Racine, WI and the tight fit

7-26-2024

We wanted to like Racine, we really did. And we might've gotten off to a better start except that when we entered the Racine Marina, we were assigned to double slip which already had another boat on the starboard side. The wind was challenging, and as we entered our half of the slip it became apparent that this was going to be a very tight fit. We probably had less than a foot leeway between the boats. At first it seem to go OK, but then the wind caught our stern and we moved to starboard contacting the other boat. He appeared to do fine without damage but we crumpled one of our outlet exhaust ducts on the starboard side. Not a big deal, but not a good start to our Racine experience.

We found the Marina was extremely large with between 700 and 800 boats. The docks were, for the most part quite nice but the hike up to the Marina office was substantial. From there, the hike to downtown Racine was a good mile along a busy road, and then into what we found was a mostly hollowed out urban center. The old buildings were nice, but there were a lot of empty storefronts and many of the buildings were occupied, by the usual cast of local government offices, not for profits, etc. which seem to fill in as a downtown begins to die. While it was quite evident that the city at one time had been quite impressive and there were still parts that were nice, most notably, we went on a bike ride to the north of town into an old neighborhood with large beautiful homes located along a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Unfortunately, if you went back two blocks, you were back into urban decay once again.

One highlight was a fairly lengthy bicycle trip along a pretty good path south of the city down to the Wind Point lighthouse, which was beautiful. This was an all residential area and we could not find any commercial or other town center on our way. The beach south of Racine however look pretty nice, broad, clean and very crowded.

After several days, we decided to move on early and left for a fairly lengthy cruise down the eastern shore to Chicago. We had planned to stay four days in Milwaukee, but the Municipal marina where we had reservations had been experiencing break-ins and problems with the homeless population. There was no security there and often times no one on site. We decided that leaving the boat unguarded in a high crime area would probably not be fun. We canceled Milwaukee (or as the locals apparently call it, Killwaukee.).