California to Milwaukee (by way of MDW)

After a fun wedding last night, I again arose at O’dark:30 to catch a plane back to Chicago MDW. This post will be mostly travel minutiae.

I was pleased to be able to fly MDW-SJC-MDW, both small navigable airports. I’ve been through MDW many times, but I had never parked there. They offered reserved parking through ParkMobile, so I went ahead and reserved a spot. Between the convenience fee and all of the State and Local taxes, $40.00 turned into over $100.00. Well, I didn’t have a lot of choice, I had to park Lucy II somewhere, and given that I was going to be leaving a lot of stuff in the car, it had to be a covered garage. When I arrived at the airport on Saturday morning, I attempted to scan my bar code, but no luck. The person on the other end of the help button advised me to pull a ticket, so I did. More on that later.

Even though I departed the wedding at a reasonable hour, I still got very little sleep as my flight was scheduled for 6:50 AM. Famous last words. I arrived in plenty of time and was pleased that the Peet’s coffee was open. I bought a coffee and settled down to wait for boarding. We were all in line when it was announced that they were missing a flight attendant and of course we could not board without a full crew. That issue was solved within about 10 minutes when the tardy attendant arrived. But we were then left cooling our heels for almost another hour with no explanation. Even the gate agent did not seem to know what was causing the delay. We finally did board, about an hour late. Once on board I asked a flight attendant what was the cause of the delay. Her eyes were in danger of rolling all the way back in her head as she explained that whoever did last night’s inspection complained that the velcro on some seats was wearing out. Because it was in an official report, they had no choice but to replace the covers on something like 15 seats. We did make up some time in the air and arrived only about a half hour late. To enhance the absurdity of the flight, someone’s dog got loose and ran up and down the aisle before she was caught and restrained in her carrier.

Once I arrived back at MDW, I had to first find where I parked before I dealt with exiting the garage. The areas of the garage are color coded but the terminal does not display the colors. A kind airport employee helped me find the correct terminal exit which saved me wandering around aimlessly in search of my car. As I expected, the prepaid QR code failed on the way out as well, so I had to back up and go to the kiosk with a human. From what I could tell, I was not the only one with this problem as she took my license plate and name and had to make a call to allow her to open the gate to let me out.

On a Sunday afternoon, I had less than a two hour drive to Milwaukee, which was fortunate as I was fading fast. When I came in to IL from the South, and then traveled to Chicago, I must have avoided any toll roads. Not so from Chicago to Milwaukee. The problem is that, if you don’t have an I-Pass, the instructions are to pay online. A couple of very small signs, that were virtually impossible to read from the freeway, seemed to indicate one should go to a website that had something to so with Illinois and toll. I was able to find the web site, but as yet have been unable to pay my toll. Apparently no invoice is associated, at least yet, with my license plate, Ah, tolls, one of the banes of my current existent. I am in favor of developing some sort of National toll program so you don’t have to deal with the boutique vaguaries of each state. I’ll try again tomorrow.

I already know that several of the destinations that I would have liked to visit in Milwaukee, including the American black holocaust museum and the Miller Brewing Company are closed tomorrow which is a Monday. The Milwaukee Art Museum is also closed. The Lakefront Brewing Company is open, but apparently their tours are full. The truth is, Milwaukee is a pit stop on my way North as it was the closest destination in Wisconsin from MDW. I’ll have to see what I can find that is of interest.

Stay tuned for what I eventually manage to do tomorrow.