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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. This spring, the 1869 Tawas Point Light on Michigan's Lake Huron coast is taking applications for its first keepers on a sandy spit often called "the Cape Cod of the Midwest.''
Around the Upper Midwest, Door County is the tourist destination that other tourist destinations envy.
Everything a tourist loves, it’s got: Lighthouses, craggy shorelines, sand dunes. Golf courses, boutiques, bistros. Bicycle paths, hiking trails, beaches.
There’s a little bit of New England in the white-frame buildings of Ephraim, where tourists click photos of Wilson’s, a century-old ice-cream parlor. There’s a little bit of Europe in Sister Bay, where goats graze on the sod roof of Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant. There’s not much that isn’t picturesque.
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.
Fish boils, cherry pie, chic shops and a nonstop stream of tourists.
Yes, that’s Door County, all right. But so is this:
Secluded beaches of fine white sand. Estuaries lined with herons. Hiking and bicycle trails winding through sun-dappled cedar forests.
Goldthread and gaywings. Bogbean and trailing arbutus. In Wisconsin's Door County, it's enough to make a naturalist hyperventilate.
Cherry blossoms and daffodils are the showiest spring flowers on this tourist playground between Lake Michigan and Green Bay. But it's the wildflowers, many of them rare, that provide the most joyous proof that spring has arrived.
On sandy ridges, the first flower spotted often is the once-common trailing arbutus, whose waxy white blossoms emerge in April.
In Wisconsin, the American dream came true for a penniless boy from Iceland — and the rest of us made out pretty well, too.
In 1873, 5-year-old Hjörtur Thordarson traveled with his family from Iceland to Milwaukee, where his father soon died of typhoid fever. The youngster's schooling stopped in second grade as the family moved to farms in Wisconsin and North Dakota, then resumed when the boy — called Chester — joined his married sister in Chicago and, at age 18, entered the fourth grade.
"All I wanted was a chance to learn," he said later.
It would be natural, for a tourist, to arrive in Sturgeon Bay and just keep going. It would also be a mistake.
The rest of Door County has all the tourist trappings. But Sturgeon Bay has appeal of its own.
"Most people want to go farther up on Door County, for all the shops and such," says Bill Munroe, a volunteer at the Door County Maritime Museum. "But this is a working town. We like it down here. We like it very much."