Ellison Bay, WisconsinThe drive: 5 hours

It’s rare to find a place where you can see the actual Milky Way spilling itself across the firmament and contemplate the cosmos on an elemental level. But one of the best spots to do so in the Upper Midwest is Newport State Park in Ellison Bay, near the tip of Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula.

My spouse and I first trekked to this wilderness — an officially designated Dark Sky Park — in September 2020. The pandemic was bringing us down, and we wanted to have our minds blown with the hugeness of the universe and the smallness of our tiny human position within it, to be simultaneously humbled and expanded. We needed Galaxy Brain to be more than a meme. 

Having studied up on Dark Sky etiquette, we learned that no white light was allowed within the park. We stowed our dumb smartphones and regular flashlights in favor of red-filtered ones. Wanting to catch the moonrise over Lake Michigan, we made our way to the very eastern edge of the park, just before land gives way to the waters leading out to Washington Island.

We sat on the sand among dozens of other astronomy enthusiasts with their charts and telescopes, an impromptu gathering of like-minded darkness chasers. When the moon, like an ethereal performer ready for her close-up, rose over the waves and into a sky stippled white with planets and stars, many of them shooting, every single person whooped and clapped. It was better than drugs.