In my final summer of college my boyfriend and I took a trip from Madison, WI to the beautiful Mackinac Island pictured above. It really is a wonderful place and according to The Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau, I’m not the only one who thinks so:

“Mackinac Island is one of the world’s best travel destinations. In fact, Travel + Leisure readers have voted Mackinac Island No. 1 on a list of the Top 15 Islands in the Continental U.S. in the publication’s World’s Best Awards this year”.

The trip was in August, a great time to get out on those gorgeous midwest rivers and wave a stick around (you could call it fishing but when you miss as many strikes as I do you just start calling it what it is). Our drive went alongside a beautiful river just waiting for us to come play. But rats, we didn’t bring anything to fish with (which is NOT very WI but we were in a small car and it was meant to be a romantic getaway – Ope). Fear not though, KMart was there to save the day. We giggled up and down the fishing aisles grabbing our gear and generally being young and silly in love and decided this was all too good so we booked a hotel for later that night and headed off looking for a place to fish.

The Escanaba River is beautiful to fish, and it was one of those perfect afternoons that late summer brings to the midwest – a warm slight breeze, deep blue skies, and trees just getting ready to turn. We took turns using our one fly rod. And as beautiful as all of this was, I wanted a little attention, so I mean I’m trying everything – busting out the bikini and sunbathing on the rocks kind of trying. And my sweet, darling boyfriend (who, you should know, was normally less interested in fishing than I was) never once took his eyes off the river – not once. And that is a very real thing I think anyone who is or is married to a Wisconsinite can verify.

Situations like these call for action so I did the only thing I knew – I waded in next to him, said “my turn”, and focused my attention on the water for a while. All things must pass and eventually it was time to start heading to the hotel. Now this was in the era of big old paper maps. I am not now, nor have I ever been good with maps, and sadly navigation was up to me. I don’t exactly know how long it took for us to get where we needed but I do know that by the time we got there we looked, smelled and felt as disgusting as the car we were driving.

When we finally – FINALLY – found our hotel we thought we had found heaven. When they told us there was a Pizza Hut that delivered to the rooms,  we knew for SURE. After cleaning off the smell of the fish, the river, and the utter stench of my navigation skills, we spent a blissful night watching Bewitched reruns and eating pizza. It was one of the best nights ever. Growing up in northern WI was like that: getting lost on winding roads, taking life as it comes, ending the day smelling like a creature from the deep –  and of course always looking out for those fish.

A word to the wise – when you can be lost, hungry, and gross and still have one of the best days ever, that’s when you know it’s real love. So a few years later that darling boyfriend and I married each other in a small Wisconsin town and had our honeymoon in an even smaller Wisconsin town. Decades and moves all around the country later we still have our souvenir fly rod, we’re still giggly in love, and there is still no hope in sight for me to ever figure out where I’m going on a (yes even digital) map. 

I love Wisconsin.