Thursday, September 30

So it's finally Sunday morning and the rain has stopped.  My tennies, however are still wet from yesterday, so after a nice tumble in the dryer, we head back out for another day of exploring the Cape Cod of the Midwest.

Our morning consisting of some driving, with stopping for me to take pictures.

Moonlight Bay

More Moonlight Bay

 We then headed to Cana Island Lighthouse.  It was my first lighthouse and there were some neat things there to see there.  It was part museum and part park.

Sign in the kitchen

Lighthouse from beach

Sweet bathrooms

There were so many neat things to see and photograph here.  Next stop...more scenic pictures. 

Wednesday, September 29th

So next stop, Von Stiehl winery in Egg Habor.  They offered free wine sampling, which in retrospect, I realize I went about completely wrong.  I only tried like 4 or 5 wines, and they were all ones that I thought I would liked.  I should have tried others, because who knows, I could have broadened my horizons, about  wine that is.  I bought an awesome bottle of a sweet white called Mademoiselle.  It has a lovely wrapper.

It's amazing how a few little bits of wine make you tipsy and ready to buy a whole case.

From the Von Stiehl winery we went directly to the Door County Peninsula winery in Carlsville.  Here I tried lots of wines, a few I didn't like.  I was so excited to go there because all over Door County, they had this wine from there called Hallowine, in a lovely bottle and I was all excited.  Thank goodness I tried it before I bought it, it was gross.  It was like a mulled cider and supposed to be served warm.  Not good at all.  I bought a bottle of pear wine.  Yeah I know.


And with that last stop, we finally headed home to have the dinner we collected during the day, smoked fish, Corsica bread and Caesar salad.   Tomorrow- lighthouses  and sunshine.

Tuesday, September 28

Sorry for the interruption.

Look closely, the gull is there.

So I mean, what do you do after visiting the lovely Christmas store and their public bathroom??  It was time for Lunch.  We had lunch in the park where we enjoyed delicious turkey sandwiches on hard rolls from Clausens.  Being right on the lake, or the ocean as I like to call it, you would expect to see many sea gulls there, however, there was just one lone bird.








Please keep in mind it's only about 1 pm at this time.

We then went to do more shopping, we went to a neat kitchen store were I got the cutest little tongs ever for serving very small appetizers.  Play your cards right and maybe I will serve something that uses them sometime when you visit.  We also went to a neat fabric store, where I purchased some supplies for a Christmas present but for obvious reasons, that's all I can say.

We then stopped at a gallery in Sister Bay, the Frykman Studio Gallery, where quite frankly, I realized that I take pretty good pictures.  Here is link to one of their pictures: http://www.door-county-photography.com/gallery/rock-island-state-park/6802784

Now look at mine.  I think it's comparably good.  It was nice confidence boost going there.


From Sister Bay we headed to Ephraim where we visited some lovely home decorating stores and I was able to purchase some more Christmas gifts.


We stopped for a quick bite at Joe Jo's Pizza and gelato.  The pizza had a deliciously thin crust.  But the decor was weird.  There were the most beautiful quilts hanging on the walls, but the gaudiest curtains etc inside.  It was such a weird hodge podge.


Next stop - wineries!

Friday, September 17

So one of the many stops on Saturday was a place called Uncle Tom's Cabin.
It was combination store and tribute to someone called Tom.  Now the funny part is, it has nothing to do with what you think Uncle Tom's Cabin would be about.

So here is an actual display from Uncle Tom's Cabin as well as some of the pictures on the wall. They also sold pancake mix and peanut brittle here.  LOL


 


So after Uncle Tom's, we went to one of the pretties places I have seen in a long time.  We went to Tannebaum's Christmas house.  It was so lovely.  Each tree was awesomely decorated with a different theme.  I actually was able to get some Christmas presents here.

Wednesday, September 15

This is part 3 of the door county series.

So Saturday morning started early.  I was awake by a little after 5 and couldn't fall back to sleep.  This was lucky though, because I would have missed a glorious sunrise had I gone back to sleep.
The sunrise was misleading though because by about 8 am it was raining, pretty hard at times, and didn't stop until dark that night.  We didn't let that slow us down though.

