Door County Scotland Yard

08/15/2026

Reservations are needed to secure a spot!

A Door County restaurant has been heralded by the New York Times. See link below ⬇️

📸 Rachel Bernhard / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

08/14/2026

Earn rewards for exploring

08/10/2026

These are events not to be missed!

08/05/2026

Guests often ask about Washington Island!

Washington Island sits about 7 miles off the tip of the Door Peninsula, reachable only by a five-mile ferry ride across Death's Door, the same treacherous strait that early French explorers translated from an Indigenous name meaning "door to death," a reputation earned honestly given how many ships wrecked in those waters before modern navigation aids existed. At roughly 23.5 square miles, it's the largest island in the Potawatomi chain stretching between Wisconsin's Door Peninsula and Michigan's Garden Peninsula, part of a group of islands geologically tied to the same Niagara Escarpment that shapes the Door County bluffs on the mainland.

French explorers first visited the island in the early 1600s, and it carried a few different names before settling on Washington, appearing as the "Huron Islands" in Jesuit records from the 1670s. European settlement really took hold in the 19th century, with Scandinavian immigrants, largely Icelandic and Norwegian, arriving to build a fishing and farming economy, wheat and other crops thriving in the island's soil while the surrounding waters supported a genuine commercial fishing industry for generations.

That Scandinavian heritage is still deeply visible today. The Stavkirke, a wooden stave church built in the traditional Norwegian style, gives visitors what amounts to a small transported piece of medieval Norway sitting in the middle of Lake Michigan, and the Jacobsen Museum preserves the island's broader settlement history. Schoolhouse Beach ranks among its most distinctive natural features, a shoreline covered entirely in smooth white limestone cobblestones rather than sand, one of only a handful of beaches like it anywhere in the world.

With a year-round population of just 708 people according to the most recent census, the island runs almost entirely on tourism today, ferries connecting to Northport on the mainland, a small airport with two runways for private planes, and roughly 40 miles of backroads that visitors explore by bike, car, or even Segway. Death's Door itself remains a genuine draw for divers, with wrecks like the schooner Grape Shot, sunk in 1867, still resting on the lake floor, a reminder that the same waters keeping the island isolated also preserved a piece of its most dangerous history right beneath the surface.

08/04/2026

06/22/2026

An annual celebration as summer is welcomed in!

06/16/2026

One of the best places to visit in Door County!

Who's ready?? Destination Door County Destination Sturgeon Bay

04/27/2026

Our night skies are pretty spectacular!

✨Sign the Petition to protect Door County's Dark Skies! For the Arooras!🐾
High lumen LED lights are popping up everywhere, threatening Newport State Park's Dark Sky status. Help protect one of the many things that makes Door County SO SPECIAL, and one of the reasons you and your Scottie come back to Rally to visit Door every year, we're sure:)🌠🌃🐾🥰
🔗change.org/KeepDoorCountySkiesDark
✨Did you know Newport State Park's Dark Sky designation from the International Dark Sky Association is one of only 18 in the United States and only the second one in the Midwest?!