Dear National Park People:

Several years ago, my wife and I just spent a week in your Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin, and it was pretty neat. The islands were nice to look at, and Lake Superior is nut-busting cool.

Thing is, I think the island experience is good, but not great. You float around and look at islands and, well, after a while they all look the same. It's sort of inert. And that's too bad, because I think that it could really be something extraordinary if you'd just make some investments to spiff up your infrastructure. You need to stoke up the adrenaline factor, you know what I mean? Make those islands ROCK.

Have you, for instance, thought of introducing a sort of musical boat cruise tour? The wife and I took a rather pedestrian sightseeing cruise through the islands, and the entire time I kept thinking how much better it would be if the boat had humongous speakers mounted on the top deck blasting out some kick-ass rock and roll. Run with me on this... the boat sits next to the dock in Bayfield and all of the passengers have finished boarding. Suddenly, the boat rises as the hydrofoil plane is extended (this plan works much better if you use an all-hydrofoil fleet), everyone hears the opening guitar riff to Guns 'N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle." You know as well as I do that when you hear that, something awesome is about to go down.

The way I see it, the next hour is spent zipping around the islands at moderate speed (say, 20 knots) to some tunes that allow for a nice mellow roll while people dig the islands... I'm thinking Dark Side of the Moon because it flows so well, but that's just a suggestion. You could always spin different discs for different crowds; if they don't look like a Floyd bunch, maybe some Flying Burrito Brothers (but only Parsons-era, though; the other guys were a bunch of strokers, really, and they're shit without Parsons). It's up to you.

The important thing is that you end the cruise right. The skipper should make sure that, by the end of the middle section, he's got the boat out towards the outer edge of the islands, pointing back to the mainland, with a pretty tight channel to travel through if he wants to get back to Bayfield. Then he gets on the PA and tells everyone to hang onto their hats, because he's about to pull some crazy shit. Then he puts on Van Halen's "Dreams" and slowly but steadily opens up the hydrofoil's throttle until the mofo's doing 50 knots as he weaves his way in and out of the islands on the way home, kicking up a roostertail you can see in Michigan. Hot damn! I'm psyched just thinking about it. You could even fake hitting a sea kayak to give the passengers some blood and guts action.

I'm confident that if you went with something like this (I vote "the Xtremely Rockin Apostle Adventure," but once again, that's up to you), you'd see revenues climb like a son of a bitch and your funding issues would be a thing of the past. I bet you'd out-draw Yellowstone. Who wants to see bears and geysers when you can waste a fake kayak at 50 knots?

Hope you find this helpful,

Keith Pille

PS: You might also want to look into installing laser shows into all of those lighthouses you've got out there. They'd work really nicely with the music, and it's not like anyone needs a lighthouse these days.

PPS: The wife also says that you should boat some local high school kids out to the beaches on the islands and have them reenact pirate scenes. I think she's on to something.