The quick way to get to Detroit from Chicago is by sticking to Interstate Highway 94. It will get you there in five hours or less, and you’ll see lots of trucks.
On our drive to Detroit, we’ll see dunes, lighthouses, charming towns, old forts, lush fields and lots of very blue water. We’ll dine on just-caught fish, munch on just-picked cherries. We’ll meet some interesting people.
We’ll take eight days, knowing we could do it in five, and wish we had 12.
Welcome to the Mitten Route. A look at a map of lower Michigan will explain the name. We’ll drive up the Lake Michigan shoreline, down the Lake Huron shoreline.
We’ll want to buy a cottage.
Bring sandals.
DAY 1
North of St. Joseph, we leave I-94 to everyone else and pick up U.S. 31/I-196, heading north. We want to see beach. We leave the highway at South Haven, which has beaches. It also, on this day, has in port the “Tall Ships” — replica 19th Century sailing vessels — which is an excuse to hold a festival.
A word about Michigan festivals: On any given weekend, you are never more than a pie-throw (cherry or blueberry, depending on the season) away from a festival.
Greg, his wife and their two very small children, from South Bend, are 1 1/2 hours into what will probably be a 2 1/2-hour wait to tour the Tall Ship America. They have paid $20 for tickets, and after waiting this long already, they’re committed to sticking it out.
“Wouldn’t do it again,” says Greg. “Probably just hang out at the beach.”
So festivals and fairs can be fun, or they can be a pain–and either way, they can mean no room at the inn. Call first.
Part of the Michigan experience, we learn quickly, is farm markets.
“How about a slice of heaven?,” says Ed Raak to a visitor from Poland. The slice is a sliver of peach, just picked from a tree yards away from his Dutch Farm Market. The recipient accepts, tastes, smiles at the sweetness. Ed and Ardith Raak own the farm. They picked the name as well as the peaches.
“Yes, Dutch Farm Market,” says Ardith, with a happy smile, who then recites a sing-song playground slogan: “If you’re not Dutch, you’re not much.”
Then she worries. “I don’t think you should quote me on that.”
I tell her I think it’s cute. Hungarians would say the same thing about Hungarians if anything rhymed with Hungarian.
A stop at Saugatuck, once an art colony, finds it still a pretty town, which late on a Saturday afternoon is clogged with weary people shuffling along in search of fudge and ice cream, both available in abundance. Some, after wiping their hands, actually seek out art.
Saugatuck is no longer quite what it was.
“In many ways it’s better, much better,” says George Wright in his shop, Alice’s Looking Glass, on busy Butler Street. “For years, we had nothing but T-shirt shops. It’s a lot more mixed now than it used to be, which is nice.”
Locally produced artwork can be found in the mix, but you have to work at it.
Back on the road. Warning: Being alone on the road makes for mind games.
If you’re not French, you can’t quench.
The local Dutch reassert themselves, big time, in Holland. There is no shortage of windmills in Holland, Mich. One of them sits atop a restaurant in Dutch Village, a reproduction of, yes, a Dutch village, with shops that sell such renowned Dutch specialties as Belgian chocolates.
Back on the road.
If you’re not Peruvian, you’re plain alluvian.
Grand Haven, about a half-hour’s drive north on U.S. 31, has a grand lighthouse and an excellent beach, a pretty downtown and, best of all, the Musical Fountain. But it’s too late in the day for the beach, downtown is closed and if you’ve seen the Musical Fountain once, you’ve seen the Musical Fountain, and I’ve seen and heard the Musical Fountain.
We press north on 31 toward our overnight stop, Muskegon.
After all: If you’re not Estonian, you’re full of balonian.
DAY 2
It’s back to Grand Haven for breakfast at the Dee-Lite, a local institution worth going back for, then a stroll down Grand Haven pier.
Four people are fishing from the end of it. Wayne, from Rockford, Ill., is in a trance–the gentle sparkle of Lake Michigan on a glorious morning does that to you–when one of his two rods starts bouncing furiously. He reels in a perch, examines it, examines it some more, decides it’s a keeper.
“The perch have been running real small,” says Wayne. “Good eatin’, though.”
I wish him well. He returns the wish. “Have a good vacation,” he says. “Pretty hard not to here, ain’t it?”
Muskegon, 15 minutes north on U.S. 31, is more beaches and an old friend: the USS Silversides. Chicago had the sub for 30 years after World War II, then evicted it from Navy Pier.
Now it’s here, and you can sleep in it: $12.50 weeknights, $17.50 weekend nights. A couple of things you should know: You’ll need at least 19 submates (20 is the mimimum; it sleeps 60), and the sub’s toilets don’t work.
