To Fish Creek

June 15, 2021

There’s only one place in Gills Rock open for breakfast, but it works well for us: Gills Rock Coffee, about three blocks up the road, opens at 7. We’re there shortly after it opens and are excited to see that it really does have the fresh frittata available that the website advertises. As a bonus, there’s peanut butter for the bagel that I order also, along with another slice of frittata. A great breakfast.

By the end of the day, I think it’s fair to say that our enthusiasm for the towns and villages of Door County has cooled a fair amount - too crammed with tourists, too gimmicky, too auto-centric - our usual gripes with beauty spots that have been discovered nearly to death’s door. Gills Rock is quite nice though, a place we’d come back to as a springboard for fitting in another pass through Washington Island some autumn when the leaves are changing. One good restaurant, one good breakfast spot, a place to sleep, a spot to watch the sunset just across the street. What more do you need?

The inn’s manager is out when we leave and wishes us well. He and his wife are Turkish, and have run this property for almost fifteen years. He reminds us that he’s from Antalya, and advises us to consider biking down the Turquoise Coast to his home town some autumn.

We’ve crafted a meandering, inefficient route for our ride down to Fish Creek. It’s only about 25 miles away, and we strive to find enough roads to bring us up to Rachael’s magic number, 42. We start by taking the short dead end spur to Door Bluff County Park, an undeveloped woodland at the end of a mile-long dirt road. Now that we’ve been there, I’m not sure I’d recommend it. You’d think that Door Bluff would offer some nice views, but the only one we fine is through a thin gap in the trees at the end of a short, unmarked path.

The GBO gazes out across Death’s Door, contemplating how many of his fellow bottle openers may be tragically rusting away out there under the waves. There but for fate go I, he silently muses.

From Door Bluff we drop south to Ellison Bay where we had our late lunch yesterday, and then cross over the crown of the peninsula to the eastern side to check out little Rowley’s Bay. It’s a tiny resort on a small horseshoe bay, with a bit of public beach access. It looks like it might do nicely as a place to stay - not too crowded, and you could rent a kayak and float the bay and up the mouth of the Mink River that empties into it.

Then west again, crossing the crown of the peninsula once more. At the end we drop steeply down to Sister Bay, a too crowded and too touristy coastal town that does have two attractions for us - a public restroom for Rachael, and a sandwich shop at the south end of town that Rachael had scouted out earlier. We risk our lives crossing the fast moving traffic on WI42 to get there and then bike the gauntlet again with two six inch subs in the hold.

We head with them to another short dead-end spur to Pebble Beach, a pretty spot recommended to us by Mark Hoffmann. It is a nice spot - quiet, a clean beach, a good spot to down the subs - and then continue on. We’re grateful to Mark for pointing out this little oasis, and think of him also as we groan our way back up the steep road we dropped down getting there.

Putting on a risqué performance, Pebble Beach.

Little Sister Cemetery, above Pebble Beach.

For the rest of the way to Fish Creek we generally follow the good route Mark recommended to us, avoiding unpleasant WI42 as much as possible. We cross over it to follow interior roads south to Ephraim, and then ride through Peninsula State Park the rest of the way.

In Ephraim, we stop to admire its striking and immaculate white Moravian Church, the oldest church in the county. We’ve biked through Moravia before, on our way from Krakow to Salzburg decades ago; so I took a snap to remind myself of this to research the ancestry of the Ephraim settlers. I was surprised later to learn that the founders were Norwegian, not Moravian. the Moravian Church is a Protestant sect, and one of the oldest - it arose about fifty years before Martin Luther was making his stand.

Looking down on Ephraim. From above, it looks like pleasant place to stay - smaller and cleaner than nearby Sister Bay.

Ephraim Moravian Church, founded in 1853, is the oldest church in the county. It might be the most interesting thing we saw today, because before now I’d never known of the Moravian Church. When I saw this my first thought was that the town was founded by Czech immigrants.

Peninsula State Park is definitely worth a visit. It’s large and diverse, with something for all tastes. We were bemused to pass through a large golf course within the state park. There’s a tourist train, miles of hiking and cycling paths, camp grounds, Segway tours, a bit of everything.

One interesting feature is the Eagle Tower, a large viewing structure that I was surprised to learn just opened a month ago. The concept isn’t new though - this is the third in a line of viewing platforms on this site, the first of which went up in 1914. It’s heavily used, and clearly a significant tourist draw - the platform gets you high above the trees for a sweeping view across the bay.

