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For more than a century, vacationers have been making their way to this breezy hillside village on the south shore of Lake Superior. It's the gateway to the Apostle Islands and a good place to hit the water by kayak, sailboat, ferry or launch.
What to do: Go kayaking with Living Adventure. Take a cruise of the Apostle Islands. Learn to sail or charter a sailboat. Take the ferry to Madeline Island.
Go to a concert or revue at Big Top Chautauqua. Pick berries in the orchards above town. Walk the three-mile Brownstone Trail along Chequamegon Bay. Bicycle around the Bayfield Peninsula.
Events to catch: June 29-July 3, Race Week. July 3-5, Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa
traditional powwow. July 25-26, Festival of Arts.
Where to stay: There's a large array of cottages, condos, B&Bs and motels.
Overlooking Chequamegon Bay on the edge of downtown, Seagull Bay is a friendly and well-run motel. The Bayfield Inn overlooks the marina and cruise dock. A mile north of town off Wisconsin 13, the Island View Inn and Cottages is a nice place for families.
Where to eat: For a fun dinner with friends, Maggie's on Manypenny Avenue. For a special occasion, Wild Rice just outside town.
Details: See Beloved Bayfield.
Past fast plans: Sights of Thunder Bay, Riverfront Minneapolis, Chicago on the cheap, Walking in Lake Geneva, New Glarus
Every festival is a good festival. There's lots of see and do, and most everything is free.
For a list, see Great summer festivals. For food festivals, see A feast of festivals. For ethnic festivals, see Celebrating roots. For outdoor arts fairs, see Art al fresco. For dragon-boat festivals, see Waking the dragon.
Here are 10 festivals worth planning a trip around.
National Cherry Festival in Traverse City, Mich.
This town on Lake Michigan attracts half a million people to events that include many
contests and the Cherry Royale Parade at
11:15 a.m. July 11. July 4-11.
Great Circus Parade Festival in Milwaukee. Circus performances and animal rides on the lakefront feature Circus World Museum of Baraboo (pictured). The big parade starts at 2 p.m. Sunday. July 8-12.
Winnipeg Folk Festival in Winnipeg. For many people, this easy-going, family-friendly festival is the highlight of summer. Many camp on-site at Birds Hill Provincial Park. July 9-12.
Aquatennial in Minneapolis. Highlights are the Nicollet Mall block party, Lake Calhoun milk-carton boat races, Hennepin Avenue Torchlight Parade and Mississippi River fireworks show. July 17-25.
Around here, you don't need oceans for a beach vacation.
We have thousands of lakes, plus inland seas on shoreline that often is called the Fourth Coast. Lake Michigan's shores are a veritable Riviera, and even rocky Superior has some noteworthy stretches of sand.
You could throw a dart at the map and come up with a good beach. Or you could take a cue from names of state parks — Point Beach and Harrington Beach in Wisconsin, McCarthy Beach in Minnesota, Orchard Beach in Michigan.
They're big, they're beautiful and they're not far away. Below are 10 of this region's best places to lounge away a summer day.
What a way to spend a weekend: hiking up and down ravines, clambering on rock, admiring views of water from ridgelines.
“It’s like hiking on the North Shore,’’ my husband said.
But it wasn’t Lake Superior’s North Shore. It was Iowa. And everyone knows Iowa is one big, flat cornfield.
In the state’s northeast corner, however, the Earth’s surface bucks like a rodeo pony. Glaciers missed the place where Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota meet, and pillars of ancient bedrock poke out of hillsides along sunken river valleys.
On the western edge of this Driftless Area, Backbone State Park lies in a bowl carved by the Maquoketa River. Named for a knobby ridge called the Devil’s Backbone, it became Iowa’s first state park in 1919. In the 1930s, Civilian Conservation Corps crews created a serpentine lake, built trails and used blocks of golden limestone to fashion handsome beach and boat houses, an auditorium, rest rooms and pavilions.
In summer, it’s not as hard as you’d think to take a trip for $100 or less.
Many of the great travel experiences in the Upper Midwest can’t be bought, anyway – swimming in a Great Lake, hiking on a wooded trail, canoeing under an eagle's nest.
For $100, you won’t be sitting down to a candlelight dinner, but you might be dining by firelight. You won't be renting speedboats, but you might have your own boardwalk to the beach.
Here are 23 great trips where you’ll get few of the frills but all of the fun. Most give you a roof over your head; the trips that require camping also include guides, meals and/or fun things to do.
If you like to ride bikes and you live in the Upper Midwest, you've lucked out.
This is a bike-crazy part of the country. Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota rank No. 1, 2 and 3 for miles of rails converted to trails, and Illinois and Iowa also are in the Top 10.
