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Late Summer Trip, August 4-10, 2005: Because the Alaska trip was canceled, this was to be our summer vacation. It began the day our summer classes ended. I finished grading finals and submitting semester grades, and Brenda gathered up her exams to bring along to grade. We got out of town as soon as we could on Thursday, and drove to Morton to stay the night with Beckie, Del, and Lowell.
The next day, we headed north, through Eureka IL, where Ronald Reagan attended college. We got to the small community of Delavin WI in the late morning. Delavin is the home of several Frank Lloyd Wright homes, but the people in the Chamber of Commerce don't know where they are. (Great job of tourism prevention, folks!) The city librarians have a file of newspaper clippings about the homes, but they are on a lake south of town, and we didn't have time to hunt them down. Delavin has also been the historic wintering home of several circuses, and is quite a picturesque place, as you can see in the picture to the right.
	The reason we couldn't spend a lot of time sleuthing in the Delavin environs is that we had reservations for a 1:45 tour of the S.C. Johnson headquarters in Racine WI. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the office tower in the picture to the left, as well as the shorter office building behind it. The tower is only used for storage, as it doesn't meet current code requirements. We enjoyed seeing the FLW-designed desks and rolling chairs, painted in Cherokee Red. I was interested to learn that SCJ owns Eureka, the manufacturers of my tent and those I used at Old Mizzou back in the Seventies.
After finishing our tour, we drove through Milwaukee to Port Washington, where we walked along the harbor and bought some cheese and sausage. The highway into Port Washington is named to honor the 84th Infantry "Railsplitters," the unit in which my Dad served. From PW, we drove to the Riverport area of Sheboygan, where we ate our first fish dinner of the trip. Brenda enjoyed the grilled whitefish, and I savored the Norwegian salmon. We went on to Manitowoc for a hot fudge sundae at the historic Penguin drive-in, and turned in at a local chain motel.
	(The communities mentioned in the account after Kewaunee are in Door County. For a map of Door County, click here.)
	The next morning, we drove north to Kewaunee, where we shopped at a local farmers' and artisans' market. Further north, we came to Jacksonport, which was holding its annual Cherry Festival. We found very little tie-in to cherries, but it DID seem to be a good excuse for local vendors to set up displays. (Not a lot different from what you can see at other community fairs.) We did eat a lunch of brats and burger, and WERE able to enjoy a piece of cherry pie. We also enjoyed listening to Mark Wahl, a folk singer from Madison WI, while we dined.
We continued driving north through Bailey's Harbor, Sister Bay, and Ellison Bay, until we came to Newport State Park, our home for the night. Because we planned our trip rather late, we found conventional accommodations to be rather hard to come by on the weekend, so we agreed to camp for one night. Rather than camping at Peninsula SP, the most popular camping location in the state (it sounded loud and crowded to us), we chose Newport, where we would have to backpack in about a mile and a half. My feeling is that drunks and loud people are less likely to go to that much effort to camp, and I was right. Our campsite was secluded, and we enjoyed a cool, quiet evening.
	In the morning (Sunday), we struck camp and were back at the car by about 8:00. We drove north to Gills Rock and took the car on the ferry to Washington Island. Driving to the northeast edge of the island, we then took the Karfi passenger ferry to Rock Island, a state park. Rock Island is the home of a historic lighthouse that dates back to the mid-19th century. The light itself is at the top of a multi-story building in which the lighthouse keeper (and the assistant) lived during the season. (In winters, the lake froze up and there was no need to maintain this navigation aid.) Today, a mechanized beacon atop a girder tower serves this function.
While hiking the perimeter of the island, we spied two bald eagles that a ranger had told us to be on the lookout for. We enjoyed the visit to this park, but finally took the ferries back in reverse order to get back to the mainland and continue our touristing. Driving south along the western (Green Bay) side of the Door County peninsula, we came to Fish Creek, where we partook of a local custom, a "fish boil" supper at a restaurant called Pelletier's.
After boiling potatoes, onions, and fish the required length of time, the "chef" uses a unique method to get rid of the fish oil scum floating at the top of the pot. He throws a can of diesel fuel on the fire, which causes it to flare up and cause the pot to boil over, thereby removing the scum from the pot. It may not sound too delicious, but our dinner actually was quite good. After visiting a few local shops, we continued south to Egg Harbor, where we stayed at the very nice Lull-Abi Inn for the night.
On Monday morning, Brenda finished the grading she had been working on (grades were due on Monday), and then we had a Swedish pancake brunch at Al Johnson's restaurant in Sister Bay. After a round of miniature golf (I won by only one stroke), we bought some cherries and cherry products at a local cherry farm, and drove south to our next destination, Algoma. Along the way, we stopped at a couple of antique malls, including one in Sturgeon Bay, and picked up just a few things. Our room at the Algoma Beach Motel, back on the eastern (Lake Michigan) side of the peninsula, was right on the beach. We had a nice supper at a local establishment, and enjoyed a walk along the beach and through the town. We were awakened in the morning by seagulls who wanted to make sure that we didn't miss the sunrise on the lake. We didn't! I took a picture using an old-fashioned film camera, as by this time my memory card was full. Our personal memories were full, too, of our pleasant interlude between the summer and fall semesters. We retraced our path south to Beckie and Del's, and eventually back to the responsibilities that awaited us in Cape Girardeau.










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