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 Culture Club | Wine & Dine | The Twilight Zone | Out & About | Take Me out to the Ballgame EASY RIDERS Snappy suggestions for places you can drive in a day Culture Club Spring Green, Wisconsin Distance from Chicago: 188 miles, 3.5 hours or so. How to get there: Take I-90 north, exit at Highway 12 & 18 west, just east of Madison. Follow Highway 12 west to the Highway 14 west exit (LaCrosse, Spring Green). Turn right onto Highway 14 and follow into Spring Green. Money matters: Taliesin, $10-$15; House on the Rock, $6-$20; American Players Theatre, $24-$42. Where to stop: Just north of the border is Monroe, Wis., self-proclaimed “Swiss cheese capital of the world.” For an entertaining side trip, get off I-90 at Highway 11 and follow it into Monroe. There you can check out the Franklin Cheese Factory (along Franklin Road, (608)325-3725), best time is 9-11am, or Roth Kase USA (657 Second, (608)328-3355), where you can actually observe the cheese-making process. Don’t miss: The Post House and Dutch Kitchen—Wisconsin’s oldest continuously operating restaurant, which has been serving up solid cuisine since 1857. 127 E. Jefferson, (608)588-2595. Home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, The House on the Rock and The American Players Theatre, Spring Green is a northern Wisconsin gem, a fount of culture hidden amongst picturesque settings. With performances on top of a gentle knoll in a natural amphitheater, this season the American Players Theatre offers everything from “Uncle Vanya” to “As You Like It” to “Richard II” in a beautiful environment—order a boxed supper and keep company while you watch the show. At Taliesin, tour the interior of what served as Wright’s personal home for fifty years, take a guided look at the grounds or check out the Hillside Home School, which the architect built for his aunts in 1902 and now houses an architectural firm and school called the Taliesin Fellowship. Lastly, don’t leave without checking out the house built into a sandstone formation—The House on the Rock—including the world’s largest carousel. Taliesin, (608)588-7900, www.taliesinpreservation.org; American Players Theatre, (608)588-2361, www.americanplayers.org; House on the Rock, (608)935-3639, www.houseontherock.com. Milwaukee Summerfest Distance from Chicago: 89 miles, approximately 1.5 hours. How to get there: Take the Kennedy and at the split stay right onto the Edens (I-94) north to Milwaukee, exit at 312AB (Lapham/Becher). Follow the signs. Where to stop: There’s only so much between here and Milwaukee; read the rest of this story for some ideas. Money matters: $9-10/day at the gate. Advance tickets are $8, or $21 for a three-day pass, available through Ticketmaster, (312)559-1212. Don’t miss: The roving Glorioso’s Cheese on a Stick carts, throughout the entire festival grounds. Sure you can eat fancy foods from every restaurant in the Milwaukee area, but the Glorioso’s carts are the real Wisconsin deal. Downtown Milwaukee’s annual eleven-day music marathon is closing in on its fortieth anniversary, and it still hasn’t shown any signs of letting up. This year, like last year and the year before, the performers are bigger, the crowds more nebulous, the food variety more incredible and, hopefully, the weather will be perfect. Performing on ten stages this year will be a little bit of everything, from old-timers like the Doobie Brothers and Bon Jovi to country acts galore and even a burst of mega-stars: Blues Traveler, Blink 182 and—the highlight of the festival—the artist who we now call Prince. Summerfest 2001 begins June 28 and is the talk of the waterfront for the next ten days, so you’ve really got no excuse to miss it—even if you only go for one day. For more information, check out www.summerfest.com. Columbus, Indiana Distance from Chicago: 230 miles, around 4 hours. How to get there: Take the Dan Ryan to either the Chicago Skyway (I-90) or the Bishop Ford (I-80/94), both of which head into Indiana. Take I-65 south and exit at Indiana 46 toward Columbus, turn left at the end of the ramp and then take IN-7 into town. Money matters: Free (go to www.columbus.in.us for free walking tour maps); guided tours run $6-$9.50. Where to stop: The John Dillinger Historical Museum. Moved from Nashville, Ind. to Hammond, the Dillinger Museum was the lifelong project of Joe Pinkston (now deceased) who tried to set the Dillinger record straight. (His basic story was that Dillinger was a straight-up guy who was paid by bank managers to rip them off.) When Pinkston died, the museum was revamped and moved, meaning that, though it still has some odd items, including the “trousers of death,” the pants Dillinger was shot in, it has lost some of its conspiracy theory wackiness. Admission $4. Inside the Lake County Welcome Center, exit I-80 at Kennedy Avenue South and turn right at the first light. Don’t miss: The Columbus Area Visitor’s Center features its own little bit of artistic wonder, a yellow neon chandelier and a Persian window done by world-renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly. Worth stopping in for. 506 Fifth St., (800)468-6564. Tiny Columbus is a slice of architectural science fiction rising from the flatlands of southern Indiana. With a history of preservation, a grant from a local manufacturer in 1957 set up the Cummins Engine Foundation Architectural Program, which has paid architect’s fees on all types of public structures, from shopping centers to factories, from prisons to churches. While attention has been paid to the architectural heritage of local homes and the turn-of-the-century downtown, there is eye candy at almost every turn, including a soaring-spired Eero Saarinen church; an eye-filling Playskool-reminiscent Harry Weese church; a see-through newspaper production plant that serves as a mute frame for a mammoth, bold yellow printing presses, and a memorable daylight-soaked Gunnar Birkerts church that, from the outside, could be sloppily described as the only sample out there of Scandinavian Soviet retro-futurism.
LIT 50
SUMMER TRAVEL
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