Day 21

Woke up and decided it was too nice out to lounge around. Said goodbye to Carl and Sue, who gave me a big bag of dates for the road. Packed up the rest and headed out for a day trip to the Door Penninsula, the protrusion into Lake Michigan Northeast of Green Bay. First stop was Wequiock Falls, a nifty little falls tucked in a gorge below a bridge.

Had a banana in the last of the peanut butter, then onto the next stop: the shrine to Our Lady of Good Help. Just passed the town of Champion, a chapel now stands on the site where, as the story goes, in the mid 1860's, the Blessed Virgin Mary showed herself in a vision, not once but three times to a young country girl named Adele Brise. She told her to help the children of her land follow the Catholic way, or something along those lines, which she did dutifully the rest of her life.
I sat in the chapel and prayed alongside other pilgrims for a time and then took a handful of holy water and spread it on Breezey's wheels. I figured it couldn't hurt, and it might help.

Then onto  what turned out to be the last stop of the day; a nice county park on the edge of the Niagara escarpment (essentially a long line of cliffs surrounding the Great Lakes). I walked through a staircase carved into the escarpment down to the beach.

The beach was fine but something was terribly wrong with the water. It was a thick pea soup color. Of course, I knew exactly what was wrong: nutrient runoff from the surrounding farms had caused an algae bloom in the warm shallow waters by the beach, consuming all the oxygen in creating a dead zone all around the shoreline. But the children played in the water and their parents pretended as if nothing were wrong. When the children did ask 'why is it so green?' and 'why does it stink?' I heard their parents respond "because that's the way it is" or even worse, "that's why they call it a Green Bay."

The situation frustrated me, but without anything else to do, I lay back on the beach, snacked on dates, and read my book.  the evening passed without much event, in the sunset was glorious.

After the sun was down, I cooked myself up a stew of sausage and peppers and broth, and then hit away in the bushes to pitch my tent under cover of darkness. And the summer rolls on...