When I think back to the delightful time that Kathy and I got to spend up on Washington Island at the end of June,  one of my most vivid memories is of ferry we rode to get there.  There is something so remarkable (I suppose because it’s so unnatural) about driving your car on to a boat and being transported across water! It underscores just how “away from it all” you are when you make your way to a place like Washington Island.

I think what made that ferry ride especially memorable for us is that it came at the end of what was a rather frantic through Door County to get there.  We left Racine right around 10:00 p.m. Wednesday evening (after that night’s Kenosha Pops Concert Band performance) and drove as far as Sheboygan – with plans to be up and on the road nice and early the next morning, in order to be up to the island by late morning.  It was only after we were underway just before 9 that we finally got around to calculating how long it would take us to get to Northpoint, where one catches the ferry.  (It’s beyond me how neither Kathy nor I had thought to look at a map and figure out how long a trip this would turn out to be. It’s really not like us to leave such a crucial matter to chance.)  And the news wasn’t encouraging: we had at least three hours of driving still to do.   And it was only when we called up to the island to let dad and Sonja know that we would be arriving a couple hours later than expected that we learned that the ferry only ran once an hour/ on the hour.  That meant that if we reached Northpoint at 1:05, we would have to wait for the 2:00 ferry. And with Dad and Sonja’s renewal-of-vows scheduled for 3:30, it was starting to look like we would be arriving at the last possible minute.

 

Needless to say, it made for a rather grim and stressful trip across scenic Door County – although I must say that Kathy was much more successful than I was at accepting our predicament.  Fretting and stewing wasn’t going to turn back the clock, lighten the traffic, or shorten the trip but somehow I couldn’t let go of my sense of dread that we had really blown it.   But then at some point it became clear that the route we had been advised to take-  up the east coast of the county rather than the more densely developed west coast- had gained us some valuable time,  and that we would in fact reach Northpoint in time to catch the 1:00 ferry.  Only then could I start looking out the window and begin to enjoy the gorgeousness all around us.

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It felt splendid to drive up to the ferry dock ticket gate at 12:20 – in plenty of time to catch the 1:00.  And in an unexpected development,  it turned out that the woman working in the ticket booth had a Carthage pen sitting there – and when Kathy asked her about it, we found out that this woman is friends with Maren Schutz, a delightful Carthage music student originally from the island.  Talk about one of those “small world isn’t it?” moments, which also made Washington Island seem like an even more inviting place. And then came the moment when we drove our car up on to the ferry to begin the twenty-minute trip to the Island.   I’m not sure I can begin to explain how wonderful it felt to see the mainland slip farther and farther into the distance, and with it the cares and complications of our crazy everyday lives.   We were headed for a place with not one single fast food establishment … a place with only spotty cell phone reception (although it turned out that our phones worked better than most) … and would be staying in a home with no Wi-Fi and no television.   For perpetually plugged in people like Kathy and me,  this might have been a case of wrenching deprivation.  But in fact it felt great to be leaving so much of that behind us, especially with both the sky and the water such a vibrant blue.  Nothing could have been more inviting.  Nothing could have cast a more irresistible spell.

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