National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee

3 August 2022 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Museums, Exhibitions Reading Time:  4 minutes

© flickr.com - Adam Moss/cc-by-sa-2.0

© flickr.com – Adam Moss/cc-by-sa-2.0

National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum is a museum devoted to bobblehead dolls. It is located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. The museum claims to have 10,000 different bobbleheads from around the world, including a life-size bobblehead. It is the only bobblehead-specific museum in the world.   read more…

Great River Road along the Mississippi River

10 July 2020 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  5 minutes

Great River Road route marker © Thomas R Machnitzk/cc-by-3.0

Great River Road route marker © Thomas R Machnitzk/cc-by-3.0

The Great River Road is a collection of state and local roads that follow the course of the Mississippi River through ten states of the United States. They are Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. It formerly extended north into Canada, serving the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba.   read more…

Madison in Wisconsin

21 April 2017 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  16 minutes

Wisconsin State Capitol Building during Tulip Festival © Vijay Kumar Koulampet/cc-by-sa-3.0

Wisconsin State Capitol Building during Tulip Festival © Vijay Kumar Koulampet/cc-by-sa-3.0

Madison is the capital of the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Dane County. As of July 1, 2015, Madison’s estimated population of 249,000 made it the second largest city in Wisconsin, after Milwaukee, and the 84th largest in the United States. The city forms the core of the Madison Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Dane County and neighboring Iowa, Green, and Columbia counties. Madison’s origins begin in 1829, when former federal judge James Duane Doty purchased over a thousand acres (4 km²) of swamp and forest land on the isthmus between Lakes Mendota and Monona, with the intention of building a city in the Four Lakes region. When the Wisconsin Territory was created in 1836 the territorial legislature convened in Belmont, Wisconsin. One of the legislature’s tasks was to select a permanent location for the territory’s capital. Doty lobbied aggressively for Madison as the new capital, offering buffalo robes to the freezing legislators and promising choice Madison lots at discount prices to undecided voters. Doty named the city Madison for James Madison, the fourth President of the U.S. who had died on June 28, 1836 and he named the streets for the other 39 signers of the U.S. Constitution. Although the city existed only on paper, the territorial legislature voted on November 28 in favor of Madison as its capital, largely because of its location halfway between the new and growing cities around Milwaukee in the east and the long established strategic post of Prairie du Chien in the west, and between the highly populated lead mining regions in the southwest and Wisconsin’s oldest city, Green Bay in the northeast. Being named for the much-admired founding father James Madison, who had just died, and having streets named for each of the 39 signers of the Constitution, may have also helped attract votes.   read more…

The Great Lakes of North America

28 November 2011 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  6 minutes

Downtown Chicago from the lakefront © J. Crocker

Downtown Chicago from the lakefront © J. Crocker

The Great Lakes are a collection of freshwater lakes located in northeastern North America, on the Canada – United States border. Consisting of Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, they form the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth by total surface, coming in second by volume behind Baikal in Russia. The total surface is 208,610 km2 (80,545 sq mi), and the total volume is 22,560 km3 (5,412 cu mi) The lakes are sometimes referred to as the North Coast or “Third Coast” by some citizens of the United States. The Great Lakes hold 21% of the world’s surface fresh water.   read more…

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