Welcome to bus North American bus travel!
This trip requires you to take three buses each way. 1. a long trip on Greyhound from Toronto to Chicago crossing the boarder at Windsor/Detroit. 2. a short hop from Chicago up to Milwaukee on Greyhound and 3. a medium distance trip across Wisconsin operated by Greyhound's partner company Jefferson Lines.
- As per the previous answer you can find information on the stop locations on Greyhound.com
- We've done some research on when to book at Busbud, a bus travel site I work for. Your ticket is rather complicated (two countries, three buses, two bus companies) but you should still get a major discount for booking in around a month advance. A possible hack to saving money is looking at booking all three tickets separately, each: Toronto-Chicago, Chicago-Milwaukee and Milwaukee-Winona. However these are tight connections and you can't expect any assistance if you miss your connection on separate tickets, they may not even be honoured for the next bus if you miss the connection. If you want more flexibility booking last minute is always an option but will probably be a lot more expensive. Booking online is also usually much cheaper than booking at the station.
- Again at Busbud we've summarized Greyhound and Jefferson's luggage policies.
- Normally at stops the station staff or driver will help you transfer bags, but not always. At the border in Windsor/Detroit you may have to take your bag from underneath the bus and lug it through customs and immigration. Chicago is a particularly chaotic station in my experience, I'd see to it that it gets moved. If in doubt of what you need to do, just ask the driver!
- Same as above, when in doubt ask the driver!
Note that this itinerary has pretty short connection times. Greyhound and Jefferson will do their best to make sure you make your connections but if something happens, like a big delay at the border, and your inbound bus arrives late the connecting bus can't always wait. Normally in this case they'll just transfer your ticket over and put you on the following bus. On the way to Minnesota the big challenge is that there's only one bus a day from Milwaukee to Winona. If you do miss that connection, there is an Amtrak train later in the day that leaves from the same station in Milwaukee, Intermodal Station, to Winona. It's hard to stay what accommodations Greyhound will make in case you get stuck in Milwaukee, if any, other than telling you can take the bus the next day, in that case you may want to know about the Amtrak option before you get stuck in Milwaukee overnight.
PS: if you end up having a bit of extra time in Milwaukee you can run over to the great coffee shop across the street and also note in general the food options in the station its self are a bit more extensive in Milwaukee than in Chicago.