Door County offers variety like this shoreline as seen from Peninsula State Park, cheese tasting at Renard’s Cheese, views of Egg Harbor Marina, and tours of the Farm Museum on Washington Island.
200 shipwrecks between the islands. Arriving French traders named it Port des Morts , translated later as Death’s Door. It has also been said that the French, not wanting the English to establish fur trade routes to Wisconsin and other surrounding areas, named the passage to discourage and scare sailors from sailing through the strait. I find the ferry ride, nonetheless, a windblown, short-burst travel journey. On Washington Island, I board the “Cherry Train” narrated tour. We stop at the Farm Museum highlighting the is- land’s strong Scandinavian and Icelandic cultures, taking root from 19th-century settlers like Christian Olsen and Oddur Magnusson. Along with antique potato planters and threshers sit original farm buildings moved here from other island locations. Another tour highlight, the pointed and multi-tiered Stavekirke, has the classical design of a Norwegian me- dieval church. It was built in the 1990s using heavy-beamed Viking shipbuild- ing techniques.
My favorite stop is School House Beach, where there’s no sand but in- stead smoothly-worn dolostone rocks reminding me of the stone beaches of Nice, France. “This is one of five glacially-cre-
and set low down in their body — in their butt, and that’s why we call them lawyer fish,” explains Moore. At Jackson Harbor, I hop on the pe- destrian ferry for the 10-minute ride to the 912-acre Rock Island State Park, once home to the first European settlement in Door County. It later became the summer estate of wealthy industrialist Chester Thordarson, who built the impressive Vi- king Hall Boat House that remains today. I hear the trees flitter from winds off Lake Michigan as I hike uphill for just over a mile to the 1836 Potawatomie Lighthouse, Wisconsin’s oldest, built atop the lighthouse keeper’s modest house. The structure’s original French-made Fresnel lens, now worth maybe a couple of million dollars, is cloaked in mystery. “When it was decommissioned in 1946, they crated it up and put it in the cellar,” says docent Jim Johnston. “When they opened the crate, it was missing.” The next morning, I head over to Door County’s Lake Michigan side — to more dramatic ocean-like waves and
ated limestone beaches in the world,” says Cherry Train guide Terri Moore.
“When you look at the shoreline and the cliffs and the water around you, you soon realize Door County is all about two things – water and stone... or maybe three things – retail.”
We soon pass a restaurant with a sign reading, “Fresh Lawyers,” a ref-
erence to the cod-like freshwater burbot caught locally. “The heart is rather small
SUMMER 2014 COAST TO COAST 11
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