Second to Devil’s Lake, I’ll recommend Wildcat Mountain State Park.
God bless you, your brother, and the entire kitchen staff because that breakfast is the stuff of dreams. I bet you spent a lot of time hanging out at the good ol’ Bayside Tavern as well.
For great breakfasts and brunches (and dinners) I’d have to mention the Rittenhouse Inn in Bayfield, WI overlooking the Apostle islands of Lake Superior. Eating there after spending time kayaking to the ice caves or hiking around the islands is a true treat.
The Apostle islands are an overlooked gem, to be sure. And Bayfield a wonderful place to jump off from to explore them.
The Saturday morning tapings in Madison of Public Radio International’s Whad’ya Know can be fun.
I’ve been a guest on that show!
OP. if you get as far as Madison (about 2.5 hours from Manitowoc), PM me. We can have lunch or something.
I find the campsites a bit to close with little privacy (but should not be a big deal if you are used to MI state parks). The views are great though. I bike caped there once - I remembered the step entrance road but forgot about the hilly roads to get to the entrance.
Brian
I did lay lots of bacon and sausage on baking trays, and did separate egg yolks for hollandaise sauce, but can’t claim much more for breakfast.
Brian
WI Cheese Map (pdf)
3 Sheeps Brewing in Sheboygan
Rowland’s Calumet Brewery in Chilton (not too far from Sheboygan).
State Park Map - Pretty much all the state parks have camping but they can fill up on the weekends. Many county parks also have camping but they are harder to find/reserve online; you might have to call.
If you like architecture, you can do better than a double-header tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and House on the Rock. Conveniently near each other, you can experience the tasteful high and tacky lows of Twentieth Century architecture all in one stop.
The carousel at House on the Rock will live in your family’s nightmares for years to come.
You mean decades. My kids are still scarred 20 years later. As am I.
—begin hijack—
Oh no. I’m only a year and a half out of it. Are you saying the dreams aren’t going away any time soon? :eek:
It started out so well, with the groovy carpeted walls, and the cantilevered overlook. Then the lovely collections… then more and more and more collections. So many collections… Then the ice cream. There, that’s better. Until the old lady told me the only way out was an hour-long walk through the hall of haunted scary dolls. Oh, the dollllllls… (Crazy person smiley) Make them stop, mama!
—end hijack, I need to go get Xanax now.—
Don’t forget the mannequins in old prom dresses with styrofoam angel wings, hanging from the ceiling as the horrible music blared from the carousel.
You don’t get over some things.
Heh…I thought “how crazy can a carousel be?” I briefly googled images on my phone at work- saw small thumbnails of something that looked very complicated and ornate with lots of lights.
I just now googled it again on my desktop at home-- what the effing eff? That’s like the fever dream of a mad scientist serial killer :eek:
Yeah, the sheer madness of the place is intriguing, but I don’t think I’ll scar my kids for life by taking them to see that.
The worst part is that the carousel gets picked on because it’s easy, but it’s not close to the weirdest / creepiest thing there. One of the next rooms over is a massive interior space that’s underlit and full of old circus memorobilia, a bunch of pipe organs, and the skeletons of steamships. It’s one of the weirdest spaces I’ve ever been in. It genuinely comes closer to anything I’ve ever seen to being inside a depiction of Hell from an old cartoon.
House on the Rock is like taking a stroll inside a macabre, developmentally-arrested hoarder’s mind.
It would genuinely not surprise me if the House on the Rock wikipedia page eventually has a section titled “After the discovery of the bodies.”
Yeah, I really meant the whole place, since once I went down the rabbit hole and started clicking through image links I saw plenty more than the carousel.
Thing is, I really do find at least parts of it really intriguing, like the infinity walk (or whatever it’s called, I shudder at the thought of looking the place up again). It all terrifies me, yet calls to me at the same time somehow…
We’ve had these conversations on these boards before.
While I recommend seeing the House on the Rock I warn people that a lot of it is weird as hell.
Well, if you get over to that part of the state, you can buy tickets to just “phase 1,” as long as your will to resist the crazy is strong. That includes the actual house on the rock itself, which is like Fred Flinstone’s bachelor pad, the infinity walk, and part of the self-playing instrument collection.
The House on the Rock has been on my road trip bucket list for years. I hope to make it there before too long.
There’s the Harley Davidson Museum in Milwaukee.
There’s a Mir Space Station on display in Wisconsin Dells that you can go inside (it was never launched, obviously, and a guy bought it for a million dollars after the Soviet Union collapsed).
It seems like the OP is going to stay north of here, though. Otherwise there are a zillion things around here I could suggest.
Theres the museum they can go see as soon as they get off the ship.
Why not do what we did one year and take both? Take one here and the other back?