The Great Midwest Road Trip of 2014: New Glarus and Minneapolis (Part One)

Recently Bryan and I went on a fantastic Great Midwest Road Trip. We traveled more than 2,200 miles, visiting six states in 11 days.

Stop one: New Glarus, WI
Only about two and half hours away from Oak Park is New Glarus, a cute little village about 20 miles South of Madison. It was founded by Swiss immigrants in 1845 and is home to New Glarus Brewery, which was our first stop on the trip.

For $3.50 you get three samples of what they have on tap, plus you get to keep the tasting glass and walk around their entire facility with drink in hand

Beautiful beer garden

Self-guided tour of the brewery

The downside of the brewery is there is no food on site. However, after asking a few of the employees for recommendations we made our way to Glarner Stube with two vouchers for a beer sample from the brewery! We spent the rest of our afternoon and early evening walking around the village, which was being prepped for the big Polka Festival that was taking place the next day.

We stayed at Lucky Dog Farm Stay, which was a few miles outside of the downtown area. Like the name suggests, this was a bed and breakfast on a farm with two very gracious hosts, two lovable dogs, goats, cats, and chickens. The owners stocked a mini-fridge with New Glarus Brewery beer for us and if we weren't traveling, we could have also purchased fresh farm eggs from their chickens.

It was so incredibly peaceful here

Reading outside while Cedar and Trout kept us company

Just part of the farm-to-table meal that was prepared for us the next morning (in the bowl is their very own goat cheese)

Where all the food magic happened!

Stop two: Minneapolis, MN
After breakfast at the Farm Stay, we made the four and a half hour drive to Minneapolis. This was one of the most beautiful parts of the trip. Driving through the rolling green hills with the bright red barns under the blue sky was like traveling through a scenic postcard. I wish I would have stopped to take a picture.

After visiting one of my member companies who has an office in Minneapolis, we of course had to go to Mall of America. I had never been here before and was a little overwhelmed. I mean, an amusement park in the middle of a mall? Bryan is a huge fan of roller coasters, so we paid the $12 bucks to ride the Pepsi Orange Streak. It wasn't too bad and I didn't break Bryan's arm skin with my nails like I usually do. I just kept repeating my mantra, "Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no" over and over. It really helps.

That night I had one of the best dinners of my life at Butcher and the Boar. We decided to try a little bit of everything from the menu. It was a little difficult to fit all the food since the table sat two and we eat for six.

Lobster grilled cheese, green chorizo sausage, coal fired sweet potato, cedar planked mushrooms, skillet corn bread, and fried green tomatoes

Bryan also tried wild boar head cheese for the first time (Head cheese is not a dairy cheese, but a meat jelly made with flesh from the head of an animal, in this case a boar - sounds delicious, huh?)

The next day we unfortunately hit some bad weather. There was a ton of rain, but we managed to go explore the famous sculpture garden with umbrellas in hand! There were so many cool pieces and I wish we would have had a little more time and a little less rain so we could have really explored the garden.

I did not realize this was a fountain, which may have been more impressive if it wasn't raining

After we were tired of getting rained on, we went into the Walker Art Museum to check out their exhibits. We really enjoyed the Edward Hopper exhibit which displayed his sketches for some of his most famous work to show his creative process. Also, The Clock screening was really interesting even though it took me (an embarrassing long time) to understand what was happening. I kept trying to ask Bryan if we could come back when the movie started again because I didn't want to miss anything. However, The Clock is a 24-hour long movie which takes clips from famous and not-so-famous films that feature scenes with time (clocks, watches, etc.). The movie plays in real time so when there's a scene where a guy looks at his watch and it's 3:30pm, it's actually 3:30pm in real life.

After the museum we went to the 5-8 Club so Bryan could try Minneapolis' famous Juicy Lucy and so I could try to eat my weight in onion rings. We were both successful.

Juicy Lucy = a half pound burger stuffed with cheese

After we got back to the hotel from lunch, it was pretty obvious that it was never going to stop raining. We decided to watch some of the World Cup and then around 8:00pm tried to figure out where we were going to get dinner and how we were going to get there. Thankfully, Minneapolis has a wonder Skywalk System which basically allows you to walk from building to building without ever going outside. Why doesn't Chicago have this?

Our last stop in Minneapolis was at the Mary Tyler Moore Statue outside of Macy's downtown. I was a huge fan of this show when I was younger. I was so excited that I almost didn't see the bus heading straight toward me as we were walking back to the car. That's right. I almost died by the Mary Tyler Moore Statue, but thankfully, I made it after all.

"Love is all around, no need to fake it. You can have the town, why don't you take it? You're going to make it after all!"