When you think of Wisconsin, your next thought after cheese and beer should be bike trails because they are everywhere. Yesterday we left Milwaukee on the Hank Aaron trail, hooked up with the Glacial Drumlin trail via the New Berlin and Fox River trails and got into Oconomowoc on the Lake Country trail.
Attentive readers will recall mention of the state fair in the previous post. For whatever reason, the fair is on grounds outside Milwaukee rather than in Madison. It turns out you can get to the fair by bike trail as we discovered early in our ride. We were tempted by the prospect of a serendipitous delay but I would have had to navigate my laden bike through the crowds so we settled for a few photos instead. A missed opportunity nevertheless.
We planned a short ride for our first day, and we were done by mid-afternoon. Our motel was in a sterile uncompleted would-be upscale development north of the freeway. Not very promising but curious in its as-yet-unrealized aspirations. While in search of a grocery store for the next day’s provisions, we saw in the distance the answer to all our needs:
That right there is truth in advertising; if you travel through Wisconsin in the summertime, you can put together a pretty fine picnic with the fruit, wine and cheese at Brennan’s.
While we did provision ourselves for the next day, we already had plans for dinner because we were in Wisconsin on a Friday night, which meant fish fry! We biked over to Silver Lake (wise decision to put double-sided pedals on our bikes) and settled in for an early dinner on the patio at Burke’s Lakeside. I don’t know anything about the tradition of Friday fish fry in Wisconsin other than it’s what’s done, but it’s easy enough to surmise that its origins must be with fresh-caught fish from local lakes. So I asked our amiable server what the fish was, and upon learning that it was cod, had the sad realization that once again our national proclivity for having too much of a good thing had done in a once-proud regional tradition.
Perhaps the Friday
fish fry lives on in distinction at other locales, but I can only mildly endorse the version at Burke’s. Rachael started gamely:
But even with the help of a half-dozen lemon slices, she could only get so far:
So we said farewell to the lake
and biked back in time to watch the day come to an end.
Not bad for day one.
Born in Baltimore and raised in Cincinnati, I have lived on both coasts and driven back and forth across the country a number of times. I now have the "midlife opportunity" to do so on two wheels.
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