So what do you do at 3 a.m.?
“Go to the portaheads,” says Kathy Morin, assistant director. You mean, I suggest, the portapotties on the dock. “This is a maritime museum,” says Morin. “So they’re heads.”
Back on 31, the four-lane turns especially pretty as it approaches the White River, its broad median covered with thick forest. Good driving.
If you’re not Danish, you’re not sanish.
Our next stop: Pentwater. Nice-looking little town. At the marina, charterboat skipper Brent Daggett prepares to clean a 23-pound king salmon. “There’s been a lot of salmon around, at least lately,” he says. After Pentwater (year-round population, a few hundred), Ludington (pop. 8,500) seems huge. This place has some of Michigan’s finest beaches, particularly the ones in the state park north of town, where even on a perfect Sunday afternoon it was possible to find isolated stretches hidden by dunes from the rest of the world.
It’s also home on this side of the lake to the S.S. Badger, the Lake Michigan Carferry. In summer, the Badger makes two four-hour runs daily to Manitowoc on the Wisconsin side ($37 for adults, $16 for kids, $45 for cars of any age).
From Ludington, 31 becomes a two-laner as it winds through cornfields and the occasional dairy farm to Manistee, whose River Street is a well-maintained turn-of-the-century commercial district. Just outside Manistee, we pick up Michigan Highway 22.
A modest detour brings us to Sleeping Bear Dunes.
It’s here, near Glen Haven, that generations of Michiganders, young and not so young, have sprung from their vehicles and scurried up one of America’s highest sand piles. Then–seized by gravity whose power is often fortified by excess personal poundage and more than a few brewskis–they all run back down the pile while making noises that sound a lot like uncontrolled panic.
Sometimes the people tumble down.
Being Danish, I just lean against my car, sip a Diet Coke and watch in wonder.
DAY 3
Leland, halfway up the Leelanau Peninsula, is one of those special places. Its fishing-town roots are preserved in Fishtown, a cluster of shacks along the Leland River that still includes an operating smokehouse and a store that sells fish fresh off the boats.
Main Street stores peddle T-shirts, but also groceries and books. Leland is touristy but real. It also has been discovered. This year’s graduating class at the high school was 30. It was 15 last year.
“People are looking for small, quaint towns,” says one longtime local. “I’m afraid eventually it’ll be like everywhere else.”
Up Michigan 22, and even smaller, is Northport. Lisa Bowlby and her family have been coming here from Boston for years; her mother-in-law lives on a nearby farm.
“We never go to Cape Cod in the summer,” she says. “It’s too crowded, the traffic and everything. This is picture-perfect.”
“More people are finding us every year,” says a local bartender. Is that good? “That’s good,” she said. “Kind of.”
The growth is showing. A dot of a town called Suttons Bay, until recently just a couple of crumbling old buildings, is now movie-set slick. Closer to Traverse City, trees can’t hide the new housing among them.
Twenty years ago, these were frontier outposts. Today, Traverse City’s population is 15,000 and swelling. Madonna has moved her parents here. It’s still OK–crime and unemployment are virtually non-existent, new golf courses open hourly, downtown looks great–but traffic is a mess.
“Before,” says jeweler Jim Sanborn, whose family has been here “forever,” “people would drive down to Grand Rapids to shop. Now they come to Traverse City.” Which is good. Kind of.
“It’s probably at a bubble,” he says.
We reconnect with U.S. 31 and head north, the road slicing through orchards and cornfields. Signs at farm markets promise sweet corn and pies, but most of all, cherries.
At the Cherry View Orchards stand near Elk Rapids, I ask the standee, one Blaise Wooten, an essential question: What is considered proper etiquette for disposing of a cherry pit?
Replies Blaise: “Spit it out.”
Charlevoix looks like Pentwater’s big sister. Bigger yacht basin, lots more stores, more lodging in town, more ambitious, better T-shirts but the same general idea. As U.S. 31 continues along the shore of Little Traverse Bay, white birch come into the tree mix on the right side of the road; with the bay on the left, this is fine driving.
All the way into Petoskey.
DAY 4
Bob Fagan, a watercolor master, is set up with five acolytes at a corner of Lake and Howard Streets, capturing on paper what’s on the opposite corner of Lake and Howard Streets: storefronts from another time.
“This stuff is going away,” says Fagan, “and people are starting to realize how valuable it is. We used to be like this. I just can’t see going to condos and painting a picture.”
