We took the Fitch Ancestral Bears with us on the trip.  All of them.  Twenty-five poorly behaved  teddy bears.  They filled the twins' child safety seats;  the back eat was litttered with them.   Many, many were in back with the luggage and two cases of coke that hadn't made it upstairs in two weeks.   Maybe three.  The bears were relatively well behaved on the way north, although William IV (our Scots teddy bear and thus the resident engineer) did not help much with the van.  He said that the brake system (repaired to the tune of $500 the previous week) was not actually an engine problem and he's an engine engineer, not a brakeman. So we drove about 100 miles with a variable flap flap flap, screetch, screetch that eventually went away.   Who knows?   We were on our way to a long weekend in the country.   Out of the hustle and bustle of Chicago and the twins and malls and all that.  Our destination was the pastoral, romantic, wooded and rugged Door Penninsula -- known throughout the midwest as Door County, thanks to a very well funded and very aggressive Chamber of Commerce. Imagine a finger of land five or six miles wide and thirty miles long sticking out into Lake Michigan along the Wisconsin shore.  Wisconsin, America's Dairy State.  Home of apples and cherries. The land forms one side of the long, calm Green Bay -- a sailor's delight.  We saw one moving sailboat and 24 anchored ones.   This seems to be about the proper percentage for sailboats anywhere. They are actually anchor boats that sometime sail to new anchorages. Much of the farmland the Icelandic and Swedish pioneers cleared has now gone back to forest.  There are orchards everywhere, marching off to the distance.  Reportedly a few old lighthouses are scattered along the shores.  It costs about $25 to go see one of them. Two wineries produce about 47 different varieties of fruit wines, all of them unremarkable.  Well, remarkable but the remarks are not repeatable.   Jim announced in a less than sotto voice "This is awful," and "Well, we won't be buying a case of this..." We did buy one bottle and drank nearly half of it, washing down cheese and crackers for our Friday afternoon snack.   Saturday afternoon we skipped the snack and Sunday we left the bottle on the dresser. This is like having to write a review of a 72 hour long chick film.  Wisconsin's Door County is actually a continuation of Merchandise America.  The coastline and the trees and all that nature stuff is just the fountain and the potted trees in the center court of the mall.... Imagine driving five hours from Chicago to this lovely place, passing Twin Rivers Home of the Ice Cream Sunday-- avoiding looking at a significant supply of dead wildlife, passing sheep that should have been sheared a month or two ago or maybe even a year or two ago, looping up and around and down the coast and into the first town along the Penninsula.  Then parking the car along a tree shaded street lined with 1870's houses and walking mutely from tacky tourist shop to tacky tourist shop;  fololowing the herd to yet another tacky tourist shop and yes, across the street to a souvineer shop.   Buying three jars of mustard, a bag of coffee flavored candy, two beanie baby things, a sweatshirt with a picture of a lighthouse we've never been near, and a $75 pair of sandals. We even went to a Doggie Clothing Store, but didn't buy anything.  I wanted to ask the manager if they had any sweaters that would fit an inguanna about the size of a small dachshund, but Cynthia made me leave. So we drove around and found the B&B. Given a cold and rainy night, Snoopy wrote, there was little else to do but sprawl on the oversized king bed made by shoving two slightly mismatched twin beds together and play dominoes.  The lighting was a little less than adequate, but the dominoes made up for this by having most of their spots worn off.   Play, examine, retract;  squint, play, record score and hope. I'd never played dominoes before, not even as a child.  Cynthia, true Texan she is, had a vague memory of elderly relatives playing dominoes, and could, with the help of a book from the common area that somehow fell into her suitcase and isn't in Ephraim Bay anymore, explain the rules to me well enough that only a quick personal reading of the book was required before actual play could begin. The B&B had been built in 1921 by a family from Chicago.  Ten kids.  No kitchen.  Later a summer kitchen was built a ways off;  it's now a Guest Cabin.  Like these pioneers, we too went out for our meals.  