We Interrupt This Broadcast to Bring You: Ten Years!

Hello yes thank you.

As of this month it has now been Ten!!!  Entire!!!  Years!!!  Since starting this blog.  Despite a few lulls over the years, I am still a big fan.  This thing is great.  It serves the same function as an old-school photo album for me, allowing me to look back on cherished memories and revisit old times.  It apparently allows that for others that were with me on these trips as well, much to my surprise!  That anyone would ever reach out to me to tell me how much they enjoyed re-reading about a trip somewhere is completely amazing.

In my very first post, I showed a picture of myself for reference:

Here, now, is a more recent photo of me:

Older n' fatter.  It happens.

In my last anniversary post, the Five Year anniversary, I posted a few stats about my trips as of that writing.  Rather than just repeat with updated numbers, I thought I'd do a few different stats, some that relate to the content of this blog, but stretch beyond its scope.  Here we go!

A few bucket list numbers:

# of States visited: 35

# of State Capitals visited: 20

# of National Parks visited: 16 (paltry!  Gotta pump those numbers up!)

# of Countries visited (excluding U.S.): 15

# of Country Capitals visited (including U.S.): 12

Blog Stats:

Total trips recorded in this blog: 72

Total days spent traveling since August 2012: 246

The year with the most # of days spent traveling was 2017, with 46, fully 12.6% of the year.  No surprise there - that was a truly crazy year of travel, mostly through the UofL Choirs.

The year with the lowest number of travel days was, oddly enough, 2014, with 6.  Not 2020 when the world shut down, or 2022 when I moved back to Charlotte and started a new job.  No real idea on why that was.  I went to Lexington, Indianapolis, and Chicago - and that was it.

And finally, once again, a smattering of favorites and highlights, from trips taken since the five year anniversary post:

Indiana Dunes and the coolest photo I've taken - https://mattwetmore.blogspot.com/2019/08/michigan-city-in-and-new-buffalo-mi.html

Irish Evensong - https://mattwetmore.blogspot.com/2019/10/dublin-ireland-september-4-7-2019.html

Knoxville during covid - https://mattwetmore.blogspot.com/2020/06/knoxville-tn-june-11-13-2020-fun-in-sun.html

Acadia - https://mattwetmore.blogspot.com/2021/06/bangor-and-bar-harbor-me-june-26-28.html

The Pristine Nowhere of North Dakota - https://mattwetmore.blogspot.com/2021/07/medora-nd-july-30-31-2021-teddy.html

An American History tour with Clayford - https://mattwetmore.blogspot.com/2022/05/dover-and-wilmington-de-and.html

And the newest member of the club, Wishigan - https://mattwetmore.blogspot.com/2023/09/milwaukee-wi-september-2-2023-wishigan.html

As for what's next, be on the lookout for the rest of Wishigan, to be posted later this Whenever!

After that, I really don't know.  I'm one of those people now.  Got a 9-5 job and weeknight commitments!  I've dove head first into the choral scene here in Charlotte and that takes quite a lot of time.  But there's no reason to think I won't still get out there from time to time and see more of this fantastic world.

15 Year Anniversary here I come!

Milwaukee, WI: September 2, 2023 - Wishigan

It's time for a sequel.

Two years ago, my parents and I did The Dakotas Trip, in part because my mother has been to almost all fifty states and needs to cross off just a few more to finish.  Up and Down Dakota were two of them, and now two more: Wisconsin and Michigan, affectionately known to us by their celebrity couple name, Wishigan.

After a skosh under a year at my new job in Charlotte, I'd built up enough PTO to finally take a trip somewhere, and I used the week of Labor Day to take it.  We flew out Saturday morning for the reasonable-length flight to Milwaukee direct from Charlotte, and got in in time enough to have a lunch at Martino's Italian Hot Dogs, which looked like a place that would have even been sketchy in the 80s:

But the hot dog itself satisfied:

I was admonished by Leigh to take pictures of all my food on this trip and send them to her.

Our first real stop was the Basilica of St. Josephat: 

Which is mightily impressive, but my curse strikes again: we couldn't tour the main sanctuary because there was a wedding going on:

That's as much as we could see.  Impressive!

We saw the rest of the place, though:

They had that chapel, the third picture, under the main church, just a spare chapel, y'know, in case ya need it.

Next, the Art Museum, an iconic Milwaukee landmark:

with it's whalebone architecture.

A truly extensive place, we barely had time to see most of the areas and even then, for the last few, it was kind of a rush.  Your sightseeing sensors tend to get worn down to the nubs.  They had a good mix of the B.S. modern crap:

Real art:

Sculpture of various kinds:

Miscellaneous:

And frawg:

Another view of the whalebone and shore of Lake Michigan:

Lake Michigan is VAST, by the way.  In the plane, I was taken aback by how endless it was, even from way up there.  It looked like an ocean.  Stretched so far into the distance that you couldn't see the other shore.

After the Museum was the hotel, followed by a brief walk through the city to dinner, at Good City Brewing:

Next to the fiserv.forum:

where the Bucks play!!!!!!!

On the return walk, we made a detour by the library:

But didn't go in, as it had closed for the night.

So that was day 1!  But there was still a week to go, and many adventures still to come.

Phoenix, AZ: March 18-20, 2023 - Life in the Desert

Four years ago (how can it have been that long?!) my family and I went to the Phoenix area for a few days because we were able to trade our week in the timeshare my parents own for one out in Arizona.  We did this in the colder months so that we'd be there for the more pleasant weather, and the same thinking guided this trip too.

My parents and I were one contingent, and we met up with the Beth+ contingent later on in the first day.  However, someone had found this weird little thing we had to go to out away from Phoenix in the middle of nowhere called the Biosphere:

Actually, technically, this one is known as the Biosphere 2.

So it's this experiment from the 80s, I think to test possible living conditions on other planets, to see if eight people could live in a sustained ecosystem entirely within this shelter.  Turns out they couldn't!  Not because they went crazy and murdered each other, as one would expect, but actually because of lack of calories.  What they ate was all plants grown inside, and apparently that's not enough to sustain human life!

It got so bad that at one point, despite it having a 360° view of the outside world, no one could go up to the library area because climbing the ladder up there took too much work.

So now this crazy place lives on as a tourist attraction, and it is actually pretty neat:

Inside, there is a tropical rainforest:

And an indoor ocean!

Here's the picturesque surrounding landscape:

So it was very cool to see, but very odd!

Next, we checked off yet another National Park, at my insistence: Saguaro!

We'd seen plenty of these cacti on trip #1, but not visited the actual National Park itself.  Was glad we did!  There was a section with petroglyphs, and a nice overlook:

We returned up to Phoenix to meet up with cohort #2 and have dinner and turn in for the night.  The next day, we went to OdySea, an aquarium in the city:

I am always up for a good aquarium, and this one did not disappoint:

There was a great like tank slash show where the seating rotated around to five different tanks with a voiceover describing each one:

Some other excellent tanks:

The OdySea was in a great little shopping area, where we stopped for a coffee before heading out:

We went to a butterfly house next:

Then lunch:

We took a respite at the timeshare before an evening hike up in the Cave Creek area.  A vast landscape:

turned to what seemed to be a dry creekbed:

which eventually led to an actual creek:

which led ultimately to a waterfall!

My brief visit then ended here, with an early drive to the airport the next morning and an early flight out.  I had only this brief window to travel with my still-accruing PTO at the new job.

But it was great to go back!