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Some of you are not going to read this story.

I can hear it: Door County in winter? You nuts? And off you'll go to the Home&Garden section . . .

Which I understand. Right about now, many of you are wishing you were someplace with palm trees--or someplace with actual slopes, or casinos, or cuisine beyond cheese curds.

Well, I don't blame you. Have a good time and send a postcard.

Now, for those of you who are still with me here:

Door County in winter is kind of neat. Of course, it helps if you think Door County in summer is kind of neat.

Door County in summer means beaches and live theater and galleries and wineries, and lighthouses and restaurants, and fishing and fish boils, a quintessential Door County ceremony whose true highlight--far more than the flames and foam and fish--is the concluding cherry pie.

It's a succession of villages, some of them charming. It's bicycling the backroads. Washington Island. A little golf. A walk in the woods.

It's lodging ranging from Victorian inns to mom-and-pop motels to resorts that test the limits of "quaint." Plus cottages for those who like cottages and condos for those who like condos.

It's crowds, especially on July weekends, when the year-round population of 28,641 quadruples and every one of the 114,564 are in SUVs on Wisconsin Highway 42 between Egg Harbor and Ephraim at the exact same time--5:47 p.m. on Saturday--gawking in wonder at the SUV in front of them.

"Summer's a madhouse seven days a week," says Tom Blackwood, park superintendent at Peninsula State Park in Fish Creek. "We have 473 campsites and they're filled seven days a week for about two months out of the year. We have 2,000 people living in the park every day."

"You can't just get into your car and drive to Sister Bay," says Ellison Bay bookseller-publisher Kubet "Kubie" Luchterhand. "You're going to get behind somebody who's looking off into the fields--`Oh, there's an apple tree over there . . . '"

Nonetheless, sane people adore Door County in high season, and they're right.

Which brings us to Door County in winter.

It's quiet.