Bridge for the clearest picture.
• Parking is just South of the bridge - about 1/10th of a mile - on North Lincoln Memorial Drive N 043° 02.988' W 087° 53.480'
• Walked to N 043° 03.086' W 087° 53.367' for a clear shot!

Lessons in Modern Cartography #2 Webcam GCH51C

This is a nice little webcam in Port Washington. It's in a park with a lot of birds and scenic views, located next to a sweet downtown port town. I think, however, parking may be an issue during prime tourist season - you may have to park and walk. The hardest part here was determining which direction the camera faced!

Port Washington - North of Milwaukee

• Click the URL http://24.106.61.2:8081/view/viewer_index.shtml?id=349 
• Stand at N 043° 23.233' W 087° 52.056'
• Camera changes position every 15 seconds, so we had about a minute between attempts

Colorado Adventure 4 - Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and Boulder

 Day 4 - Wednesday: Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and Boulder

It's Wednesday morning and time to leave Colorado Springs. Let's take one last look at our morning view.

Pike's Peak

What was awesome about this trip was flexibility. We didn’t go strictly to schedule. We decided last night to go to the zoo today, and this was one of the best parts of the trip! I’ve been to zoos from Toronto to San Diego, and this little non-profit on the side of a mountain is one of my favorites!

Cheyenne Mountain Zoo Colorado Springs

We checked out of our hotel and headed up-up-up to the Zoo. The grounds and views are beautiful! This multi-storied Zoo clung to the side of Cheyenne Mountain.

At an elevation of 6,714 feet above sea level, it is the highest zoo in the country!

CMZ is also very big on animal and Earth conservation. When you enter the park, each visitor is given 3 tokens to drop into the conservation effort of your choice.

No paper - they suggest you snap a photo of the map

For a few dollars you can feed over a dozen giraffes from the boardwalk.

Yum! Lettuce! Best $5 ever!

Yes, there was a webcam! We were concerned if we had data that far up so luckily Lorna and Brenna were on their computers back home snapping away for us! We have dozens of these shots!

Oh, I had a hard time getting away! The giraffes were so friendly and so close - I didn't want to leave them. Luckily there were many more well cared for critters winding onward and upward.

We visited the elephants and then ascended the path to the Australian Walkabout.

Onto the Asian Highlands.

And over to Rocky Mountain Wild.

Closest we got to a moose that we know of

We chilled with some penguins hanging out outside and ended at Primate World.

Although a lot of climbing (we had to take an elevator up to the elephants), it was very well designed so there was little backtracking. We spent a glorious few hours there.

After this great adventure we cooled off in the car and drove the loop around the Garden of the Gods one last time before adventuring to Boulder for lunch and shopping.

Garden of the Gods from the Juniper Loop

Rockies to the West of the highway north

Boulder, CO

Turning towards Boulder

JPS: Enjoy the View! GC66Y8J

One of the most visited graves in Colorado belongs to assassin Tom Horn [story].

History in Stone 2 Virtual GC9756

Boulder has an impressive pedestrian-only series of shopping plazas along Pearl Street. We stopped for an early dinner/late lunch (YUM!) out on the plaza, poked around a few shops and completed several enjoyable Adventure Labs downtown.

BarTaco - YUM!

Estes Park, CO

But dusk in settling in so it's time we moved on. We wrapped by finally making our way to Estes Park for the night (where we were kept awake all night by the bugling elk in the motel parking lot - more on that tomorrow!).

The road was beautiful and scary as F*

It seems only fitting we end this post with another mountain photo. This time from downtown Estes Park. Is that snow on that cap?