Lake Geneva: Shore Path, Vineyard Afternoon & Wood-Fired Evening

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is 90 minutes from Chicago and has been the Midwest's answer to Newport since Chicago industrialists began building estate cottages on its shores in the 1870s. The 26-mile Geneva Lake Shore Path — said to have been continuously used since the Potawatomi people inhabited the region — connects the surviving Gilded Age estates and runs past the 1933 Riviera bathhouse and the mail-boat dock, where a postal carrier still leaps from a moving boat to deliver lakefront letters. Staller Estate Winery outside Delavan rounds out the afternoon with estate-grown wines and small-batch spirits before wood-fired dinner at Oakfire back in Lake Geneva.