By GINNY VAN ALYEA

When my family's plans for President's Weekend changed, while we were already in the car headed to Michigan, we quickly decided we didn't just want to pull back into our garage and stay home. Our list of spontaneous trips was short, and against my son's objections, we wanted to go see some art. Madison, WI was within a couple of hours drive, and though the temperature was colder than Chicago, it's a city that embraces winter and offered a couple of museums as well as supper clubs we could visit.

Saturday evening while headed to our hotel, we wondered at the flurry of college students jogging near the lake in shorts. It turned out they were participating in Lily’s Classic, an annual fundraiser for epilepsy research that is sponsored by a fraternity at the University of Wisconsin. Despite clear skies and some waning sun, we remained bundled up and walked across downtown, past the state capitol to an early-bird dinner at the famous Tornado Room for some fortifying steaks and martinis (or Shirley Temples). Madison's energy on a Saturday evening undoubtedly centers on the campus of the University, but for everyone else who isn't a college student, there was plenty happening in a very-walkable downtown within the radius of the glowing statehouse.

Sunday morning the temperatures dropped further, so we set out to explore the UW campus as well as the city by ducking into various buildings, such as the Memorial Union, where crowds of students were perched with their laptops or scrolling their phones. Not far from the Union is the university's Chazen Museum of Art. A broad, brutalist structure that was initially constructed in the