trip-to-wisconsin

a retrospective of my trip to wisconsin

The best time to visit Wisconsin is early fall, right when the trees start to change colors, and that's exactly what I did. My trip began Sunday September 28th 2025, and will hopefully gracefully end tomorrow, Wednesday October 22nd 2025.

Week by week, the trees changed colors. Things were mostly green when I arrived, and all kinds of brilliant colors when I left. There were a number of key highlights of the trip:

1. Passout Wisconsin

I arrived in Milwaukee Wisconsin, and spent a week camping in the yard of a friend's house. He lives on an apple orchard / vinyard in Oak Creek. The table grapes were still fresh on the vine. They tasted like grapes. Which is quite rare for grapes. Normally they're kind of sour. These tastes like Welches Grape juice. Like the idealized standard for how a grape should taste. Delicious.

I spent the week attempting to juggle my brains out, but found myself a bit disappointed in my lack of energy for the most part. In the end, it was perfect. We got completely lucky on the weather. It was a bit cold on the first night or two, but perfect there on.

Passout is an invite only event for advanced jugglers dedicated to passing, mainly clubs. In the USA, it is on the smaller side, this time there were 25-ish for the entire event. The typical attendance in the USA is 15 - 40. There's been about 10 or so. I've been to most. I volunteered to organize one in Texas in 2020, but I was the one caught "holding the short straw" during the pandemic, so it all blew up in my face.

There was nothing I could do but cancel completely and keep track of the damages. I had already booked the space, earned a food handler certification, and bought insurance. I was really excited to bring onboard a bunch of Texas jugglers to the Passout culture, but all in all everything happened as it should have. Running the event would have been grossly irresponsible during these times and likely not even at all possible due to lockdown restrictions.

Passout is big in Europe. They regularly have 60 people show up, and they have them more frequently throughout the year. I wish we had that in the USA, but Europe has so many advantages over the USA that I'm not sure my wish will come true any time soon. Their advantages include: a better work life balance that affords them more time to dedicate to hobbies, a robust train system that allows them to more easily travel to site locations and make plans that include a larger variety of sites, the largest annual gathering of jugglers in the world - the European Juggling Convention - from which to draw in fresh new people interested in juggling year after year.

1. Madison Wisconsin

This is a very rich town with a ton going on. Here's what I did in Madison Wisconsin in the span of a random two weeks in the fall:

• I juggled in the UW homecoming parade. This was like a dream. I borrowed a bike from a friend and biked downtown to State Street in a group of 6 or so other jugglers. Madison is uniquely designed to be a bikeable city. I don't think many people understand just how much biking can improve somebody's quality of life. I drove a few minutes from where I was staying over to the Madison Circus Space. Parked and then rode a bike. The weather was perfect.

• I went to my best friend from highschool's 40th birthday party. In a series of coincidences, I happend to finish a juggling pattern and make a pose directly in front of this person, and his entire family. They all called out my name and we made the connection. It still boggles my mind how I could have been on the other side of the street, or up or down a bit further, and totally missed them. Even further, it made it through the conversation chain that I was in town, so in secret, I was invited to a surprise birthday party for him. My highschool had a culture centered around tight knit friend groups, so many of the people at the party were friends in highschool via various connects: tennis team, deacade of attending the same elementry middle and highscool together, many people I knew. Hardly a stranger at the whole event.

• I finally saw the new WYSO building. A building worth about $46 million. A building inside a building, purely for the purposes of acoustics. A building with dropdown sound pannels that can micro adjust the reverb in the main hall. This again was a tremendous moment of luck. I was allow to sneak in with a group of construction experts, which seemed to include the chief architect of the building, which were on a tour of the space. Growing up, I was in WYSO for 8 years - some kind of record - so this space meant a lot to me because I could so easily imagine myself within it at key moments in life.

• I juggled my brains out at MCS and with the MAJ. I attended every Thursday night practice at a church on campus downtown. I went to most of the Sunday practices. I had a 6+ hour juggling maration session with one of the best club passers in the USA. Madison is a mecca for juggling, and I made the most of it.

1. Door County

As if it couldn't be perfect enough, the trip ended with a weekend in Door County. If you're not familiar with Door County Wisconsin, look it up. The pictures are real. It's unlike any other place. We stayed in a cabin in the woods, with falling leaves of bright yellow and orange. I used ChatGPT 5 Pro to plan an itinerary, and the trip was as smooth as it could be.

So, that's my trip to Wisconsin. Not over yet, still need to catch the plane tomorrow, hopefully that will go well in spite of the historic government shutdown, but everything about it has been great.