Peninsula State Park

Our day started with a short walk on the White Cedar Nature Trail. This trail is well designed for children with lots of activities to keep them interested (things to watch for, activities to do). We enjoyed it for explaining about deer and their lives in the forest.

Eagle Bluff Lighthouse

After our walk, we took a tour of the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse, operational in 1868. This is one of three lighthouses in the area, designed to get ships through the nearby Strawberry Channel. The fun part of the tour was learning about the family of the second lighthouse keepers. They had seven sons – who managed to sleep in two double beds and a crib. The sons all had chores to keep them busy. The worst chore was fetching water from the shores of Green Bay and carrying it up the bluff using a yoke on their shoulders. The boys hated the chore so much that they used their one horse to drill a well – it took them over two years.  Being a lighthouse keeper was a federal job with the privilege of staying in the brick lighthouse, compared to the wooden houses of the surrounding community. They hosted many a social occasion for the townsfolk who lived in Fish Creek about 3 miles away.   

Captain Hook's Cave

In the afternoon, I relived my childhood, by taking the Eagle Trail from the Bay Beach Campground. This hike is relatively flat at the start, but then it narrows and has a lot of tree roots and rocks as it follows the shoreline with Eagle Bluff rising above you. This limestone formation, part of the Niagara escarpment is filled with little caves. As kids, we called one of them Captain Hook's Cave and sure enough, when I got there, a pair of kids were playing in the cave. In my youth, a large set of stairs climbed from the lake shore up to the top of the bluff near the fire tower. Those are gone now, and instead you took a roundabout way to climb up to the top. The views from the top of the bluff are fantastic, one to the town of Ephraim the other way to Bay Beach and Welkher’s Point. 

Sunset from Skyline Drive

In the evening, we took the car along Skyline Drive to watch the sunset from the vantage points along the bluffs.