Bernie's slide snafu, Kwik Trip super fan and more very Wisconsin stories from 2022

We laughed, we cried, a Californian couldn't handle Bernie's slide.

The past year brought a lot of news — from a Russian invasion and record gas prices to midterm elections and a tripledemic.

Then there were these stories. The only-in-Wisconsin stories of a more lighthearted matter, from a Kwik Trip fan visiting all 457 Wisconsin locations to a Los Angeles Dodgers reporter destroying himself on Bernie's slide.

These are some of the most Wisconsin stories the Journal Sentinel published in 2022, in chronological order.

Visiting all of Wisconsin’s Kwik Trips

If you thought you were a Kwik Trip super fan, meet Cassandra Berger, who visited every one of Wisconsin’s 457 Kwik Trip locations in 2021. She documented her journey — which included visiting 52 locations in one day — on YouTube in partnership with the company, and the Journal Sentinel documented her journey in January.

Rare birds to ring in the new year

The new year began with a rare treat for birdwatchers in Milwaukee, who spotted three species not regularly seen in the state: first, a ruddy turnstone and a purple sandpiper — side-by-side, a once-in-a-lifetime sighting — then a tufted duck, which outdoors editor Paul Smith called "the rarest bird of all currently being seen in southeastern Wisconsin." It was just the third recorded Wisconsin sighting of the bird that mostly lives in Europe and Asia.

Snowy owls love Wisconsin

In more bird news, it was an irruption year in Wisconsin for snowy owls, with the beautiful white birds returning to the state in large numbers over the winter. It was the first irruption since the winter of 2017 to 2018, and while it was not unique to Wisconsin, it brought a familiar, big-eyed face: Fond du Lac, a four-old-female that was fitted with a GPS-GSM transmitter as part of Project SNOWstorm, an owl research effort started in 2013. The return visit demonstrated that even snowy owls can’t get enough of the Badger State.

Lambeau Lay’s

Mmm, tastes like an NFL record number of victories. In January, Lay’s announced a chance for people to win a bag of chips, "Golden Grounds," made with potatoes grown in soil taken from Lambeau Field. A gimmick? Yes. But Packers fans like this stockholder are familiar with those, and we still eat ‘em up. Somebody pass the beer cheese dip to go with these chips.

Grace Weber rehearses in freezer

Method acting, meet Method singing, Wisconsin-style. To prepare for her national anthem performance at Lambeau Field in January, Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter Grace Weber rehearsed in a walk-in freezer. Weber might be from Wauwatosa originally, but she now lives in Los Angeles and said she decided to do the freezer prep when she saw the forecast for Lambeau (windchill of minus 5) and realized she didn’t know what it was like to sing in freezing temperatures.

Icehenge

Wisconsin winters can breed boredom, which sometimes can breed creativity like it did on Rock Lake in Lake Mills, where for the past decade a group has built Icehenge, an ice version of the famous English rock formation. When the group went to build the formation in January, old man winter nearly got the last laugh, with the ice measuring 16 inches — 7 inches more than the ideal depth and almost too thick to create the 5-foot-tall formation.

Donald Driver buys Jabari Parker’s loft

Professional athletes in Wisconsin have a convivial history supporting and interacting with each other, from Randall Cobb and Aaron Rodgers sitting courtside at a Bucks game (Rodgers is a minority owner) to Brewers watching the Bucks clinch the title in 2021. And who can forget David Bakhtiari’s legendary beer-chugging skills at Bucks games? That relationship continues off the court, too, and between former Wisconsin athletes. In February, former Packers wide receiver Donald Driver bought former Bucks forward Jabari Parker’s $3 million Brewer’s Hill loft, promising to keep the murals Parker had painted that are an ode to Black history and culture.

World’s best cheese curds

In case anyone outside America’s Dairyland still had doubts, Wisconsin proved once again the state is home to the world’s happiest cows when local cheesemakers swept the new cheese curds categories at the World Championship Cheese Contest in March. Wisconsin dairies claimed the top five spots in both the flavored and unflavored categories and took home top awards in a handful of other classes.

Bald eagles in every county

Talk about a comeback. In March, conservationists announced an active bald eagle nest had been documented in Milwaukee County — marking the documentation of active nests in every one of Wisconsin's 72 counties. The raptor has made a remarkable comeback in the state, from just 107 documented nests in 1974 to 1,684 in 2019 — thanks in part to the banning of DDT, a chemical that thinned eagles' eggshells and caused them to break before the chicks hatched (Wisconsin was the first state to ban the chemical, in 1972). Bald eagles were removed from the state's endangered species list in 1997 and the federal list in 2007 but are still protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and other federal laws. And they're not out of the woods yet. Sixty-five percent of Wisconsin nests failed to produce an eaglet this year — significantly higher than the 20% failure rate of the past few years, which scientists suspect was due to the avian flu that swept through the continent this year.

Giannis thinks LA is too expensive

After signing a five-year supermax extension to stay in Milwaukee instead of taking his talents elsewhere in 2020, then winning the city its first NBA championship in 50 years in 2021, Giannis Antetokounmpo was already a beloved athlete in Milwaukee when in May he proved he really is one of us — a frugal Wisconsinite. After leaving a Los Angeles restaurant, Antetokounmpo told a TMZ reporter the city was too expensive and “not for me.” Will somebody get the guy a lifetime supply of Chick-fil-A already?

