I'd tell you the whole long story about how we wound up waiting for these seats for almost an hour because 200+ cheerleaders from the University of Kentucky were stopping by for dinner before their cheer camp, but I really don't want to relive those memories. All you need to know is that we ate at this restaurant. It's called Fratellos. Our crazy boat captain recommended it during our tour. (He also insisted on blowing the ship's horn both times we passed it in hopes of getting the patrons to wave at him. Yay, waving people!)

Anyway, the food was good. Eating outside with the sun setting on the (admittedly rather gross) river was great. Our waiter was named Preston, and I'm pretty sure he was rolling his eyes behind his sunglasses the entire evening. I bet that would have been funny if we were drunk.

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.

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?"

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.

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.