Wisconsin - Church of Cheese!

Cheese, brats, wine, beer, and pie, all encased in a beautiful state! We purposely dropped down from Canada through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to experience all that is Wisconsin – or at least all that we could squeeze out of the northern part of the state in a few days. America’s Dairyland did not disappoint. Bucking our trend of finding adventures that require some athleticism (meaning only that we sweat and are happily tired and sore afterwards), our first day in Wisconsin we headed past Green Bay to Door County for some sightseeing and wine touring/tasting. We did not make it all the way to Sturgeon Bay since we stopped in Brussels for some tasty brats (called “trippes”) at the Belgian Delight Cafe. We then chose to visit Algoma on the Lake Michigan coast to tour the Von Stiehl Winery. They are the oldest licensed wine makers in Wisconsin. The tour was awesome, especially since we encountered their head of wine production, Dave, and spent about 20 minutes talking to him in detail about the science and art of winemaking. After the tour we stayed for a couple of hours, tasted about a dozen wines, and we may have imbibed a couple of glasses along with some Wisconsin cheese and chocolates; our excuse is that they had wifi (about as rare as Sasquatch in the backwoods and rural regions of our country). Oh, and we left with 7 bottles of oak-aged joy, some bourbon-barreled apple cider, and cranberry wine.

The following day we were back in the woods. We started in our kayaks on the rather mirror-like Boulder Lake near our campsite, and finished it in Class II rapids on the Wolf River. Neither of us have a clue about white-water kayaking, so of course we had to try it. We got some advice from the bar tender at a local outfitter called “Bear Paw” to try a somewhat calmer 6.5 mile section of river. We discovered that our 12 foot open cockpit boats are decidedly not designed for the twists and turns of boulder strewn rivers with rapids, even just class I and II. Our mental risk-reward calculators may need calibration. We, along with the insides of our boats got very wet, but we had a blast, despite getting momentarily stuck on or between boulders and nearly capsizing once or twice. We had a closeup encounter with a bald eagle and a beaver (or it may have been a river otter) and multiple giant turtles. The reward at the end of the day was a meal at a local dive called the Grudgeville Pub and Grub, where we sampled the local Wisconsin brews and had fried cheese curds. Those alone are worth a trip to Wisconsin.

Next day, heavy from beer and cheese, we got up early to help kick off the Independence Day festival of our pub waitress’s home town, White Lake, population 346. We ran in their 5k/10k race and scored an awesome t-shirt and Dawn won a slice of homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie! Maybe it was because we worked for it, or that Dawn won it, but it was the best pie we’ve had in a long time. Dean didn’t win squat (the hazard of opting for the longer and more competitive option), so Dawn bought him a whole blackberry-peach pie from the Ladies Auxiliary.

We wish we had stayed longer. Wisconsin, at least in the summer, is a great place to be. I’ll let the hardy natives testify to their winters. Next stop: Minnesota.