Not far from Lake and Howard Streets, in Pennsylvania Park, a small crowd is gathering to hear a noontime band concert. It all works: the pace, the architecture, the shops and galleries, the flowers, the lovely old Perry Hotel, concerts in the park.
There is much to like in Petoskey.
Just north of here is Bay View, a community established in the 1870s by the Methodist Church as a summer retreat and today a marvelous collection of Victorian cottages. And a couple of miles north of that, the signs lead us to Michigan Highway 119 and picturesque Harbor Springs.
Special trains once carried those who could afford it to lake-cooled Harbor Springs from steamy St. Louis, Louisville and Cincinnati. Those old-money cottages are still here, passed down through generations. But the boom that has boomed Traverse City, Charlevoix and the rest has been particularly uncomfortable for veteran Harbor Springsians.
“Now,” says an unhappy local, who declined to reveal even her first name for fear of unneighborly reprisals from the nouveaux, “all the buildings you see are owned by people from outside Harbor Springs.”
To us poor folks passing through, Harbor Springs is a stylish little enclave with interesting galleries and pricey shops, gleaming yachts and a token town beach with snack-mooching ducks.
Beyond Harbor Springs, Michigan 119 becomes the “Tunnel of Trees.” Undoubtedly breathtaking in fall color season, in summer it’s, well, a Tunnel of Trees, the monotony broken only by scores of “for sale” signs–until Cross Village, home of the Legs Inn.
The Legs Inn is a restaurant and saloon, not necessarily in that order. In the saloon part, perched near a tangle of twisted wood, is a stuffed hawk wearing a lei.
“How long has the porcupine been wearing the tiara?” I ask a bartender.
“Probably since the last big party we had,” says the bartender. “It must’ve been last October.”
The cuisine is Polish. Great joint.
We continue up the shore road. Here, along Sturgeon Bay, trees give way to dunes. Lake Michigan is startling in its blueness, and the beach is long and deserted except for one couple whose female half is bent over, picking through a pile of small stones left by the waves, occasionally dropping one of the stones into a plastic container.
“We’re from Florida,” she says, “and we don’t have stones like these.”
But you have all those shells.
“These are prettier,” she says. “So many colors.”
I leave them to their business and walk in another direction. There’s another pile of stones. I look around, see nobody in range, squat, and sift a few stones through my fingers. The woman from Florida is right. I’d had no idea. So many colors . . .
At Mackinaw City, Lake Michigan turns into Lake Huron. I’ve been here before, and I’d rather not be here at all.
“Let’s face it,” says Ira Green. “Mackinaw City was a parking lot.”
Green is one of the partners behind Mackinaw Crossings, an entertainment-shopping complex just down the street from the ferries that float most of the area’s visitors to and from Mackinac Island, which is the only reason any of them come here at all.
But Mackinaw City is trying harder, and it shows. The Crossings, one symptom, began operations a year ago. This spring, its 830-seat Center State Theatre opened with a revue called “Stagestruck,” a two-hour Bransonian “salute to Broadway.”
“To most people,” says general manager Susan Jewell, “Broadway and Mackinaw City are like….” Opposite extremes? “Right.”
Surprise: It’s a terrific show.
Followed by a Lake Michigan sunset.
So many colors.
DAY 5
And then, a Lake Huron sunrise.
Teams of archeologists began digging in Mackinaw City on the site of Ft. Michilimackinac in 1959, and they’re still digging. “The most common thing we find is people’s trash,” says Lynn Evans, curator of archeology. Which is good: Trash provides clues.
Meanwhile, the fort has been faithfully (we assume) reconstructed around the dig. Costumed interpreters do their best to re-create a time when the fort was both a military and trading post. It doesn’t always go quite right.
A colonial British officer orders a tower guard armed with a flintlock rifle to fire a round as a signal to an arriving pack of voyageurs. The soldier aims, then pulls the trigger. The hammer just clicks. The guard looks back at the officer.
“I hope when they get here,” shouts the guard, “they bring fresh flints.”
Mackinac Island, a 15-minute ferry ride away, is supposedly a state of mind, but during a previous visit my mind never reached the projected state. Now, once again, there’s no magic. I encounter horses, fudge shops, people waiting in lines for carriage rides, rude bicyclists, whining children, more fudge shops. Even without motorized vehicles, which are banned from the island, there is frenzy.
After an hour of this, I rush to catch the ferry back to the mainland. On the dock, I meet two Michigan couples who have had a wonderful time on Mackinac Island.
“You have to get away from the fudge,” says Phil. You do it, he says, by biking around the island.
Next time.
