Alt: Wisconsin Scrapbook Only
We love you, Wisconsin!
Wisconsin is nice, but not in the same way as Minnesota or Iowa is “nice”. Wisconsin is a place where almost anyone could get drunk and kick your a$$ at any time…it could be a buff guy, an old lady, or even a baby.
If you’re not prepared to:
drink about eighty-seven beers
wade through five-foot-high snow to get to where you can start digging out your car
tow your buddy out of some floodwaters
navigate the casserole hot dish divide
and still maintain your decorum
…You may need additional resilience training before considering Wisconsin as a destination. That being said, Wisconsin ROCKS.
This photo of an ice cream advertisement, taken by the AR team while traveling through Wisconsin, exemplifies the straightforwardness you can expect there.
We like carrots, but we like ice cream, too.
We (Dr. Emily & Eleasa) visited Wisconsin in October 2025 for the Midwest Climate Resilience Conference in Milwaukee. It was a great conference! And it was Eleasa’s first time in the state, so (after correcting her pronunciation of Milwaukee) we took our time and made sure to cross a few things off her Wisconsin bucket list.
We drove through the Driftless area…
The landscape feels ancient and magical. We marveled at the landscape, the showy Sumac, and the local limestone architecture. Eleasa especially marveled at the presence of a cheese curd fridge at a gas station we stopped at. She bought what seemed, at the time, an unreasonable amount of cheese curds, but later proved quite reasonable (for her).
Eleasa commented that the sky and landscape reminded her of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico and wasn’t sure why. As it turned out, we were driving near O’Keeffe’s birthplace and childhood home of Sun Prairie. No wonder those clouds looked familiar!
Then to the indescribable House on the Rock…
This was Eleasa’s #1 wish and Dr. Emily charitably agreed (a benevolent gesture, indeed, as she knew what we’d encounter there). It started out as a peaceful, serene break from the road, and then became curiouser and curiouser. Enjoy some photos from our visit, but note that photos truly can not capture the experience. One’s emotions might run the gamut: from wonder, to awe, to childlike joy, to astonishment, to horror, and then back again to wonder.
This is Eleasa trying not to lose her cheese curds in the “Infinity Room” at HotR.
The room juts out over the edge of the bluff and creates the illusion that it goes on forever, swaying into eternity. Some folks described the room as “mind-blowing”, “disorienting”, and “surreal”. Eleasa was only able to say “nope”.
In the presence of … angels?
One of the many rooms filled with the sounds of giant pipe organs and angels of a certain type.
This is us in the “Heritage of the Sea” room.
It was surreal and TERRIFYING. No picture can capture the immensity of the grandeur, nor the horror.
Behind us are 3-stories of maybe-whale battling colossal squid and a dizzying bizarro history of the sea. It sounds like drowning with drug-addled fish (Really. There are robotic fish bands playing a variety of arrhythmic horns and drums and….more.)
We thought the visit would take 3 hours, but it took us 5 hours… and we only got out that quickly because we ran (courageously! not screaming!) through the last few labyrinthine miles of increasingly mind-bending galleries.
Eleasa gave it 11/10 stars and would visit again.
We made it to the conference, which Dr. Emily gives a report on here: https://youtu.be/EfxD7YUO2bU
After that, we fulfilled Eleasa’s #2 Wisconsin wish… a visit to the Mars Cheese Castle.
And YES, it is glorious! It is a castle! It is a castle filled with CHEESE!
Until next time, Wisconsin!
