What We Did in Wisconsin

Making our way south from Michigan’s U.P. we drove down the western lakeshore of Lake Michigan into Wisconsin first stop: Green Bay.

Green Bay. While ESPN’s Chris Berman referred to Green Bay’s Lambeau Field as the “frozen tundra” it was anything but in late July.

Green Bay is, unsurprisingly, very much about its renowned NFL team the Packers. There’s even a Packers Heritage Trail you can follow if you’re a die hard. We stayed at the Hotel Northland (now a Marriott Autograph Collection hotel) which opened in 1924 and is a stop on the Heritage Trail being the place where Vince Lombardi held his introductory press conference and the hotel which housed the team during training in the 1950s. A Lombardi hat sculpture sits in the lobby as a tribute.

We walked along the Fox River in the evening and made our way across it to Chefusion for dinner, an absolute highlight of our stay. They had a $35 price fixe menu where you could order a starter (salads, mostly) and a small plate and a dessert. While the portions weren’t huge, it was plenty for us and I think their almond cake with pear ice cream may be the best dessert I’ve ever tasted.

Sister Bay. Green Bay was a stop to shorten our drive from Michigan before we made it up the Door Peninsula to visit friends in Sister Bay.

Door County has been referred to as “Wisconsin’s Cape Cod” and after you exit the four-lane highway onto the roundabout in Sturgeon Bay and continue on northward, you can see why. There are several great little laid-back resort towns on the ride up to Sister Bay, where our friends have relocated from Colorado. Despite a trip to the Sturgeon Bay urgent care to deal with a nasty bout of Michigan poison ivy, our trip was a huge success.

Sister Bay is another of these great little Door County villages out on the peninsula, with a fantastic downtown full of shops and restaurants, bars and coffee shops and a nice little beach and harbor on Lake Michigan. It was a slow-paced couple of days, wandering around, eating fun meals and visiting our friends’ brewery, the Peach Barn (where the motto is “Life is Beautiful. Eat a Peach. Drink a beer”). The Peach Barn offers a fantastic light Pilsner, several slightly hoppier IPAs, some great, tangy fruit-flavored beers (peach, of course, and others), a couple of stouts and live music every night in the summer. You can also grab one of the creations in some local restaurants and liquor stores (or right at the brewery) out on the peninsula. If you’re visiting be sure to stop in and tell Jason and Sarah hi for us (and maybe even buy one of their great hats).

The Lumberjack (and Jill) World Championships. A couple of years ago on CBS Sunday Morning, I watched a story about the Lumberjack World Championships and made a note that, if we ever nearby when it was taking place, I wanted to check it out. As luck would have it (for me anyway), when we mapped our trip west and I realized we’d be in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, a mere 2.5 hours away from Hayward where they are held (also home to the Birkebeiner cross country ski race, also profiled about a year later on CBS Sunday morning) we had to backtrack to northern Wisconsin (with my good-sport-family-members in tow).

“Competitors, you’re in the hands of the starter” each competition would begin in a New Zealand accented voice. Then the countdown to the chopping, sawing or climbing would commence. Some events are quick; in some cases, a mere 14 seconds to saw through a log or climb a 60-foot pole; some are longer; like the log rolling or the standing block chop (which, frankly, seems a good way to take a hunk out of your shin or lose a toe). We got to see almost all of the events in the preliminaries on a Thursday, save the boom-running race across rolling logs in the lake, taste delicious Bar-B-Que at one of the many food trucks (I missed my chance at Wisconsin cheese curds this trip, but you gotta leave something for next time) and grab a quick beer in downtown Hayward at the Moccasin Bar (and self-proclaimed “wildlife museum” of interesting taxidermy) before heading back southwest. These ladies and gents are athletes, people. Color me impressed.