Chicago and Wisconsin : Day 3 - Wisconsin Dells & the Ponderosa

Aaaaargh! We were almost there! I was screaming "Hurry, hurry!" in my mind because I needed to go to the bathroom at my cousin's place in Morton Grove (a small suburb just outside of Chicago proper)! But as luck would have it, there was traffic moving at a glacier's pace on Dempster Road. Thanks to our newly purchased Garmin, we were able to bypass it and get to his place through another route...
After dropping some kids off at the pool and freshening up, we all got ready to make the trip to Wisconsin Dells which was about 3 and a half hours away. My cousin bought us a bag of cheeseburgers, fries and apple pies from McD's. The pies from the days of yore were much much better than this faux baked healthy shit. Gimme my fried apple pies! And while you're at it, bring back the Cherry flavor too! OMG - In Hawaii, their pies have killer flavors like Jackfruit, Taro and Haupia! Why can't we have that on the mainland? One bite of this was all I took. I shudder at the memory of actually ingesting this sad excuse of a dessert.
Yee haw...I'll spare you the painful details, but it was cold, it was raining and my cousin also neglected to tell us dumbass Californi-yan's about paying TOLLS ON THE FKG FREEWAY! We had enough change for the first two (I think they were .60 and .80 respectively), but we ended up calling him and pulling over to the side of the freeway before hitting another toll so we could get change from him. Yes, knowing about the fkg toll roads would have helped.
Welcome to watery Waterpark Hell at the Wilderness Resort!!! It was about to get worse when I was to find out that there would be no Wi-Fi in our cabin since it wasn't in the main hotel rooms area. It was out in the damn boonies!
Here we are...the Wildnerness Resort!
Since we got there before my cousin and the other family arrived, we decided to kill some time by driving down one of the roads. These are some of the sights that we saw...This is the Tommy Bartlett Exploratory.Man, who the FK is Tommy Bartlett? He must be a popular dude! Wait...turns out he's a Wisconsin showman and entertainment mogul.

I also saw a flier about the "Tommy Bartlett Waterskiing Show" so Tommy Bartlett is like, the Sheeyit!There were so many waterparks here! A lot of them were indoors so that's convenient for those rainy and coldass days.
Saw a bunch of these "True Blood"-rip off posters all over the place here! "Bitten at the Park" is a Haunted House attraction at the nearby Mt. Olympus waterpark
Nice lettering...Gilligan's Island font anyone? Oh yeah, there are tons and tons of cheesy and sleazy looking hotels here. And if you want fake dolphins, sharks or some other marine animal (or even a dinosaur) near the pool, this is your place. OMFG, this was NOT my idea of fun!
Tacky hotels galore!
Because we were at the mercy of my cousin's hospitality (they were paying for this cabin at the resort because they wanted to go there last month but couldn't go but waited until we came so they would have an excuse to go to this hellhole)...I mean...really, how could I be an ungrateful bitch of a cousin and refuse? Besides, this was our first time to Wisconsin and we were going to make the most of it...My cousin was originally going to barbecue for dinner but there wasn't a functional lighter (Wal-Mart here we come) so we went out to dinner instead. The dinner choice? The Ponderosa Steakhouse(cousin's wife). This is kind of like Sizzler, I guess. Nothing spectacular...My cousin's wife got the buffet for everybody and then ordered some ribeye steaks with wild rice and grilled onions as well. I didn't bother taking photos of the buffet. Just picture Hometown Buffet but with less selection and you got the picture. Oh yeah, there were lots of obese people there. One woman was almost as big as Gilbert Grape's mom.
The girl who was serving us was really polite and super nice. She kept asking us, "Is there anything I can get you all right away?" I thought the use of "right away" kind of odd but she said it about three times. Another side note - we were sitting next to Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel and his family. He and his wife were kind of arguing loudly with one another while one of the Ponderosa workers was trying to be a funny guy by telling lame jokes.
Here's some of that steak...One thing I noticed with my cousin and his family...they eat a lot of meat. I mean, a lot. Too much. Like majorly unhealthy amounts. I dont' think vegetables exist in their diet.
And more steak...
I'm calling this a night. Tomorrow I will make up an excuse not to go to the waterpark and instead be anti social...

