Martin Hintz - Wisconsin Off the Beaten Path: Discover Your Fun

Martin Hintz, a past president of the Society of American Travel Writers and former chairman of its Freelance Council, has been a travel writer for more than four decades. Hintz has more than one hundred books to his credit, some of which are other travel-related volumes published by Globe Pequot. He has written hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and also publishes The Irish American Post, an international online news magazine (irishamericanpost.com). In addition to his wife, Pam Percy, sons Daniel and Stephen and daughter Kate have collaborated with him on writing projects.

Pam Percy has written The Complete Chicken, a coffee table art book about chickens, and The Field Guide to Chickens. In addition to working on Wisconsin Off the Beaten Path, Percy collaborated with Hintz on Wisconsin Cheese: A Cookbook and Guide to the Cheeses of Wisconsin (Globe Pequot), which contains more than one hundred recipes utilizing award-winning Wisconsin cheese, along with information about serving cheese and the Dairy States cheese plants, festivals, and related attractions. In 2014, they wrote Globe Pequots Food Lovers Guide to Wisconsin, covering restaurants, markets, and local culinary offerings from around the state.

Percy and Hintz raise chickens, goats, rabbits, and vegetables on their farm in northern Milwaukee County, selling to area restaurants and to a lucky group of select customers. They also host farm-to-table dinners with noted chefs throughout the growing season.

Special gratitude to all our friends throughout Wisconsin who helped with this book, especially Gary Knowles, plus the staff of the Wisconsin Division of Tourism. Visitor bureaus, historical societies, and local information offices around the state were particularly helpful as well. The people of Wisconsin themselves also deserve rousing applause, from the guy who told us where to find the best pie in his hometown to the volunteers at all the marvelous historical sites.

The rolling, muddy waters of the Mississippi form most of the western boundary of Wisconsin. The river edges a slow way from where it first touches the state at Prescott, meandering 200 miles south to the rural southwestern corner of the state near Dubuque, Iowa. The Great River Road, Highway 35, skirts the rim of the river, crawling through sloughs, up over the ridgebacks, and along short straightaways that end much too soon in a sweeping curve. The road has consistently been voted one of the countrys most scenic routes by everyone from motorcycle clubs to travel editors. The route is well marked by white signs with a green riverboat pilots wheel.

For a map of the entire Great River Road, covering the 3,000 miles from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, contact the Mississippi River Parkway Commission, 222 State St., Madison 53703; (866) 763-8310; experiencemississippiriver.com.

Muscular tugboats, with their roaring diesel engines, shove blocks of barges loaded with coal, oil, lumber, and other goods. They make these runs almost year-round between Minnesotas Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, to the Gulf of Mexico. Only the freezing cold of midwinter forces closing of the river traffic. The river is then turned over to hardy anglers who brave the blustery winds in search of the Midwests best-tasting bluegills and catfish. The hapless fish are plucked through holes chopped in ice that can be 2 or more feet thick.

Trappers range along the riverbanks, bringing in dozens of muskrat, beaver, and fox pelts each year to satisfy the demands of the national and international markets.

The river is straight out of Mark Twain, with memories of the steam-spitting Delta Queen that called at quays in Prairie du Chien and La Crosse. I remember camping on a riverfront sandbar one summer and being awakened in the predawn hours to the crash of paddle wheels storming downriver. A quick glance out the tent flap revealed what seemed to be a sky-high bank of lights surging south on the blackness of the river. Waltz music wafted through the humid night air, just audible over the roar of machinery. Then it was gone, like a 19th-century dream. Or was it? These days, the La Crosse Queen paddle wheeler offers daily sightseeing tours, plus pizza, Sunday brunch, and lunch cruises, along with weekend dinner jaunts.

The river itself is dotted with islands, fringed with marshlands, and speckled with drowned trees, which are the reminders of the Mississippis many spring runoff tantrums. But on decent days, canoeists can paddle along the backwater sloughs in search of great, flapping herons and slithery muskrats. Houseboaters can drift along in tune with seasons.

WESTERN WISCONSINS TOP HITS

American Players Theater

Badger Mine Museum

Elroy-Sparta Trail

Fennimore Doll & Toy Museum

First Capitol State Park and Museum

Grand Army of the Republic Hall

Grant County Courthouse

House on the Rock Resort

Joseph Huber Brewing Company

Mount La Crosse

Nelson Dewey State Park

Norskedalen

Pendarvis

Prairie du Chien Museum at Fort Crawford

Prairie Villa Rendezvous

Spurgeon Vineyards and Winery

Stonefield Village

Sugar River Trail

Swiss historical village

Villa Louis

Wisconsin High School Rodeo Association Championships

This is a county of rivers. The Wisconsin bisects the landscape, meandering downstream from the states Northland. Its importance in history is marked by a sign in Portage (Columbia County) that reads:

ON JUNE 14, 1673, JACQUES MARQUETTE AND LOUIS JOLIET STARTED THE 1.28 MILE PORTAGE FROM HERE TO THE WISCONSIN RIVER, WHICH LED TO THEIR DISCOVERY OF THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI, JUNE 17, 1673, AT PRAIRIE DU CHIEN.

Other markers in the county should be perused as well. While you are in Gays Mills for the annual Blossom Day Festival in May or the annual Apple Festival in September, read the marker on Highway 171 east of town. It tells of the early lives of the pioneers who developed the apple industry there. A marker commemorating early governor James Davidson is on Highway 61 near the village of Soldiers Grove. A marker on Highway 35 south of Lynxville describes the log rafts that used to float down the Mississippi in the 1800s. The Prairie du Chien marker is at the tourist information center on the Mississippi River, memorializing the building of the third frontier fort in the Wisconsin Territory. Another marker in Prairie du Chien, located at Villa Louis, outlines the importance of Fort Crawford in protecting the American frontier during the War of 1812. A Marquette-Joliet marker at the states tourism information center where Highway 18 crosses the Mississippi honors the two French explorers and their five French-Canadian voyageur companions as being the first whites to travel the Upper Mississippi.

After the Mississippi and the Wisconsin, Crawford Countys third major waterway is the Kickapoo, a name derived from the Winnebago Indian term kwigapawa, which means moves about from here to there. The Winnebago knew what they were talking about. The Kickapoo offers more twists and turns than a dish of spaghetti on its crooked north and south route, joining the Wisconsin River at Wauzeka.

Lovely as it is, the Kickapoo can be nasty. A flood in late August 2007 inundated much of Gays Mills, and the angry waters overflowed the banks so often that the town of