June 18, 2021 Illinois and Wisconsin
As I type this post, I find myself in a public library for the first time since the pandemic started. Our library at home had just reopened two weeks before we left on this trip and I had no reason to go up there. We are now in Sturgeon Bay, WI winding up a visit to Door County on the peninsula between Lake Michigan and Green Bay. I remember reading about this area in National Geographic years ago and have always wanted to visit. Since Door County is one we have not visited for geocaching, we set aside two days at Peninsula State Park.
To get here, we traveled from Johnstown, PA by way of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Illinois. Here are the highlights.
We make good use of the 16 hours of daylight these days leading up to the solstice. I am awake around 5:00 just as the sky begins to lighten and we usually don't get around to cooking dinner until 8:00 and enjoy the twilight hour before retiring for the night. Driving though the countryside on back roads with the windows down on cool mornings is a pleasure.
We entered southern Illinois and spent some time in the town of Casey and viewed about a dozen of the 30 large-scale items, some of them the world's largest.
We left Casey and headed north to visit my best friend from elementary school, Dawn, in Tuscola. Another first for us since the pandemic started - buffet at a Chinese restaurant. Then we enjoyed time in a local park as the evening cooled down. The last time we visited Dawn was 10 years ago, but we have no trouble picking up where we left off. Last winter, I pulled out the shoebox where I have kept all the letters she wrote to me after I moved away from Illinois, covering the years 1970 to 1977, and I reread them. The visit was short and sweet and we promised it wouldn't be another 10 years between visits. The next morning, we drove 7 miles south to Arcola where I lived from 1958 to 1970 and visited places that are significant to my time there.
Arcola boasts that it is the Broomcorn Capital of the World.
The downtown area (all two blocks of it) has fiberglass brooms
painted with different scenes. One day, I hope to visit Arcola in September
for a Broom Corn Festival (they didn't start them until after I moved away).
My favorite - "Lincoln Swept Here"
Next on our places I have wanted to visit was Starved Rock State Park, situated along the Illinois River. We hiked to the waterfall in St. Louis Canyon and enjoyed having it all to ourselves.
View of the Illinois River from the top of Starved Rock
St. Louis Canyon, Starved Rock State Park
Before leaving northern Illinois, we made a point of hiking around Beverly Lake to find the third oldest active geocache in the world. Another one checked off our list of 100 oldest caches (not all of them are in the U.S.)
Beverly Lake and the cache that was hidden in May 2000
Our first campground in Wisconsin was a lovely Sauk County Park. It is just a few miles north of Spring Green so we were fortunate to book a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright's home Taliesin and were 2 of just 5 people on the tour. We enjoyed visiting Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona a few years ago, and enjoyed his Wisconsin home just as much.
Brian demonstrates the architectural element used by Wright -
low doorways that enhanced the opening up of an interior room.
There were some ceilings in the house that were too low for him.
The rolling hills and valleys in southwestern Wisconsin are lovely. I spotted several pairs of sandhill cranes and never get tired of seeing redwing blackbirds perched on fenceposts and flitting over fields just as I remember when I was a child. On our way back to the campground one evening, we saw a sign that read Our Lady of the Fields Shrine. After following arrows down several rural roads, we found this beautiful little church.
Today's adventure all around Door County started in Peninsula State Park. We have learned to visit popular places early in the day before they get crowded, so we were at Eagle Tower by 6:30. The second tower at this site fell a few years ago and we were lucky that the reconstruction had recently opened. We could smell the fresh sawn wood as we climbed up the ramp, through the canopy, and onto the viewing platform overlooking the bay.
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The ramp starts at the left and continues through the trees and then up
to the right.
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I wonder if all the wood in this construction was purchased before
the recent prices skyrocketed.
Looking down from the top
We enjoy seeing barn quilts all over the country. With Door County Barn Quilt Trail map in hand, here are a few we were able to photograph (others we could see, but not get photos):
This is the tip of Door County Peninsula. We chose not to take a ferry ride to
Washington Island in the distance. The body of water is known as Death's Door
Strait - lots of shipwrecks all around this peninsula.
Seen while geocaching: We continue to encounter unique, quirky, interesting locations while seeking out caches.
I just liked the way the trees are growing on the different
strata of the roadcut.
Nick Englebert's farmhouse that he covered with mosaics of broken
china, glass, shells, etc.
Englebert also created sculptures in the yard.
part of a wall in progress
This geocache near Milwaukee is named "The Doctor is In".
It is a gadget cache built as a Tardis.
It only took Brian two tries to successfully repeat the pattern of blinking lights
to open the door. Remember the game Simon?
On the floor inside the Tardis
We loved this cache in Ephraim (Door County) named "Graffiti Me."
There is no physical container or log sheet to sign. The building IS the log to sign.
I signed it ZHR and S.S. Moby (our geocaching initials and the nickname of our big
white Nissan van) because the tradition is the boat captains who docked here would
write their names and the names of their boats on the building. We saw several marriage
proposals written on the clapboards.
While out searching for barn quilts, we came across this unique location and
the art around it.
Wisconsin Motorcycle Memorial
Tomorrow is the day we move onto Ottawa National Forest in northern Wisconsin.
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