Door County Delights
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2009
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Trip End
Sep 20, 2009
Door County, Wisconsin
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Dear inclined reader,
You are most likely going to fit into either of 2 categories: either you're a city dweller in the American Great Lakes region in which case you’re probably well aware of Door County as a quaint weekend getaway if you have not in fact been there already yourself. You may be reading this to research a trip of your own there. Or you live on the fringes of the country or elsewhere in the world and will never have heard of it. then you’re probably reading this because you know us (cheers!). In the latter case let us enlighten you:
Hold up your left hand facing away from you: Door County is a thumb-shaped Peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan from the hand that is the State of Wisconsin (or for the Brits: it’s the spout of the Wisconsin teakettle). Now Wisconsin is not exactly on the international tourist trail although it starts just North of Chicago. Can’t say much about the cities (the 3 largest being Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay) but Wisconsin certainly has some beautiful scenery to boast. The east of Wisconsin drops into Lake Michigan whereas the North is bordered by Lake Superior. So fishing and water sports are the main draw.
The Great Lakes hold 90 per cent of North America’s fresh water and over 10% of the World’s fresh water. Lake Superior is the mother of them all: an average of about 400m deep it would easily accommodate the water of all the other 4-and-a-bit Great Lakes combined.
Door County consists of a string of villages along the lakeside perimeter of an elongated northward pointing granite outcrop steeped in Indian and subsequent Scandinavian heritage. It is bordered by the calmer Green Bay in the west and tempestuous Lake Michigan in the East. The countryside is a mix of lakeside vistas, forests, orchards and fields dotted with those typical red barns, silos and windmills: picture postcard rural American Midwest. The people are very friendly and helpful. This comes somewhat as a surprise given that in summer and fall it gets overrun with American tourists clogging up the few roads. In winter, though, it is a fairly forlorn and isolated place, in parts only navigable by snow mobile. Catering, gift shops and accommodation mainly lay out its infrastructure. But that does not distract from the serenity the whole county exudes. With more shoreline than any other US county it has it’s own microclimate which in turn has led to extraordinarily successful fruit growing: the region is famous for its apples and is America’s leading cherry growing centre. As a visitor you will get bombarded by cherry pie, heck, you can even get cherry wine. Care for more factoids? Door County lies on the 45th parallel and is thus exactly halfway between the North Pole and the equator. Who’d a thought it, ey?
It took us about 7 hours to drive up from Peoria, IL, to get to our first stop: Fish Creek. Here we went straight for a Door Country specialty: a fish boil. This involves onions, potatoes and fish in a big witch-sized cauldron over a fire. Just when the fish is about ready the daredevil locals then chuck a bit of kerosene on the fire incending a several meter high flare-up of the flames. This leads to the kettle boiling over sending the fish oils swimming on top gushing over the sides, thus leaving a virtually fat-free dee-liciously chewy whitefish to pleasure your palate. Very dramatic. Goes well with cherry pie.
The next day we set up our tent in the nearby Peninsula State Park and hired a double kayak in which we explored Ephraim’s Eagle Bay (plenty of Canada geese) and had a picnic on Horseshoe Island. Afterwards we took the Eagle trail for some late afternoon hiking and spotted a porcupine high up in a birch tree munching away at the leaves. It was certainly a new one on me that porcupines could climb trees. Great stuff! We watched the sun set over Green Bay from atop the soaring and windswept Eagle Tower observatory. Although we had a picnic (and some very nice local cranberry wine) ready we decided to go for a warm meal in the excellent Cookery restaurant in Fish Creek. We were the only ones sitting in the biting wind on the porch and even had a rugged and heavily bearded button-eyed outdoorsman ask us if we were from Montana (which I took to be a splendid compliment to our hardiness). But we didn’t want a cozy indoor meal given we were actually supposed to be camping.
The next day took us to Newport State Park where we secured the best camping spot on the Door Peninsula: a solitary pitch atop a sand dune looking out over Lake Michigan (site 16): nobody else in sight, a beach to ourselves, our own campfire and even a little toilet in the woods. We spent the day walking pretty much every trail in the park. We took a sunset dip in Europe Lake nearby and then settled around the campfire to eat our marvelous smoked Atlantic salmon, courtesy of the Gills Rock Smoke House, washed down with my beloved cranberry wine. The evening finished off with some star gazing.
And the next morning turned out to be beautiful. After a delicious breakfast of local bread, jam and cheese we decided to call it a beach day and I took the long trip back to the park administration to secure our campsite for yet another day of mainly skinny dipping in Lake Michigan, reading, munching water melon and hiking crowned by another nice evening by the campfire. Magical. During our time in Newport State Park we spotted deer, sea eagles, ospreys, hawks, the majestic monarch butterflies (who flutter here every year from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula), various snakes, and were even visited by a playful pair of weasels by the campfire.
Next morning we hired some kayaks from a bunch of young enthusiasts at Rowleys Bay and went up the Mink River estuary for some bird spotting: hawks and a grey heron were sighted.
Afterwards we took a stroll along the wave beaten dolomite promontory of Cave Point County Park that gives way to the south to some of the highest dunes of the Great Lakes region at Whitefish Dunes State Park. The tranquil sands a complete contrast to the rough spectacle only a few hundred meters further back. The late afternoon sun was out and cast its amber light to illuminate a lakeside scene from the pages of a history book: the beach was virtually empty but for a group of Amish people in full dress. Enchanting.
That evening we stayed at Baileys Harbor and had a slightly premature dinner to celebrate Regine’s upcoming birthday at the Harbor Fish Market and Grille: the most luscious 3-course lobster meal. This time without cherry pie.
Early the next morning we drove straight back to Chicago Airport. On the way we enjoyed the numerous alternative rock radio stations that we just don’t have in England (or Germany for that matter). My voice was certainly a bit raspier when we arrived at O’Hare only to meet my old American Football crazed friend Frank there negotiating his way into Lufthansa’s first class. He was enjoying the perks of being a Lufthansa employee: he’d flown over for 5 days to watch a football game in Seattle, WA, missed another one in Oakland, CA, due to unavailable stand-by flights, flew to Peoria to pick up a closet full of football memorabilia my sister had collected for him and then flew back to Germany out of Chicago. Crazy!!!! Some great fun was had. Then it was back home for us, too, with horrible United Airlines who hadn’t managed to seat the 2 of us together although we’d checked in 6 ½ hours before departure. Thankfully the cabin staff made up for the ground staff’s incompetence and we found ourselves holding hands on the flight back to Heathrow reminiscing on our beautiful holiday off the tourist track in America. We’ll be back!