Better though is the Eagle Bluff lighthouse, which is much more attractive than I’d expected from the photographs I’d seen. We especially enjoyed our stop there, admiring the lighthouse, admiring the views, and chatting with a cyclist from Madison who was there with her charming and personable granddaughters and her German immigrant mother.

Best though were the roads themselves, which were a refreshing delight to cycle - cool, shaded, passing through lovely beech and maple forest. We made the most of our ride through, first biking the Shore Road that follows the perimeter of the park and then doubling back to loop above on the Skyline Road.

The newest version of the Eagle Tower in Peninsula Park opened just a month ago. Its viewing platform can be accessed by staircase or by this 850 foot long accessible ramp.

The view up the west coast of Door County from the Eagle Tower.

The view straight down from the Eagle Tower.

If you don’t care for the stairs or long ramp, the view from the roadside is nearly as fine.

Cycling through Peninsula park is very pleasant, with the road cooled by the surrounding beech/maple/cedar forest.

Eagle Bluff Lighthouse, guiding ships through Strawberry Channel since 1868.

We enjoyed a lengthy visit with this multigenerational lot. The one in cycling gear has taken a few bike/barge trips in Europe and looks forward to returning for more.

The view north from Sven’s Bluff Lookout.

Looking across Fish Creek Harbor to Fish Creek.

We came close, but we didn’t get our 42 miles in by the time we arrived in Fish Creek. We’ve got some credit built up, so our average is still respectable; but we’ll try to do better.

We end the day at the Fish Creek Motel, a place I mention because it quickly finds its way to the bottom of our list of accommodations for the tour. It has several significant negatives, including very poor WiFi and a poor use of space - but the worst for me is the sign at check-in that prominently states that bicycles are not allowed in the rooms or even on the balcony outside of them. They belong locked up at the uncovered bike rack by the pool. Fortunately rain isn’t in the forecast, or we’d be seriously griped.

We’re still having discussions about why ‘we’ thought it would be a good plan to spend two nights here.

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Ride stats today: 38 miles, 1,700’; for the tour: 664 miles, 20,300’

Today's ride: 38 miles (61 km)
Total: 664 miles (1,069 km)

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Kelly IniguezYou mean we are spending all of that money on lodging in Door County and we aren't going to like it? That's disappointing . . . . we've had mixed recommendations. Some says it's a must say, others say it's a tourist trip. I guess we will be finding out for ourselves.

My memory is a little poor, but it seems we couldn't find even a two day stay at near Gills Rock. Or perhaps it was the lack of food . . . but we ended up down in Sisters Bay for two days, planning to use one for a loop up toward Washington Island. I'm not a busy tourist town kind of gal. It might be a long two days . . . .

In general, I'm wondering if this tour is going to be busy - busy roads, busy towns, busy restaurants . . . the vibe I'm getting from reading journals is that there are plenty of people out enjoying their freedom, but quite a few restaurants are closed, and the places that are open are stretched thin.

We will find out!
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3 years ago

Scott AndersonTo Kelly IniguezI probably didn’t get the tone quite right on this post, Kelly. It’s not Door County itself - it’s the towns. Once you get off the highways and out of town, the cycling is really very nice. In about two hundred miles of cycling in Door County, all but a very few of them were excellent cycling roads. The alphabet county roads here and in Wisconsin as a whole are invariably nice cycling. It’s not Southern Utah, of course, but still very nice, We’re glad we came.

Did you know there’s an AirBnB in Gills Rock, btw? It’s associated with the coffee shop.
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3 years ago

Mark HoffmannYour experience is not surprising. The "magic" of Door County in my estimation is time on the water, time in the water and time spent watching the water change with the weather, all capped off by the sunsets of which your photo was a prime example of how good they often are. Trips into or through the towns have not usually been a highlight for those of us with places there. The fall is a terrific time because the county is less crowded, and the fall colors can be amazing.

My sister spent last week at a weaving course at Sievers, the fabric arts school on Washington Island. (You cycled past it at 1:13 of Rachael's video.) She said the county is busier than usual this June, and those in the tourist industry are having a very tough time finding workers.

Rural Wisconsin (and Michigan, I suspect) are serenely pastoral, but the scenery simply does not include the awe-inspiring mountains, oceans, or endless views across a desert or plain that we have in the west.
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3 years ago