Miko and Me: Door County

Let me take you back to June, 2022. Yes, that is how far behind I am.

How can you go to eastern Wisconsin without going to Door County, that little artsy peninsula that juts up into Lake Michigan. I was torn between staying on the bay side of the peninsula where the touristy towns of Egg Harbor and Sister Bay reside or the quieter rough and tumble lake side. I ended up on the lake side in Bailey's Harbor at Bailey's Grove Campground. It really didn't make that much difference where I stayed as you could get from one side of the peninsula to the other in about 15 minutes.

One day I took the Door County Coastal Byway which is a 66 mile scenic drive that goes up one side of the peninsula to the tip and down the other side. I went through the touristy towns, there were some galleries that were worth browsing in and I meandered thru a farm market where I sampled fifty million different jams, jellies, salsas and best of all chocolates. Door County is the 4th largest cherry producing region in the country and most of what I sampled had something to do with cherries.

I stopped at the Hands On Art Studio which lives up to it's name. When you get there, you decide what type of art you want to create. You could do mosaics, ceramics, canvas or glassware painting, stamped jewelry or my choice – fused glass. They have different fused glass inspirational pieces to get those creative juices flowing. You then pick out pieces of glass and put them together in a comely manner. When you are ready, they fuse the glass for you and you have your very own glass piece that you have created. Let's just say, it did not go well. Evidently, I have no inner artist, or my inner artist was on holiday someplace. I finally gave up, made my apologies to the staff and left. No creative fused art for me.

It was supposed to eventually become a long hanging piece of glass.

One of the most fun (I really wanted to use the word funnest here) things I did was to take a boat ride. There are several types of boat rides you can take. Kayaks or a big boat that chugs along the shoreline in a very staid manner are two of the choices you can do. The one I picked was from Door County Adventure Rafting. The boat was a 24 ft rigid inflatable boat which held 12 people and it went really really fast. The driver did some boat equivalents of wheelies in the bay and then we were off along the coast. The boat was small enough that the captain could get us into some of the caves along the way. We also saw some of the 240 shipwrecks that are known to have occurred around Door County. I had made reservations online and evidently, I inadvertently made the reservation for the following week. Not knowing that I had done that, I sauntered down to the pier and got myself on the boat. Yup, I stowed away. I don't think they even noticed that I wasn't supposed to be there.