Right.

Stevens Point sees us head west on Highway 10 and then north on 13. We zip past Milladore's postmaster carefully lowering an American flag. An ethanol train as long as time chugs east, so we buy bratwurst and a bag of chips from a fund-raising Girl Scout whose broad vowels congeal when she speaks. "Don't make a deer your hood ornament," she drawls by way of good-bye. Just before the town of Phillips, on Route 13, is the extraordinary Concrete Park, Fred Smith's folk art museum, home to 200 life-size figures—teams of oxen, Ben Hur, an angel—made out of concrete and glass bottles. We seem to be wandering through an entire landscape of stone eccentrics. Descendants of pioneers now dot their yards with whimsical post-agrarian lawn ornaments like fake sheep or mailboxes shaped like windmills and U.S. mail trucks. Other roads in Wisconsin lead to a water tower shaped like a giant apple, or the world's biggest penny, badger, grandfather clock, and Hormel chili can. It's a land of dubious honors. There's Butternut, a past winner of the state's best-tasting water award; Park Falls, the self-described ruffed grouse capital of the world; and Lake Nebagamon, which boasts a 20,000-pound hand-rolled ball of twine made by a man whom God instructed in 1975 to stop drinking. Imagine what kind of drunk he must have been.

Two girls on the side of the road yell, "Nice wheels!" Our reply is lost to the wind. We're in the Northwoods now, with the option of one country music station or silence, and a cool dusk slowly emulsifying into night. Flashes of the Great Lake are visible amid the trees, and the water's deep indigo matches the sky's.

Once past Northland College, an environmental liberal arts school that offers courses in limnology (lakes and rivers), pollution biology, the politics of global resources, and wolf monitoring, we arrive in Bayfield, dubbed the "Best Little Town in the Midwest" by the Chicago Tribune. It's also the most ardent of the four pilot towns participating in Travel Green Wisconsin, a program that promotes ecotourism by recognizing businesses which keep their environmental impact minimal. We wander into a local coffee shop to see what this means. The to-go coffee cups at Burt & Francie's are biodegradable; their tables are fashioned by a local craftsman out of sustainably harvested wood; food waste is composted. Best of all, the beer comes from excellent local microbreweries and there's a glass case full of Wisconsin farmstead cheese, carefully selected by the owners, Jon and Danielle Ewalt, both in their mid-twenties, for whom two years in the corporate world were enough to want out. Like all new business owners, they're nearly cross-eyed with sleep deprivation, but their pride in the budding eco-municipality colors their speech with pleasure.

The local specialty, whitefish liver, is quaint but revolting. Not all traditions are worth keeping.

Day 2: Bayfield, Wisconsin, to Grand Marais, Minnesota (195 mi.)