Hangin' in Milwaukee

THURSDAY 22nd
Thanksgiving Day in the USA. We drove west about an an hour and a half to Mt Horeb with Kev and Kathy to Kathy's family's traditional Thanksgiving lunch. It was fantastic to be in the USA for such an American tradition. We had turkey, pumpkin pie and pecan pie which is all as American as Uncle Sam and apple pie - we had apple pie too!
We packed up in the evening and got ready to go to Las Vegas in the wee small hours of tomorrow morning.

WEDNESDAY 21st
Milwaukee is the training centre for the US Winter Olympic skating squad. They have an amazing skating rink with a 400m speed skating track and two hockey rinks. They do public skating sessions twice a day. We took the kids along for an ice-skate and a bit of exercise. Reid just jumped on and away he went – after his season of roller hockey he found the ice skating relatively easy. Adam hadn’t done it before so was a bit shaky to start with but got the hang of it quite quickly and was doing well when the incredibly uncomfortable skates just got too much. It was a good couple of hours though – Shari is a bit of a whiz!
We ventured downtown to the Grand Avenue Mall after skating and bought a few warm clothes and had a late lunch.
In the evening we went along to the Milwaukee Bucks vs Los Angeles Lakers pro basketball game. 2008 is the 40th year of the Bucks franchise and to help celebrate they invited Kareem Abdul Jabaar to the game and retired his jersey. He was with the Bucks for his first six years in the league and helped them to win their only Championship in 1971. It was a great honour to see Kareem in the flesh and also good to see Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant for the Lakers. The Bucks won however and Aussie Andrew Bogut played an integral part especially toward the end.
The kids loved the game and all the razzmatazz and they got given a free tee-shirt as well.

TUESDAY 20th
The City of Milwaukee has recently built a large interactive science discovery world and an art gallery down on its re-developed lake-front. We spent most of Tuesday at the Discovery World exploring all sorts of hands-on exhibits that demonstrated everything from the great lakes hydrology to lying on a bed of nails. It was pretty interesting although as with a lot of these things they really suffer when stuff is “out of order”. The things that were working though were very well done and interesting. There was also a small aquarium which was very well done too. It managed to occupy the kids for a bout four ours so it must have been reasonably well put together.
The art gallery is a very interesting building with a large winged roof that opens and closes to flood the atrium with natural light. We went over and had a look through the public part but didn’t venture into the galleries.
We had an excellent dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the evening.