Let's Go Places: Two Rivers WI

 

Friends, it's time to continue with the story of Mega Vacation 2024.  We've just spent a few days in Rockford IL and now it's time to go three hours north to the town of Two Rivers WI.

One of the hardest puzzle pieces to fit into place was the Still Bend Schwartz House in Two Rivers, WI.  Two Rivers is about 90 minutes north of Milwaukee, and it is only open three days a week for tours, so I couldn't fit it into my Milwaukee trip last month.  The only reason that I was able to go on this trip is because I had an entire day to devote to getting there and moving on to my next stop.

I had driven too far not to go there, but also I didn't want to go to Two Rivers just to see one Frank Lloyd Wright house.  I hoped that I would find something else to do there as well, but there were so many moving parts to this trip that I had planning fatigue and didn't do any research before I got there.  Spoiler: in this case failing to plan did not mean planning to fail.  I found that special extra thing to fit into the trip.

Where I stayed

I didn't see anything great on the Airbnb scene in Two Rivers, so I went the boring route and looked at hotels.  The winner was the Cobblestone Hotel & Suites, where I scored a suite with a kitchen for $140.  Well it would have been $140 but I've been sitting on a bunch of credit card points so I decided to dip into my stash and stay for $0.

The Cobblestone was a perfectly fine hotel, but the reason that I chose it was for the location.  Guess why Two Rivers is called Two Rivers?  Well duh it has two rivers that meet up with Lake Michigan and the hotel is basically at the center of it all.  There's a lot of water in that town and a lot of hike and bike trails alongside it.

Sunday Night

When I rolled into town on Sunday night my first move was to unleash Bikie and hit the trail.  I'd already done a bike ride in Rockford that morning, but there is no law that says a girl can't take two bike rides in one day on vacation.

Monday Morning

On Monday morning I worked for a few hours (yes I'm still moonlighting at my old jobby job while on vacation from my new jobby job) and then I hit google to see what I could get up to in Two Rivers besides my afternoon visit with Frank. 

When I saw what Google had to say I packed up my stuff and checked out of the hotel so fast you would have thought that someone was chasing me.  10 minutes away in the next town there was a museum with a WWII submarine and tours.  And I don't mean to come off as cheap, but it didn't hurt that it was on the list of reciprocal museums for my museum membership back home so it was a free visit.  You need to understand that touring submarines is one of my many side hobbies.  Touring the U-boat at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry is one of our all time favorite family memories, and I've also been to the USS Cod in Cleveland.

This is the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, and the fun fact that I learned is that Wisconsin was where it was at for submarine production in WWII.  The only problem was that they didn't have enough room to just launch a sub into Lake Michigan, so they had to tip the ships sideways into the water.  If you're thinking that the subs went from the Great Lakes right into the Atlantic, you are incorrect.  That wasn't a passable route, so the subs were towed all the way down the Mississippi and out to the Pacific.

Our guide took us on to the deck of the sub.  It just so happened that a big ship was passing by, so the guide had us run down into the sub so that we could feel the vibrations of the ship passing by underwater.  It was a unique experience.

We came back up to finish talking about above ground stuff and then went back down.  We stayed long enough to appreciate that we didn't have to stay down for one to two months like they did back in the day.

After the tour I walked around the waterfront and took in the sights.

And then it was time to go back to Two Rivers and meet up with Frank.  I mean, it had been 24 hours since my last tour so I was due for a fix.

Still Bend was named because it's on the bend of a river - which is still.  It was one of the first Usonian homes (a.k.a one of the first houses in the FLW: Everyday collection), which was meant to be affordable housing.  The problem was that the houses were affordable by FLW standards, and not necessarily by everyone else's standards, so that cut into the production numbers a bit.

Still Bend is a two story house, which I hadn't seen before in my FLW Usonian wanderings.  Here is the view from the upstairs hallway.

Every FLW tour has its own vibe.  Some of them are very formal, and some not so much.  Still Bend was delightfully in the not so much camp.  The current owners restored the house and then put it to good use - tours during the day, rental at night.

The crazy story of Still Bend is the upstairs restroom.  See anything wrong in this picture?

The backstory is that the owner wanted a linen closet in the bathroom.  FLW wanted the one and only linen closet to be in the hall.  The owner didn't back down on the bathroom linen closet.  Everybody won - there are linen closets in both the hall and the bathroom.

As our tour guide put it, "there are a million ways the closet could have been added without putting the toilet right in the path of the door".  Her theory was that FLW had a chance to take a shot at the owners and he took it.  Years later an apprentice who worked on the house came back to visit with the current owners, but our guide wasn't on the scene that day.  She asked them later if they'd asked about the story with the bathroom and they hadn't - so the Secret of the Bathroom will remain a secret.

Bye Bye Two Rivers

And with that, the tour was over and it was time to move on.  My next destination was four hours away.  You heard right - it was three hours to get there and four hours to the next place, with just about 24 hours total time spent in Two Rivers.  But the quality of the 24 hours was well worth the quantity of the hours to get there.  I'm glad that I made the time to stop by.

Anyone been to Two Rivers?  Toured a sub?  Had a bathroom door that crashed with a toilet?