ELY – Getting to Ely is a long drive for most people. Getting to Ely to live can be an even longer journey.

Two families related their experiences of making Ely their new home at a recent Tuesday Group gathering.

“How we got to Ely is kind of a long story,” said Andrea Konrath. Andrea and her husband, Luke, are both public school teachers in rural central Wisconsin. Luke also dabbles in online teaching and is an adjunct professor at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth.

The Konraths started their journey together to Ely by meeting each other near Milwaukee, where they grew up, and got married. They moved up north to Marinette, Wis., on the Michigan border, then moved to the Lake Michigan coastal town of Manitowoc. “We have spent our recent years smack dab in the center of Wisconsin in Red Granite,” she said.

The story of their relocation to Ely started with Luke. When he was young, the family sought a place to enjoy fishing. “Their mom wanted a place that was at least close to a hospital in case Luke and his brother got into trouble, and they found Ely,” Andrea said.

Annual camping trips to Bear Head Lake State Park and Blair’s Point on Garden Lake instilled a love for the area for Luke and his family. “Their mom still gets a bad rap for suggesting a trip to the Grand Tetons instead of Ely in 1994,” Andrea said.

“When Luke and I met, of course he wanted to get married in Ely, and I had never been here. As it happened, Ely was a perfect spot for us,” she said. They were married at Garden Lake. “Everything that we could have asked for was just perfect, from the minister, to the flowers and photographer.”

In recent years, the Konrath family, along with four children, Jordan, 19, Austin, 13, Lauren, 10, and Jaden, 7, have vacationed on Fall Lake. “We always camp, sometimes in good weather, and sometimes in bad weather. We have had lots of good memories out there,” she said.

She noted that local nature photographer Jim Brandenburg has had a big influence on their lives. “When we got married, Luke and I decided to not go on a honeymoon, but instead we bought a Brandenburg print,” she said. “Our house in Red Granite is filled with his work, because we love the area and what Ely has to offer.”

Energy conservation and green living are a big part of the Konraths’ life. They named their dog “Tesla” after the electric car maker. “I jokingly suggested that name because it would be the only Tesla Luke would ever own,” Andrea said.

They continued to vacation once a year in the Ely area and continued the tradition started in Luke’s family.

Luke liked looking at the real estate ads and dreamed of buying a place up north. “Being two teachers, that wasn’t really in our budget, so we decided to invest in solar panels on our home in Red Granite,” she said. With the savings of using 75 solar panels, as well as driving an electric car, they saved enough money to purchase a home in Ely last year. “Hopefully, any day now, we will be installing solar panels on the roof,” she said.

Luke did finally get his Tesla-made vehicle. “We feel like we have devoted our lives to being part of the solution, and we want to leave the world a better place for our children,” she said.

Luke added, “Part of the deal when we got married was that Andrea does all the talking.”

From Dallas to Ely

Kelsey Wood and Matt Weissert, along with their two children, Sunny, 3, and Summit, 9, own Wilderness Wood-Fired Pizza and Catering in Ely. Their journey to Ely started in Dallas, Texas.

Matt said his story is not much different from the Konraths. “My dad used to pull us out of our comfortable home in Dallas in the summer and drive us up to the Boundary Waters, put on the packs and told us to get out there,” he said. His family did that for most of the 1980s and 1990s.

“What I remember most is driving into town, seeing the big Chocolate Moose building, and lots of mosquitoes and DEET,” Matt said.

Matt and Kelsey met while attending college at Texas Tech. At the beckoning of his father, last summer they decided to move to Ely. “We put everything in storage,” he said. “That storage building got flooded. Then we had the big storm and both of our cars were totaled. Our house was damaged.”

Once they got through that, they realized Ely was a totally different life from Dallas. “Our neighbors here actually helped us to decide to stay in Ely,” Kelsey said. “Living in Dallas, we hardly knew our neighbors. We met so many wonderful and genuine people here, that we decided to stay the winter and give it a shot.”

“I have never been in a place where the sun didn’t come out for a whole month,” Matt said.

Instead of moving back to Dallas, they decided they needed a way to make a living to stay in Ely. They were doing some part-time online work.

Enter the pizza trailer business. “We both, in our past lives, worked in restaurants.” She ran a Cheese Cake Factory and Matt ran a Jimmy John’s Sub Shop. “The pizza wagon idea sounded good. It was for sale, and here we are,” she said.

They both marvel at the way so many people in Ely make it go with more than one job, or create their own jobs. “There are so many people here who have created their own niche,” Kelsey said.

“Everyone has been so supportive,” Matt said. “From the help we’ve received from the area restaurants to the friends we’ve made, it is just incredible. Like my dad said, Ely is like living in a Norman Rockwell painting.”

“And our kids are already tired of pizza,” he added.