Milwaukee Madness – Aug 31-Sep 4

After a few hours back at home, I was off to Wisconsin.  I was especially excited to head back through Milwaukee, because a Geocaching VLogger on Youtube had visited some especially cool geocaches there.  One was at a spy-themed restaurant.  They don’t advertise it as such.  The entrance is in an alleyway, which was dark and quiet when I got there late at night.   

The reception room is small, and there’s a person there who asks for a password.  If you don’t know the password, they have to “test” you to make sure you’re a “friendly spy”, by asking you to embarrass yourself by acting out something funny.  There’s actually a video camera, too, streaming your performance to the multitude of TVs scattered within the restaurant.  Once you’re in, the servers address you as “spy” and stay in character.  

There are spy-themed decorations, artifacts, and paraphernalia everywhere.  They give you a sheet with missions to accomplish, where you can find different cool things (typically interactive) within the winding restaurant.  There was a geocache within the restaurant, which I got.  Once I was ready to leave, there’s a secret “getaway” entrance which is a fake phone booth that leads you down into tunnels (for a $0.25 fee, of course) and back out into an alley.  Pretty cool.  Growing up, I loved that kind of stuff, and I still appreciate it very much.

Work was good – I was training people, and it went well.

Wednesday, Sep 2:

5.0 in 40:16, 8:03 ave, 3 degrees of incline = 7:26 effort.  Felt harder than it should’ve been.  It was before breakfast, but typically, that doesn’t bug me much.  I got a bit of a cold, though, and it got worse throughout the week.  Tolerable, though.  Then again, maybe it was hard because of the pace and incline.

Thursday, Sep 3:

6.0 in 49:17, 8:13 ave, 2 degrees of incline = 7:53 effort.  Much easier this time, despite not feeling 100% motivated physically or mentally.  Ran in the evening.  

Friday, on my way back to the airport, I hit up some super special Gadget Caches, which are geocaches that are interactive, which you physically have to decode through some mechanical solution.  I went to a Snoopy house-shaped one, where I already knew the solution, based on the spoiler Youtube video.  That’s a cache that you typically have to be a $10/mo member to see, but on the video, I could see signs that helped me google the address.   

 

 

There was another one involving an etch-a-sketch where you drew out the instructions by following a code.  There was a fun one that wasn’t a real gadget, but which was a cool human-sized mousetrap with a yellow geocache ammo can as the “cheese”.  The last one was a fire truck where you had to play with different things on it to figure out what would open the back of it.  Super cool.   Glad I got to see more of MKE during this trip.