Chicago: Day 3 - Graceland Cemetery

Before heading over to Graceland Cemetery, we passed by a few places on W. Irving Road, like St. Benedict Parish - so many of these older churches are really pretty and have a lot of character.and the Chemically Imbalanced Theatre in neighborhood of Irving Park. I just liked the name!Graceland Cemetery was our destination - yes, you heard that right. A cemetery? Morbid, perhaps, but most importantly, educational and FREE! Seriously, who wants to see the boring old Navy Pier or the Field Museum? There's lots to see here at one of Chicago's most historic Victorian era graveyards. More on Graceland here and the overwhelmingly positive yelp reviews here!
Entering the gates...mua-ha-ha-ha-ha (say this in a Vincent Price "Thriller" kind of way!)
Established in 1860, Graceland was modeled after the park like cemeteries in Europe. Graceland is also known as the "Cemetery of Architects" because there are so many of them buried here - like Mies van der Rohe, Louis Sullivan (the father of "Modernism"), and Howard Van Doren Shaw. A few other famous folks include Jack Johnson), (no, not the surfer turned singer but the first black boxer to win world heavyweight championship), Philip Armour - yes, thank you for making Vienna Sausages in a can!), Cyrus Mc ormick(inventor of the farming implement, the reaper---"Don't Fear the Reaper dude!), and George Pullman (inventor of the sleeping car). In addition, many of the monuments and mauseleums themselves are architecturally significant. There were so many interesting headstones, like this one (kinda phallic, don't you think?), although I am not sure who "McPherson" was.
These are headstones in a family plot. This foray into the cemetery also gave me the chance to demonstrate to TC how different life was back then. As we looked at the many tiny grave makers, many of which were worn down by the elements as to be rendered unreadable , I explained that people had large families back then, but many children died young. We looked at the dates on many of the stones and saw that many did not live past their toddler years, a very sad but real fact of life back in the late 1800's. She was also mentally calculating the ages at which people died when looking at the dates....The stones serve as a concrete reminder of the high mortality rate during the post Civil War years. Headless statue...
Another statue with raised hand...

Here's someone's 2-part video of Graceland that I found quite cool...

and this one...

Someone's personal mausoleum (there were a lot of those here). This reminded me of a scary book I'd read as a kid - I think it was "The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn" by John Bellairs. I was attracted to the book covers (at least the original ones) becuse they were illustrated by the amazing Edward Gorey. Anyhow, in the book, a young boy tries to solve a mystery and it involves a dead man coming back to life on doomsday. The story also featured Winterborn's "crypt". I got chills just thinking about that and now, here I am in front of one!

Headstone with carving of the deceased...
Obelisks were quite the popular choice of monument back then...the taller it was, the richer you were, I presume? Attention getting maybe? Fascination with Egyptology?
Angel putting a wreath on a cross...
I'm not sure who "Bartels" was, but this looks like a coffin with a blanket draped over it. I could be wrong, but that's what it looked like to me.

Monument of a woman...
Headstones...
This is the distincly forboding monument that marks the gravesite of Chicago hotelier Dexter Graves. The statue pictured here is called "Eternal Silence" and was sculpted by Lorado Taft. We were driving along the little road in the cemetery and I literally shouted, "Stop!". I had to get out and take a photo of this...This has got to be one of the most creeptastic monuments ever. You feel like a huge dark presence is staring you in the face...This statue is also known as "The Statue of Death" and some say that it is impossible to take a photo because a wierd presence makes cameras go batty. Well, as you can see, my camera worked just fine.
Here is a detail of the face, which is still black, save for the nose, which has turned green over time. I didn't stay too long in front of this...so off we went again!
There were so many monuments with columns or pillars...Certainly many of these folks had a lot of money to pay for these elaborate markers. That was another thing we were trying to point out to TC...looking at the markers, could she tell which people had money? What about family size? Lots of markers? Dates of death? How long did most people live back then? What type of stone was used? Limestone? Granite? Marble? You know, stuff like that.
The Schoenhofen Pyramid Monument, named after Peter Schoenhofen, a brewer...More on his company here.

See a detail of the Lotus doors here. That is one cool grave! One grave that I regret not paying more attention to was the Getty Tomb because it was considered a very significant piece of architecture by Louis Sullivan (also buried in this cemetery). This one is for William Kimball, founder of the Kimball International Piano Company.
If you've ever the enjoyed walking along Lake Michigan or the unfettered view of the Lakefront, you can thank Daniel Burnham, who was an architect, as well as the Director of Works for the World's Columbian Exposition (aka the Chicago World's Fair) in 1893 and the creator of the Burnham Plan (also known as the Burnham Plan) which laid out the map of the Chicago we know today. His grave is on a little manmade island and you get to it by crossing the little bridge.
Marshall Field's grave - This owned the largest retail and wholsesale dry-goods company in the world at one point. The Field Museum is also named after him.
Here are a few more links to the other monuments here.