Wisconsin's Elroy-Sparta State Trail sparked the boom in bicycle tourism in 1967; when surrounding towns and counties saw all the tourists who came to ride it, they built their own trails. We also can ride on thousands of miles of quiet country roads, built so dairy farmers could get their milk to market.
If you're taking a so-called staycation this year, don't stay too close to home. From the Twin Cities, you only have to drive an hour or so to find a world of fun.
Minneapolis and St. Paul grew around the confluence of two rivers, and their favorite day-trip destinations are on rivers, too. To the southeast, the port of Red Wing is curled into an elbow of the Mississippi. To the east, Stillwater and its shops unfurl along the St. Croix.
To the north, St. Croix Falls is a hub for hiking, paddling and bicycling. To the south, historic Northfield straddles the Cannon River.
You can shop or stroll, cruise or catch a play. Here are 10 lovely little vacations that will take only a day.
Red Wing's picturesque setting on the Mississippi River has been inspiring comment for centures; explorer Jonathan Carver called it "the most beautiful prospect that imagination can form.''
In 1920, northern Wisconsin already was a playground for people from Chicago.
And when Prohibition flung open the door to organized crime, its remote lakes and forests became even more attractive to a certain kind of Chicagoan.
Al Capone had a fortified summer home on a lake near Hayward, to which hydroplanes flew whiskey from Canada. His lieutenants frequented the saloons and brothels in Hurley. Rival Roger Touhy vacationed in Minocqua, fishing with a machine gun.
By 1934, Prohibition was over but the Depression was in full swing, and many people blamed the banks. John Dillinger was the most-wanted bank robber, and he made a resort in Manitowish Waters famous when the FBI interrupted his stay there, killing a local but allowing Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and the other men to escape.
The spectacularly botched raid of Little Bohemia Lodge is at the center of the film "Public Enemies,'' starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger and Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis. It was filmed at Little Bohemia and around Wisconsin and opens in theaters July 1.
Now it's tourists who are hot on the gangsters' trail, not FBI agents.
In summer, overheated tourists head for the Cool City.
Two Rivers, Wis., gets its nickname from cooling breezes that come from three sides: the East Twin River, the West Twin River and Lake Michigan. Swimmers can cool off with a dip from Neshotah Beach, a great strip of sand, but there’s an even better one five miles north, where Rawley Point Lighthouse towers over the dunes of Point Beach.
Two Rivers also is the birthplace of the ice-cream sundae — how cool is that?
From its small harbor, charter boats set out to fish for trout and salmon. Two Rivers’ sister city, Manitowoc, is known for larger boats: the U.S.S. Cobia, a submarine docked alongside the Wisconsin Maritime Museum, and the S.S. Badger, a coal-powered car ferry that makes daily runs to Ludington, Mich.
Watch a water-ski show, and you'll want to climb into your Thunderbird and go get a chocolate malted.
There's something deliciously retro about spending a balmy summer evening listening to '50s party music and the roar of marine engines as spangled, sun-bleached teen-agers fly by. A corny comedy routine is part of the show, but it's the tricks that keep the crowd enthralled: double flips, dance lines and pyramids that can go up to five tiers.
Show
skiing is most popular in the Upper Midwest. Ralph Samuelson, who
invented water-skiing on Lake Pepin in 1922, was a showman, and Tommy
Bartlett began putting on shows in the Wisconsin Dells in 1952.
Wisconsin has many more show clubs than any other state, and the Janesville Rock Aqua Jays organized the first national championships in 1975.
In the southwest corner of the state, the prairie hardly looks like typical Minnesota vacation land.
Instead of lakes, fractured red quartzite erupts from the earth, and wind towers pop up on the horizon like giant black daisies. Herds of bison graze in fields, and yellow blooms cover prickly pear cactus.
This was the spiritual center of the universe for indigenous people on the prairie, and it exerts a pull on others, too.
Ancient stories are inscribed on outcroppings of quartzite at Jeffers Petroglyphs. At the quarries of Pipestone, seams of softer catlinite are carved into sacred pipes. North of Luverne, the blood-red rock forms a 1½-mile long cliff called Blue Mounds by early settlers, who first glimpsed it in a far-off haze.
On the western fringes of the Twin Cities, the wealthy have staked out Lake Minnetonka.
Nearly all of its 125 miles of shoreline are privately owned, and the summer cottages built by vacationing flour millers and businessmen — Pillsbury,
Northrop, Bell, Loring, Peavey — have morphed into mansions.
But on the southeast corner of the sprawling lake, one town retains vestiges of the Victorian age, when steamboats ferried vacationers around the lake and day-trippers arrived on electric streetcars.
On the Great Lakes, everyone loves to see a two-masted schooner, white sails flapping in the breeze.
When three tall ships sailed onto Lake Superior last August for a maritime festival in Duluth, more than 125,000 people turned out, nearly swamping the port town.
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