Elsewise it was just a poorly planed and unremarkable old building where people slept and ate strange breakfasts:  Rice pudding with cherries in a syrup accompanied by what with a couple of days boiling to thicken up might have been coffee. Meals were not readily available in Ephraim Bay even though it is a tourist town; we were the first week's rush and the Bay was slow in coming alive.  We did find an advertisement for a lovely looking place nearby.   Jim suggested walking, but C insisted on taking the car in case it rained. Good idea.   Not that it rained, it didn't until the middle of the night.  But the restaurant was not quite as nearby as Jim thought.  In fact, after a ten minute search we found the address only to discover that the restaurant was now a Garden Knicknackery Shop. So we went to Fish Creek and had fish.  Pretty good stuff too, C's better than Jim's because his fish was overcooked and mushy, although the sauce on his was better.  Service was first week of the summer and Jim didn't overly encourage the indifferent waiter to pursue this occupation by lavishly tipping. Optimism is looking at a Chicago forecast of 90's for the weekend then driving 250 miles due north to a peninsula stuck out into Lake Michigan and discovering that it is cold and rainy.   Sort of like looking at the Washington Post and going to Buffalo.  Clever;  Cynthia did get to lie awake at 2AM and watch a heavy thunderstorm come off the lake and lash the trees around the house.   Our room was rather like a treehouse, perched among the branches of the second floor. The next morning, in the cold and blustery dampness, we decided to take the ferry ride over to Washington Island.  We drove up to Northport, missed 9 AM ferry, drank coffee, took the 9:45 ferry and lurched across, cold and damp.  Once on the waterfront of Washington Island we were faced with a car park,  a hot dog stand (not open) and a long road into the woods. No town.  No shops. No nothing, except for an elderly Willis Jeep pulling three open-sided wagons which constituted the Cherryland Train.  For only $6 each they offered a 90 minute trip around the island, with narration and a stop at a captive trinket shop where Cynthia bought beanie baby thingies and Jim looked at rusty old farm implements.  The best part of the trip were the beach towels they gave us to use as lap blankets against the cold and rain. "If you scoot towards the middle the rain won't blow in on you too much,"  the driver assured us. The 1999 graduating class at the Washington Island High School consisted of seven boys.  Made for some authentic Shakespearean drama club productions and an interesting Senior Prom. The wind had died down while we were touring the Island's Schoolhouse Beach a long curving bay with small smooth rocks instead of sand for a beach.  There was a $25 fine for removing any of the small smooth stones.  I think that if you just picked them up and pitched them back in the lake where they came from you got a suspended sentance. Later, waiting for the ferry to depart,  we got to have lunch number one at the hot-dog stand, which while not good was at least not expensive. On the return trip to the mainland,  we sat inside on the glassed in upper deck, having had enough outside for a while.  Entertainment was provided by 8 unsupervised 10 year old boys hiding from one unsupervised girl of the same age.  We passed the time trying to guess which of the youngsters was going to get a hand crushed in the doors that kept slamming shut as they ran, dashed, ducked and giggled their way through this elaborate mating ritual that involved trying to hide from the girl who wasn't looking for them. None did, but that was pure luck. We drove back down the island and visited the tacky shops in Egg Harbor, the tacky shops in Fish Creek, the tacky shops in Sister Bay, and the tacky shops in Ephraim Bay.  We had visited the tacky shops in Surgeon Bay the previous day. We ate lunch number two in Fish Creek, then shopped some more and wandered around.  Eventually we had dinner and walked the beachfront, watching a Mallard make a date and Mr and Mrs Goose take the goslings for an evening cruise along the shore.  Father brings up the rear, encouraging the youngsters to keep up with mom, who looks back now and then to see how everyone's getting along. Insight gained from the trip:  There is little if any limit on the variety of useless cutesy stuff you can sell American women.  They seem to shop with the same combination of credulity and hope that explains Christianity....   They know it's silly but they hope it might lead to happiness. We drove home on Sunday, having seen but two lighthouses in the distance.  The drive home was uneventful to  The noise from the right front wheel did not come back with us. It was hot in Chicago, just like the paper predicted.