From Mackinaw City, U.S. Highway 23 gets us started down the Lake Huron side. First stop, 15 miles away, is Cheboygan. There is nothing fake-cute about Cheboygan, no phony facades, no boutiques with sister shops in Milan. There’s a Dairy Queen across from the Chamber of Commerce.
The Lake Michigan side was fine in many ways, but it’s nice to be back in the Midwest.
There is, in Cheboygan, a showpiece. From the outside, it looks like a medical building. But hidden within the 1980s shell: the Cheboygan Opera House, circa 1904. It’s a gem. Poke your head in the door and ask for a quick tour.
And, yes, concedes Joann Leal, director of the Opera House, people do confuse Michigan’s Cheboygan with Wisconsin’s Sheboygan. All the time.
“But we’ve never had any artists show up at the wrong one,” she says. “That would be a real disaster.”
And now begins a marvelous drive along the Lake Huron shore.
It’s a world away from Lake Michigan. There, the beaches were broad, the bluffs high, the dunes splendid. Here, for the most part, the beaches (where there are beaches) are narrow, the bluffs token, the dunes modest. Trees come almost to the rocky shoreline. Where there are no cottages–and yes, there are long stretches on this side where that’s all you see–there’s a raw naturalness that suggests things haven’t changed much since Sammy de Champlain first reported something big here in 1615.
And the lighthouses, many of them, aren’t stuck at the end of town piers. There’s no town of 40-Mile Point behind the 40-Mile Point Lighthouse, no Sturgeon Point behind the Sturgeon Point Lighthouse.
A forest road gets you to the Old Presque Isle Lighthouse, as it has since it was built in 1840.
Seeing them standing there as they’ve stood for a century and more–that’s magic.
Without fudge.
DAY 6
Alpena is not a tourist town, though it welcomes them. More than anything, it is a town that will make you wish you grew up there.
Ten miles south of Alpena, past wetlands that will remind you of the Everglades, is Ossineke. And in Ossineke is a blue styracosaurus.
In the mid-1930s, Paul Domke–who died in 1981–began building big dinosaurs, kept building them over the next 30 years, and set them in 40 acres of handsome Michigan forest that eventually became what today is called Dinosaur Gardens Prehistorical Zoo.
“It was just something he wanted to do,” says Jean Cousineau, who has been here for 16 years and now runs the place.
Originally, Domke’s dinosaurs were green, gray and brown, which seems reasonable. Over the last two years, the styracosaurus has been painted blue, the tyrannosaurus red and the parasaurolophus a kind of yellow-green.
Others are pink.
“Those are my colors,” says Jean, of the Barneyfication. “I wanted them to stand out for the kids.”
I imagined Domke’s reaction, were he around, would be about the same as mine when my mother threw out a stack of my favorite comics. Jean concurs.
“He probably turned over a couple of times in his grave,” she says. “But I’m sure if he thought about it, he’d probably agree with the colors. The reaction has been great.”
About 20 miles south of the blue and pink dinosaurs stands Sturgeon Point Lighthouse. Of the state’s 116 lighthouses, this is one of the ones most often seen in paintings, and seeing it leaves no doubt why. It’s also one of a relative few that are open to tours and are fully furnished; admission is free.
Cathy, who works in the modest gift shop, understands why so many are drawn to lighthouses.
“It’s a piece of history that’s going to be lost,” she says. “And there’s a romantic part to it–it’s from a time when all this technology wasn’t here. We’ve already had half a dozen weddings here this summer.”
Nearest town, a couple of miles south, is Harrisville–to me another charmer on the water. “A lot of folks come up here in the summer,” says a cashier at Richard’s Pharmacy, one of the town’s few businesses. “Don’t know why. There’s really nothing to do here.”
On the road out, another sign: “Ki Cuyler’s Dugout.” Kiki Cuyler, a Cub when Babe Ruth called (or didn’t call) his shot in the 1932 World Series, poured them at his bar here in his hometown until his death in 1950.
“I wish you’d been here 10 years ago,” says a longtime customer, sipping a midday highball. “That wall was all covered with stuff.” The family long ago sold the bar, but there are remnants.
Continuing south on U.S. Highway 23, it’s mostly cottages on both sides of the road. People come here to fish. Or to do nothing. Or to eat jerky.
“We marinate it in a special brine with salt and flavorings, and then we smoke it,” says Susan Ulrich, owner of the Mariner Market (“fine jerkys”) in Omer, smallest city in Michigan. (Omer’s population is about 400; the “city” thing is a technicality, but they brag about it there anyway.) I sample the elk jerky–at $27 a pound, or about a dollar a bite. It’s tasty and surprisingly tender. Susan prefers the beef. “I’m like the vanilla ice cream person.”
