Rachelskirts

Rachelskirts

I love a well-placed semicolon.

Cincinnati, OH
655 posts

Sober in Milwaukee: Ambassador Hotel

Fancy Beds
Fancy Beds | Flickr

Comfort Inn. Fairfield Inn. La Quinta. Best Western. These are the hotel choices we normally have while traveling. Sometimes, we get lucky and stay in a room that doesn't have empty pop cans hiding behind the curtains. Sometimes, the toilets have even been washed. In fact, for many years, my family had great luck finding newer, nicer hotels that were still on the lower end of the price scale. But then my dad accidentally cut the tail off of a lizard while we were at a La Quinta in Texas, which greatly angered the hotel gods who protected the tiny creature. Since then, we have stayed in a string of terrible rooms with horrible smells and unidentifiable stains and towels made from crusty napkins.

Thankfully, when we were planning our trip to Milwaukee, my brother suggested we try finding a really nice place to stay in case we needed to spend more time in our room than out of it. Unfortunately, our trip coincided with the State Fair and a few other weekend events, so almost every room was sold out by the time we started looking. Thankfully, we were able to make a reservation at the Ambassador, "Milwaukee's Premier Art Deco Hotel."

Things to love about the Ambassador Hotel:

  • Down comforters, down pillows, soft sheets.
  • Free wireless internet.
  • Fresh Aveda bath products every day.
  • Big, fluffy towels, hand-washed and folded by angels every day.
  • The quaint quasi-Starbucks café downstairs.
  • The overwhelming number of good-looking people staying there.
  • The amazing stained-glass doors on the restrooms in the lobby. (I was too embarrassed to take pictures in the lobby. I already felt extremely out of place in my not-evening-gown attire with my not-perfectly-manicured hands and my not-really-brushed-recently hair.)
  • Free shuttle service to anywhere in downtown Milwaukee at any time of the day or night.
  • The really classy wallpaper above the tiling in the bathroom.
  • Old-fashioned, pull-door elevators.
  • Seriously, those beds were amazing.

Things to hate about the Ambassador Hotel:

  • The overwhelming number of good-looking people staying there. People were always leaving to go to plays and fancy concerts and expensive dinners. Meanwhile, we had things like the State Fair on our schedule, which doesn't really demand any special attire.
  • The shuttle service that only left on the hour and which would pick up and drop off other guests along the way such that, in the end, it really would've been faster to walk to your destination.
  • Old-fashioned, pull-door elevators. Maybe two people could fit in there comfortably without invading personal space. A family of four was starting to get cozy. Add another person or three, and suddenly I'm intimately familiar with the body curves of the fellow from Room 314.

In the end, though, the hotel itself wound up being a perfect retreat from the other crazy adventures in Milwaukee. Juan Pedro even threw some crazy parties while were out during the day. He'd tell you about them, but he's too busy being cool.

Fancy Sock Monkey
Fancy Sock Monkey | Flickr

Sober in Milwaukee: Boat Tour 2

Blah Blah Public Lake
Blah Blah Public Lake | Flickr

So, it's true. Our captain was strange. He had some obsessions. He spent fifteen minutes talking about a tiny lake just beyond these rocks.

"Behind these rocks? Is a tiny lake! It's for public use. You can even take small boats in there! There's a beach! There's a bridge! There are people! It's public! Did I mention the lake?"

Art Museum
Art Museum | Flickr

But I'm going to stop picking on Milwaukee for a minute to admit that this was when I really started getting excited about the tour. The weather was gorgeous. The miniature skyscrapers were adorable. The art museum, pictured above, was a really neat structure. The lake was beautiful. Not everything in Milwaukee was terrible.

Pirateskirts
Pirateskirts | Flickr

But don't think I wasn't scowling the whole entire time the captain was babbling on and on about the gosh dang bicycles you could rent! And the parks you could visit! And the things you could eat if you brought your own grill! But I did turn to my parents and say once again, "I bet this would be funny if we were drunk."

Alas, all the rum was gone.

Sober in Milwaukee: Boat Tour 1

Feuding Siblings
Feuding Siblings | Flickr

After skedaddling out of the mall, the family and I finally did make it to the boat in Milwaukee for our tour of Lake Michigan. The captain was quite nice and was giving an excellent description of everything we were passing. After the first thirty minutes, though, we realized that, like the rest of Milwaukee so far, the man had his quirks.

He was obsessed with condo prices. "The cheapest you could get a place there would be one million dollars, folks. One million dollars." And he would go on to point out condo prices for four or five more buildings. NOBODY CARES, BUDDY. Okay, scratch that. My family certainly didn't care. We're not from the area, and we don't want to invest in any real estate along a really gross river. I'm guessing none of the children on board were too interested, either.

Blah Blah Ducks Under the Bridge
Blah Blah Ducks Under the Bridge | Flickr

Then, we got to this bridge. It's still in working condition, and our captain was really in love with it. His favorite things to talk about—both on the way out to the lake and on the way back—were the little building up top and the ducks below. Apparently, when this bridge was in regular use, a man would live up there and control its direction. Granted, it was fun to think about someone with a little tiny bedroom and a little tiny kitchen living on top of a bridge, but it was not information that needed to be repeated once. Or twice. Or three times. We certainly did need to hear five times about the family of ducks who lived under the bridge, though, especially since we couldn't even see them.

Fortunately for us, this tour continued on for another two and a half hours, so we got to discover at least five more of our captain's obsessions. Stay tuned.