Milwaukee, Sheboygan & Kohler: Art, Ceramics & Lakefront

The Quadracci Pavilion's moving brise-soleil opens at 10am — worth timing your arrival to see the 72 steel fins articulate above Lake Michigan before entering the permanent collection galleries. The museum's strength is in 19th and 20th-century American art (the Bradley collection), German Expressionism reflecting Milwaukee's German cultural heritage, and the largest Georgia O'Keeffe collection outside New Mexico.

Founded in 1987 and operating from Milwaukee's historic 1908 North Point Water Pumping Station since 1998, Lakefront has been a Milwaukee cultural anchor as long as the craft brewing movement. The Friday fish fry — a Wisconsin institution — uses Great Lakes perch and potato pancakes; the brewery's New Grist gluten-free beer is widely recognized as one of the first commercially brewed gluten-free beers in the United States. The 60-minute tours are the city's most popular attraction by attendance.

Milwaukee's most significant industrial heritage site: the museum covers the full history of Harley-Davidson from its 1903 founding in a 10x15-foot shed in the Menomonee Valley to its current global scale. The 450 motorcycles on permanent display include the original 1903 Serial Number One, FDR's presidential motorcade bikes, and Elvis's 1956 KH Model. The building is a serious piece of contemporary architecture by Pentagram Design.

One of the most significant outsider and folk art institutions in the United States, the Kohler Arts Center occupies a complex of renovated historic buildings in downtown Sheboygan and runs the Arts/Industry residency at the adjacent Kohler Company factory — giving artists access to the foundry, kiln rooms, and fabrication facilities to create work using industrial processes. The permanent collection focuses on self-taught and vernacular American art; the rotating exhibitions are consistently among the country's most ambitious. Free admission.

Sheboygan's claim to the bratwurst capital of America is defensible — the city consumes more bratwurst per capita than anywhere in the US, and the proper preparation (simmered in beer and onions, finished on the grill) is considered a local art form. Miesfeld's Market has been supplying the city's bratwurst since 1941 with house-made sausages using a proprietary spice blend; the market is the place to buy and grill your own or eat at the counter.

A free design museum inside the Kohler Company's campus in the company village of Kohler, WI — a meticulously planned 1917 industrial town designed by the Olmsted Brothers landscape firm. The Design Center displays the full history of Kohler's bathroom and kitchen fixture design from 1873 to the present, including the original enameling processes, historic advertising campaigns, and the Arts/Industry program that has produced ceramic sculptures by artists including Robert Arneson and Virgil Ortiz. The company town itself is worth a walk — the American Club Hotel, a Tudor Revival workers' hotel built in 1918, now operates as a five-star resort.

Sheboygan's waterfront redevelopment has turned a former industrial Lake Michigan shoreline into a walkable harbor district with a marina, the Deland Park fishing pier, and the Sheboygan Marsh — 14,000 acres of wetland inland from the lake that constitutes one of the largest marshes in Wisconsin. The 8th Street pedestrian bridge connects the harbor to the downtown commercial corridor.

The Northern Unit of Kettle Moraine is the less-visited half of the glacial landscape — rolling terrain of kames and kettles covered in beech-maple forest. The Parnell Observation Tower (73 steps) provides the northern unit's best elevated view: an unbroken canopy of hardwoods extending across the moraine ridges. The 4.6-mile Greenbush Kettle Nature Trail loops through the area's most botanically diverse terrain.

A regional arts center in Plymouth, WI — the self-proclaimed 'Cheese Capital of the World' (Plymouth processes more cheese than any other city in the US, handling product from surrounding Sheboygan County dairies) — with a gallery program that takes the Wisconsin arts scene seriously. The building is a renovated 1920s gymnasium with a good exhibition record for a small-city institution.

A Wisconsin craft brewery in a converted 1890 creamery in Plymouth, with a full food menu and house-brewed ales. Plymouth's identity as the Cheese Capital of the US gives the brewery direct access to local dairy-country ingredients; the taproom occupies the original creamery's vaulted ceiling interior. A natural final stop before the return drive through the Kettle Moraine corridor.