Chicago's O'Hare is one of the world's largest and busiest airports. To reach it from Southeast Asia is easy, as Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing and Tokyo's Narita serve as hubs for flights to and from the United States.

Upon landing in Chicago, the third largest city in America, behind New York and Los Angeles, you will discover O'Hare's location is also hub-like as it sits on the western edge of the huge metropolis to allow easy access to the east and downtown Chicago, the south for the vast prairie farmland of the state of Illinois, to the west where the mighty Mississippi River flows and to the north for the vacation state of Wisconsin.

Wisconsin was put on the golf map when the PGA of America played its 2004 PGA Championship at the state's Whistling Straits golf course that Vijay Singh won.

The drive north from O'Hare to Milwaukee, Wisconsin's largest city with a metropolitan area at about 1.8-million, is an easy 90-minute tollway and freeway drive through the extreme northeast region of Illinois and the southeast corner of Wisconsin.

Milwaukee sits on the western edge of Lake Michigan, one of the five Great Lakes that together are the largest fresh water bodies of water in the world. Compared to Malaysia the Wisconsin landscape, which is dominated by rolling farmland in its lower two-thirds and forests to the far north, is relatively flat.

As late as the 1950s, Milwaukee was known as the beer capital of the world, largely because of a great number of German immigrants that settled in the state around the 1850s, that started major breweries that included Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, Gettelman and Miller, of which only Miller has survived. The brewery tour of this the second largest beer producer in the world is a favourite of the city's college students and visitors.

In the last 30 years the city has become known as a spot for summer festivals. Starting in June, each week a different ethnic festival takes star billing at its lakefront. German, Italian, Mexican, Polish, Irish, American Indian and African based festivals are some of the featured weeks that compliment the city's big Summerfest that brings in name entertainers each night for nearly two weeks.

The city, as well as the state, is also a haven for sports fans. The National Football League's Green Bay Packers are about 100 miles straight north, The major league baseball team the Brewers, a National League team, plays in Miller Park a modern stadium with a retractable roof to combat the Midwestern weather that is quite unpredictable for all 12 months of the year. The stadium is also a popular venue for Chicago baseball fans as they travel north to cheer on their beloved Cubs and see the famous Sausage Race that occurs around the sixth inning and hopefully, not...

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