Now, prior to going on our trip, I was reading up on Graceland Cemetery in the book, "Wierd Chicago" and came across a story that kind of gave me the creeps...This is the story of Inez Clarke , a little girl who died at the age of six whose statue is encased in glass to protect it from the harsh weather. Legend has it that her statue sometimes "disappears" from it's case. (cue creepy music here)
Now I guess that depends on which story you believe. In the same book, it also mentions that no one by the name of Inez Clarke was ever buried there at the cemetery nor was she even a child of John and May Clarke! Some speculate that the statue was put there as a marker by a sculptor who wanted to advertise his business and that the monument actually marks the grave of a young boy.
This is the only monument encased in glass at Graceland. There is another cemetery that we hoped to visit at Rosehill Cemetery (another one of Chicago's oldest cemeteries), which has two monuments in glass cases. More on THOSE in a later post.
You could really see a lot of details in the statue - the ruffles in her dress, the strands of her hair, the folds in her parasol, the grain of her wooden chair...
Sometimes people have been known to leave little toys and gifts as offerings at the foot of her monument, but there weren't any that day.
Now this was a really cool headstone! This is the grave of William Hulbert- the founder of the the National Baseball League as well as the Chicago Cubs. According to the lady at the visitor's desk, this was a popular grave for many visitors. Bert really liked this headstone...
Another view here...
And here...
Here is a "Beauty Shop Nagel" sign - seems to be ubiquitous at all beauty salons across America...
It was really quite a cool experience wandering around the cemetery. It was a great history lesson for all of us. We also appreciated the cemetery's layout - the graves were arranged in various ways, not just in linear rows. Some were arranged in arcs and not all stones faced the same way. That was also done purposefully because back then, cemeteries were used as picnic grounds. People actually chilled out at the cemetery. Judging from the number of graves at some of the plots, I can imagine that some families were probably here A LOT since people seemed to drop like flies back then.

We walked through part of Graceland, then did the rest of our "tour" by car. We stopped from time to time when we spotted a certain grave. If you ever go here, stop first by the visitor's center. You can pick up a map of the cemetery (it's like going to the zoo, but with dead people) which is marked with the brief biographies of their "notable residents" as well as conveniently marked maps of the more well-known monuments and graves. The people at the front office are really nice and helpful and won't think you're odd for visiting a cemetery for fun!

Okay, now let's go to my cousin's in Morton Grove for a brief pitstop! Then, we're going to the Dells!!!

Chicago: Day 3 - Return to Hot Doug's

After checking out of our hotel, we headed over to Hot Doug's for a quick bite to eat...passing by the Stock Exchange building which is actually a tunnel for trains.
Random pic of a detail on a building while in the car...

One thing we noticed about the Midwest - there a lots of water towers with place names on it like the town or "village" (example: Arlington Heights, Morton Grove, and Niles) or in this case, a business name, "Pep Boys". I found those quite curious and amusing.Hey, I feel like I'm in Chula Vista. This is somewhere in the East Irving neighborhood.

Yes, the return to Hot Doug's....this time on a Friday! Check out my first post here.

It wasn't even 11 am and the line was beginning to grow even longer down the block...Check out the Talking Heads tribute band poster.

Once the doors were open, the line moved pretty quickly...

Here's their board of gourmet dogs

and more here...

We got the Atomic Bomb, which I flubbed when ordering, instead, asking for an "Atomic Dog". The owner, Doug Sohn, laughed it off and said, "No matter, that's still a good song!"

More signage:

Here are two sodas we got - Both were by Dr. Brown, a label I was unfamliar with. The first was cream soda and the second was "Cel-Ray" (celery) flavored. I figured, WTF, when was I going to see celery soda again? Plus Doug said that if we didn't like it, he would give us another flavor. How's that for service? And the verdict? It was surprisingly good! It had a faint taste of celery but it seemed to "pair well" with the Atomic Dog, I mean, Bomb.

Here's what we came back for...the Duck Fat Fries ($3.50), served only on Fridays and Saturdays! Let me tell you that it was worth the wait! You could smell the duck fat - the aroma was quite prominent. The taste was very rich and permeated the fries completely...Nice, crispy and duck fatty!We had to come back today since we were leaving this afternoon for Wisconsin, plus Hot Doug's was going to go on vacation starting on Saturday.

Here's Bourdain's take on Hot Doug's here (starts at the 3:00 minute mark):

and here's another clip about Hot Doug's (a documentary, if you will)

and here as well!

Had enough? Here's that Atomic Bomb with the spicy pork sausage...Yeah...And the peach mayonnaise and capriko cheese cubes! The sausage had a kick to it and the peach mayo was an unusual touch!

The cheese wasn't too bad either!!! I wished there was more of it!

View from our seats - we sat on the stool by the front window...We were planning to just have a quick bite here before heading over to my cousin's place in Morton Grove.

Here's a waaaay better version of "American Gothic"...this is the tile in the "Girls" Bathroom. Bert took the photo of the Magritte spoof in the "Boys" bathroom (will have to post later since it was on a different camera)! Now this is more like it! Put THIS in the Art Institute!

"Encased meats...my friend!"

On to Morton Grove...but first, a quick detour to Graceland Cemetery!