Wisconsin - Milwaukee

We left Dubuque in the midst of dense fog and 99% humidity (very sticky). Dubuque (pronounced 'du-buke') was named after a Frenchman Julianne Dubuque - the first permanent settler who mined the area for lead and established the town in 1788.

We took the 151 North and as we left the town, crossed over the Mississippi River into the state of Wisconsin (known as the dairy capital of the USA). We rode over rolling hills of farmland with the fog slowly lifting as the sun started to heat up the day. We rode the freeway system that skirted the city of Madison (remember George Thorogood's 'song The Madison Blues'?) and linked up with Interstate 94 East. We had a fuel stop at Lake Mills and then pulled off the road later on for lunch at the very affluent looking town of Delafield, with it's specialty shops and trendy cafe's. It was getting quite warm by this stage , so we used the cargo net to tie our jackets to the back pack on the carrier and made the journey down the freeway system into Milwaukee on the shores of Lake Michigan. We checked into our motel not far from Milwaukee Airport. A relatively shorter ride of 319 km's for the day (compared to 560 km's the day before).

The next morning, we called into the US Post Office to send some gear home that we had accumulated (and to free up some storage room on the bike) and then rode about 10km across the city to the Harley Davidson Museum (our reason for visiting the city - the home of Harley Davidson ).

The Harley Museum is a major tourist attraction and was opened in 2008. The complex covers about 20 acres (8 hectares). The museum contains about 140 harley vehicles, interactive exhibits, multimedia presentations and around 16000 smaller artifacts that tell the history of a century of Harley motorcycle manufacturing. At the moment they also have a special exhibition in an adjoining building dedicated to the stunt rider Evel Knievel which is pretty cool.

We met and talked for a while with a neat couple - Mike and Linda in the parking lot and exchanged contact details. Mike is an ex-policeman from Washington who now works for the U.S. Department of State in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

The museum tour bascially took up most of the day. The remainder of the afternoon was spent 'chilling' before grabbing some dinner. We will have an early start in the morning to beat the rush hour traffic on the freeway as we leave Milwaukee and push further north.