In the rain, we went to Whitefish Dunes State Parks.  There was this awesome over look where you could see up and down the sand beach and if you did not know better, you seriously would have thought that you were at the ocean.  With the rain and wind, the waves pretty cool to watch come in.   The next stop was Cave Point County Park.  This had cool lookouts as well, but everything here was rock.  With the rain, I was pretty sure I was going to slip on the rock and fall.  The cool part about this place was that you could see where the waves would crash in against the rock in these spots were the rock was recessed.

Click here to see video of the waves 

So it's only 9:30 ish now and completely soaked, we head out to see more.  Our next stop was the door county bakery in Sister Bay for coffee and breakfast.  This is where I had some of the best bread ever.  They make this bread called Corsica bread.  It has the most awesome texture.  The bottom is crunch and soaked in olive oil and the top is crunch and coated with sesame seeds.  Instead of selling it by the loaf, they sell it by the pound.

Because it was raining, we decided it was a good time to drive, so we drove all the way to the tip and then worked our way back down.  We stopped for smoked fish and tried to see the car ferry to Washington Island but it was too far out.

There is coolest tree covered road in the north end of door county that is a perfect S curve.  I forgot to take a picture.  

Tomorrow, I will start with our visit to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Monday, September 13

This is part two of a many day series about the trip to door county.

So after we left the dead goat, we went to the weekend cottage.  It was a lovely three bedroom house with all the modern conviences, including but not limited to:

A lovely full kitchen, with appliances and dishes and anything else you could need.  Not pictured is a lovely plate collection on the wall.

The house also had a lovely pellet stove that provided heat and a wonder cozy feeling in the cottage.  ( I think it's important to note that Karlene was masterful both at operating the stove and cleaning it)

 An important part of any vacation destination is the ambiance and this lovely framed doily collection really added to the homey feel.

View from the front seat

After a quick dinner and unloading, we headed out to see some of the sights of Door County and then went to a drive in movie, where we could watch a movie in cozy pants in the comfort of our own vehicle.  The featured films were Eat, Pray, Love and some other movie we didn't stay for.  The funny part is, it was exactly like the drive ins of my younger years.  The neat thing was that there we were benches up front were you could watch the movie from if the weather so permitted.  And mosquitoes were not a problem at all, because PIC mosquito coils were available for sale at the concession stand to magically repel all of the those little pests.  That pretty much concludes the first the day.  So to summarize, day one - left at noon, traveled 4 hours, went to 4 stores, saw one dead goat and one movie. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Sunday, September 12th

Over the next few days, I would like to share with you some highlights from my recent weekend trip to door county. It was the first time I had been there in many years.  I also have never spent that much time there.

So Friday, we left Madison about noon and headed north.  After getting gas and making pretty good time, we arrived in Sturgeon Bay about 4 pm.  Not wanting to waste any precious time, we immediately started going to places I had read about in the many guidebooks I was provided with to prepare for this trip.  One of the places I wanted to check out was a Lang Store.  Unfamiliar with the surroundings, ( I was the rider) we moved into the left lane to turn.  All I could see was a Target sign and with much delight I exclaimed, " Are we going to Target?"  After some laughter, the Lang store was pointed out to me.  We went through the Lang store, enjoyed the public restroom and moved on to the next stop, the door county candle company.  Now, I think it's important that you know at this point, I'm on day 2.5 of a cold and had spent most of the ride up blowing my nose.  So we walk into this candle store and this guy keeps telling us about the candles, but there is no way I can smell them.  The longer I am in there the more my nose runs and it gets to the point where my eyes are watering and I just need to get out.  Smelling coffee beans at this point to cleanse the smells were not going to help me differentiate between the scents. Luckily my friend was able to smell the things I wanted to buy and verify their scents weren't horrible.