The 'up north' debate rages on

Just like the answer to how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie pop, the world may never know exactly where “up north” begins in Wisconsin. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop debating and trying to define it. This year, we tried to narrow it down based on factors including highways and ecological zones. We got a little closer to a definition, but ultimately landed where these debates usually do: up north isn’t so much a place as a state of mind.

Quadzilla vs. minor league mascot

It’s tough being a mascot in Wisconsin. Just ask the two Racing Sausages taken out by Pittsburgh Pirates first baseman Randall Simon in 2003, or “Elvis,” the Kenosha Kingfish mascot who got steamrolled by AJ Dillon in July. The latter was a planned stunt, however — both parties had agreed to do the “Oklahoma Drill,” in which two players try to take each other down one-on-one. “Elvis vs. @ajdillon7 ended as expected … ” the Kingfish tweeted with a video showing Dillon flattening the mascot, causing his costume’s head to fly off. The mascot’s portrayer, Trey Meier, said he got the wind knocked out of him but was otherwise OK, and Dillon apologized after for the severity of the hit, although it wasn’t really his fault — Quadzilla only knows one speed, the one that gets him through a defensive line.

Kwik Trip wedding photos

This is a whole new level of love. After Katie and Mark Endres got married this summer in La Crosse, the couple made a pit stop at Kwik Trip for some wedding photos before heading to their reception. The convenience store, which is based in La Crosse, had been a favorite stopping point for the pair while they were dating and driving between Mark’s home in Milwaukee and Katie’s in La Crosse. When they got married, they wanted to find a fun, lighthearted spot to make memories and a Kwik Trip store between their church and reception hall seemed like the perfect place. The couple did take other photos elsewhere, but the Kwik Trip photos might be the ones that created the lasting memories they hoped they would.

Bernie’s slide gets the best of Dodgers reporter

There are certain things that just should be left to professional Wisconsinites: cheese, beer and sliding down Bernie’s slide at American Family Field. Los Angeles Dodgers TV reporter David Vassegh learned that last one the hard way this August, fracturing multiple bones in his hand and ribs after taking his turn on the slide and crashing into a padded wall at the bottom. The reporter was a good sport about it, reporting with a cast on his arm and joking he does his own stunts “Tom Cruise style.” The Brewers had fun with the incident, too, taping off the wall with caution tape and a crime scene outline.

Japanese YouTuber shows off Wisconsin

“Wisconsin is sooo underrated,” Takuya George Maeda, aka George Japan, starts off a TikTok video that went viral in September. Preach. The YouTuber was in Wisconsin as part of a two-year journey to visit his subscribers around the world, and in a short vlog shared some highlights of his visit including “beautiful lakes,” a stop at the Walworth County Fair — one of the state’s oldest — and, of course, a trip to Culver’s for a ButterBurger (better than McDonald’s, he says) and cheese curds. We won’t hold it against him that he (accidentally?) goes to Edwards Apple Orchard in Illinois, when there are so many options here. We’ll show you some next time you’re in town, George.

AJ Dillon loves the Door

Door County has been called the Cape Cod of the Midwest, so it makes sense that Packers running back AJ Dillon — who grew up along the ocean in New London, Connecticut, and spent time in Cape Cod while in prep school in Massachusetts — would fall in love with the idyllic peninsula northeast of Green Bay after his now-wife Gabrielle took him to her family’s house in Egg Harbor. The couple got married there in June, and Dillon came to love the peninsula as much as his wife and her family do. In September, they shared some of their favorite spots in Door County, including where Dillon got the best wings he’s ever eaten in America — AC Tap in Baileys Harbor.

BOB-BY brings his brothers to MKE

Bobby Portis might not have the nationwide fame of Giannis, but he has the hearts of Milwaukeeans — and they have his. The hardworking Bucks role player has become a fan favorite, with chants of “Bob-by! Bob-by! Bob-by!” ringing through Fiserv Forum whenever he's on the court, and sometimes when he’s not. In July, VISIT Milwaukee featured him as “Milwaukee’s hype man” in a new ad campaign. The love is mutual, with Portis feeling such a connection to the city that he brought his two younger brothers here. They soon also recognized what a special place Milwaukee is, with 21-year-old Jarod Portis summing up not just the state’s fanbase, but its general ethos: “It just seems like more of a homier feel and the fans are more dedicated, and they embrace their teams here in Wisconsin.”

Milwaukee is one of the best places to visit

The secret’s out. Milwaukee’s been getting more national attention over the past few years, especially after landing the Democratic National Convention in 2020, and this year two more publications recognized the city as a great spot to visit. First, the New York Times included the city's Bronzeville neighborhood on its list of 52 places to visit this year. Then National Geographic included Milwaukee on its annual Best of the World list, naming it one of the 25 best places to travel to in 2023.

JR Radcliffe contributed to this story. Contact Chelsey Lewis at clewis@journalsentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter at @chelseylew and @TravelMJS and Facebook at Journal Sentinel Travel.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: 18 of the most Wisconsin stories of 2022