October 7 - Lighthouses of Door County, Wisconsin

We woke up to sunlight streaming thru the trees outside our windows. I was hoping for a beautiful sunrise over Sturgeon Bay, so we hurried over to the beach to take some pictures before breakfast. We did in fact catch the sun rising over the bay and took a nice set of pictures.

We were expecting my sister Lois for a visit in the late afternoon, but we figured we had time to explore the peninsula’s eastern edge a bit after breakfast and still get back in the early afternoon. The eastern edge of the Door Peninsula is the shore along Lake Michigan, and driving along the shoreline wherever possible gave us some magnificent views of the lake.

We first stopped at Baileys Harbor to look for a lighthouse that was reputed to be there. We finally found a little white tower beside the road around the harbor—it was a “range” lighthouse and I’m not sure what that means exactly but it certainly was smallish. This lighthouse had been put out of business by a more modern navigation signal—smoke signals, perhaps—and was sitting there rather looking somewhat forlorn, I thought. From there we could walk to and along the beach of Lake Michigan, so we stretched our legs a bit. As we walked along we took turns scaring a seagull on cue so that the other person could try to take a nice “seagull in flight” picture. It’s just so hard to get wild animals to pose correctly!

>We also wanted to visit the Cana Island lighthouse and finally found our way there along county roads. In contrast to the lighthouse at the end of the Sturgeon Bay canal, the route to the Cana Island lighthouse was clearly marked by signs, but they seemed somewhat ambivalent. One of these signs stated that the lighthouse was open for business, but on the other hand some other signs stated there were “no facilities” and absolutely no parking was available. I really wasn’t certain whether they wanted us to come or wanted us to stay away, but we persevered.

As it turned out, limited parking was available along the side of the dead end street out to the Cana Island isthmus, but it was clearly catch-as-catch-can. I expect the property owners along that stretch are the folks responsible for the “no parking” statement on the sign as they must be heartily tired of always having cars parked on the street just beside their fences. Where the street ended a really rocky isthmus about 10 yards wide and 100 yards long led over to Cana Island proper—you wouldn’t want to be on that path in bad weather, let me tell you.

When we arrived on the island we were unpleasantly surprised to see essentially a tollbooth that collected a fee of $3.50 per person just to get on the island! Choking a bit at the total of $7 just to get some pictures of the lighthouse (post cards would definitely have been cheaper!), we anted up the dough and strolled on. The lighthouse was actually quite picturesque: the house was of yellowish brick while the tower was of steel plates painted a stark white, and the whole thing was located in a picturesque little glen formed by green grass surrounded by a line of trees. Monika and I took pictures from every conceivable angle and even walked out on the stony beach to get some shots from the seaward side.

Fortunately the fee included a visit to the light-keeper’s house, and inside the house they had a small gift shop, some exhibits, and a short videotape on the lighthouse’s history. That was fun and perhaps it justified the $3.50 entrance fee, but I really was much more resistant to spending money in the gift shop than I think I would have been had they kept the entrance fee more reasonable. Still, we saw a very nice lighthouse and could still get back to Sturgeon Bay in time for another meal at Culver’s before we returned to our campsite to wait for my sister.

While we were waiting we decided to gather some wood. The old saying is that firewood warms you three times—once when you cut it down and drag it home, once when you saw and chop it, and once when you burn it. How true. After gathering some long branches I spent the next hour or so sawing them into logs and splitting the logs into quarters or eighths while Monika cleaned the trailer in anticipation of Lois’s visit. It’s funny that even when we were ostensibly on vacation, the old pattern of cleaning up the house before company arrives spontaneously reasserted itself.

Lois arrived around 5:15 and we showed her around our trailer and then around the campground. The moon was rising over Sturgeon Bay just as we walked past the beach there, so we all just sat down and watched, spellbound. It was a perfect full moon and it created a broad silvery path over the calm, dark waters of the bay. Really it was the type of thing you read about in poems but almost never see in reality because the conditions are so rarely right. We continued to watch until the moon was well up and then found our way back thru the campground in the moonlight. Back at camp we had a very nice evening fire and lots of talking until 10 o’clock when we all turned in for the night.