The friend I went to Door County with, has been there many times before and knows it like the back of her hand.  One of her favorite things to do there is to stop at farmer's markets and enjoy the samples.  So on the way to her house, we stopped at a farm market to check things out and maybe score some ice cream.  We ended up with some pizza for dinner.  There was a neat little area outside where there were some small animals for the city folks to look at and feed, so we wandered over to check them out.  The first corral held some pigs and I think they may have been pot belly pigs and were pretty
cute.

  So next to the pigs, was a cow ( there is no picture because the cow couldn't be bothered to turn it's head) , some more pigs (no picture- a pig is a pig) and then we got to the goats.  There was one that was pretty friendly ( the brown one) and even tried to get into Karlene's purse.  Luckily, it didn't get anything important.  So we walk around the corner because one of the goats appears to be laying down on the ground.  All of a sudden, we both realized that maybe the goat was sick.  Upon closer inspection, we realized that the goat wasn't breathing.  So we were the only people in the area.  The guy who owned the farm was off by one of the other buildings working on something.  We couldn't let other people see this goat, so Karlene starts yelling "you who", trying to get his attention.  When that didn't work, she started waving her arms and yelling excuse me.  Finally, the guy rides his golf cart over wearing a look of "what the hell do these damn tourists want?"  He gets there and we go, "Um, your goat doesn't look so good"  and he looks at it and agrees with us and then starts stammering about what may have brought about his demise all while not seeming so surprised about the goat.  He calls over his helper and they get about the business of removing the goat.  So when you look at the goat, it had obviously not been "well" for a couple hours.  I just wonder how many people looked at it before we flagged the people down and thought that it was maybe a fainting goat.  I mean seriously, who would ever imagine they would see a dead goat? Followed by the "you who"-ing and arm waving, it was a pretty memorable way to start a weekend.....

Thursday, September 9

So if you watch TV at all, you will have noticed that lately there has been a lot of attention on hoarding.  If you are like me, every time you watch one of these shows, you look around and start to throw things out.  Recently, my laptop crashed and when it was resurrected,  one of the things I was tasked with was transferring the itunes from the old computer to the new one.  So I transferred all 3250 songs.  The problem is when you transfer all the songs, itunes decides to check them all, as in mark them all to be synced to your ipod.  The problem is, my ipod only holds 1600 songs, so I need to go through and uncheck half the songs so that I can sync my ipod again.  So I'm going through the list and there are CD's in there that I only like one song on, but do you think I will delete the others, oh no, I just uncheck them.  So I have to realize that I'm a song hoarder because I really can't let go of the songs I don't like to listen to in case I want them some day.  How silly is that??  At least it's not a stack of newspapers......

Tuesday, September 7

So I was home over the Labor day weekend visiting my family and on Sunday, they had some friends over for a cookout.  One of the couples cares for the husbands brother as he blind.  The blind man's name is Uncle Bob.  ( honest)
So Bob is pretty easy company because he wears his head phones and listens to baseball or reads some braille ESPN, all from the comfort of a rocker.  Now, mentally, Bob is  fully able but I have to imagine the blindness has created significant social isolation.  As a result, Bob says some pretty funny shit.  He always just kind of talks and you never know if he is responding to his head phones or something in the conversation.


My favorite was last summer at the fourth of July party, I was telling people that story about the sham-wow guy who got in trouble with the hooker that bit his tongue  and out of no where, at completely the right time, Bob chimes in with "EWWW".  Maybe someone struck out, maybe he heard the story, there is really no way to know.

Monday, September 6

So tonight I was home and watching the bachelor pad and thinking about men and dating.  After my recent streak of not putting up with crap, I'm obviously between flavors of the week.  As much as the idea of being in some sort of relationship frightens me, that is what I would like to eventually end up with.  I'll even admit it, I was starting to feel a little lonely when I looked outside my window and I saw a frog leaping across the sidewalk.  I shit you not, an actual frog just hopping along, outside the window.  I have NEVER seen one around here before in my grass where I live and I have lived here almost 10 years.  I feel like it's got to be some kind of sign that if I kiss enough frogs, eventually, I will find my prince and that I shouldn't give up hope.  Well, either that or I just don't pay enough attention to  my surroundings.