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Around the Great Lakes, love for lighthouses is unlimited. Often called "America's castles,'' lighthouses are symbols of a more adventurous era, and tourists find them irresistible.
"They work their way up the coast seeing all the lighthouses,'' says Ronda Werner of Michigan's Tawas Point Light. "They bring their lighthouse book and want stamps in their passports, and they're all decked out in their lighthouse shirts and their little lighthouse earrings. It's wonderful so many people have this much passion for our lighthouses.''
Now, the state parks and friends associations who care for them have found a way to harness all this passion: They're turning tourists into volunteer keepers. Every year, the 1869 Tawas Point Light on Michigan's Lake Huron coast takes applications for keepers to live on a sandy spit often called "the Cape Cod of the Midwest.''
Around Lake Superior, you have to act fast to reserve a vacation mowing lawns or combing the ground for bones.
It may not sound glamorous, but the lawns are at lighthouses, and the moose bones are in the backcountry of Isle Royale National Park, where volunteers may be tutored by famous Wolf-Moose Project researchers Rolf Peterson and John Vucetich.
You may not get to take a lot of hot showers, but oh, the stories you’ll tell.
It had become a summer tradition: Drive my daughter up north to her German camp at Concordia Language Villages, look enviously around the fabulous campus and whine that adults should get to come, too.
Someone was listening. One day, a flier arrived at my house, announcing the first French and German adult weeks. As it turns out, others had whined, too.
"We've got these millions and millions of dollars' worth of facilities, and we want to use them,'' said Larry Saukko, dean of the Finnish and academic-year German programs. "Besides, parents and grandparents would come on closing day and say, 'When are you going to quit wasting it on kids and start doing it for us?' ''
In a cedar and pine forest on Lake Michigan, moments of illumination fly around like sparks off a campfire.
The best way to capture sunrise on film. Handy techniques for depicting shadow in watercolors. How to harness the power of the inner eye.
At the Clearing in Door County, everything becomes clearer.
In hindsight, it's good to be grown up and out of school: no more tests, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks.
But it's also good to be a grown-up who's back in school, because schools have grown up, too. There are no tests and few books, and teachers are as friendly and attentive as cruise-ship hosts.
In fact, attending some schools is a lot like being on vacation.
If you want to play hooky from work in summer, just tell your boss that the University of Minnesota thinks you should.
Americans are putting in more work hours than at any time since the 1920s, it says, but as many as 30 percent of us don't take a vacation. Yet, research also shows the brain needs time away from the job so it can stretch.
It turns out that all work and no play really does make Jack a dull boy. That's why the College of Continuing Education offers summer Curiosity Camps, with nearly two dozen chances for people to take a day off.
I coulda been a contender.
I played tennis as a kid, teaching myself on the courts near my house, and I played on my high school girls’ tennis team, which, while not very competitive, had an actual coach thanks to Title IX.
But I never took lessons, and after high school, my budding skills slid into disuse. The years passed and I became a has-been, with nothing to look forward to but the senior varsity.
Whitewater paddlers are, by definition, thrill-seekers.
That's why they seek out the northeast corner of Wisconsin, "the cradle of rivers.'' The big Wisconsin River starts there, as do the Wolf, Peshtigo and Menominee, three of the Upper Midwest's best-known whitewater rivers.
On the Wolf River, Bear Paw Outdoor Adventure Resort has been a whitewater hub since 1994, selling gear to expert wranglers and teaching novices how to handle the rapids, which froth and churn over knots of boulders dropped by the last glacier.
In southwest Wisconsin, it is natural that people gather in Mineral Point to smash plates, snip glass and cover themselves in cement dust.
Not far to the west, a German-born priest built the Dickeyville Grotto from conch shells, china cups, quartz, petrified rocks and glass. Just to the east, an Austrian-born cheesemaker encrusted his house with glass "jewels'' and filled his yard with concrete fairy-tale figures.
And in Mineral Point, the very air — faintly chalky from damp limestone — is thick with artistic impulses.
Cooking classes have become entertainment, one more thing to do on a weekend getaway. In eastern Wisconsin, the big Osthoff Resort has added a classical cooking school. There's a school in Door County, and many shops, restaurants and B&Bs in tourist areas are adding classes to draw customers. After all, everyone loves good food.
In some classes, students pitch in, but others offer only demonstration classes.
"The most relaxing thing is to watch some other chef work really hard while you sit and watch with a glass of wine,'' says chef
Stephen Larson, who operated the Gourmets Garden cooking school and now runs Quarter/quarter restaurant in the southeast Minnesota town of Harmony.