I order a chunk of elk to go.
DAY 7
Bay City is an old lumber and ship-building town with a streak of wildness in its past, and some of its downtown buildings and the mansions along Center Avenue reflect those fun times. Today, pleasure-boat traffic is active on the Saginaw River, and upgrades on the riverfront and in the old Midland Street commercial district suggest a city on the rebound.
For us, it’s the start of the Thumb of the Mitten.
This is farm country. Corn and sugar beets and other green stuff grow on both sides of Michigan Highway 25. The land is flat. Not many people. Then the road turns toward water, and fishing takes over again.
Fishing is big in Bay Port (population, according to the chamber of commerce, “about 250”), and we arrive a day before the annual Bay Port Fish Sandwich Festival. The fish in the sandwich is mullet. The sandwiches are sold during the festival, two days out of the year, $2.50 each–and then, like Brigadoon, they vanish until next year.
“They have a lot of bones, if they’re not prepared right,” says Connie Williams of the Bay Port Fish Co. Somehow, she says, the cooking process dissolves the bones. “It really is a good fish, but only if it’s prepared right.”
Past Bay Port, smallish cottages regain control of much of the shore. But beyond Caseville, Albert Sleeper State Park handsomely opens the beach to everyone; and the beach at Port Crescent State Park–with its protected dunes–matches some of the best on the Lake Michigan side.
We know we’re in Grindstone City because there are grindstones everywhere. They’re lawn ornaments, tabletops, driveway markers, signs. They were made here until 1929. They’re still here.
“Why not?” says charterboat skipper Dave Dybowski as he guts a 15-pound chinook. “How you gonna get rid of them?”
Huron City is a privately owned 1880s village that has been turned into a privately owned museum. I give it a quick glance and move on to another wonderful lighthouse at Port Aux Barques.
“It’s my favorite lighthouse,” says a white-haired woman with a camera. Why? “I don’t know,” she says. “I just like it.”
Now, for the first time on the entire drive, there’s a sense of really being out in the country, and there’s a sweetness to it. The towns along this part of Michigan 25 barely register. Around Forestville, the road–smooth until now–turns choppy for about 10 miles until Forester (no relation), where cottages return, some of them on large lots and, from the outside, quite fine.
And finally, Port Sanilac.
The last available room is in a four-room motel on the road west to Carsonville: the Last Chance Motel.
“We just came up with it,” owner Sue Brewer says of the name.
It is, like the rest of Port Sanilac, perfect.
DAY 8
It has a lighthouse, a marina, a hardware store, a drugstore, a grocery store. Houses built in the 1850s. There’s a golf course a couple of miles up the road. There’s a theater group that performs in a barn. There’s Mary’s Diner for breakfast, and places with martinis for dinner. A couple of blocks off the highway and it’s farms. Whatever isn’t here that’s important is probably in Lexington, 11 miles down the coast.
Port Sanilac is where I want my cottage. But not right now. There’s more road.
In theory, Detroit is about a two-hour drive from Port Sanilac, but there’s an art fair in Lexington, and that stops us. Some exhibitors are from places like North Carolina, but most are from the region–and among those from the region who are showing paintings and photographs, one subject dominates: lighthouses.
Joe Cilluffo is touching up an original, in acrylics, of the lighthouse at Ft. Gratiot in Port Huron. His work is splendid.
How, I ask, do you explain people’s fascination with lighthouses?
“They’re the oldest form of architecture in America,” he says. “They’re the American equivalent of European castles. They’re our heritage.”
And maybe, he says, there’s a spiritual side as well.
“The lighthouse represents light, guidance,” he says. “And that’s just what we need right now.”
Thomas Edison, speaking of light, lived his boyhood in Port Huron, 20 miles south of Lexington, and hawked papers and candy on trains out of the city’s Grand Trunk depot. His house is gone, but the depot is still there (as a tourist information center), a statue of “Young Tom” is nearby, and there’s other Edison stuff around town.
But nothing dominates Port Huron like Lake Huron and the St. Clair River. The Blue Water Bridge spans the river into Canada, and the name is no accident; only the styracosaurus in Ossineke is bluer than this river.
And near the mouth of the river: the Ft. Gratiot Lighthouse. This one, we climbed. The view from it was good, but it doesn’t compare with the view of it.
Bob Hanford has been leading tours here for seven years. He knows the attraction.
“We love ’em,” he says. “They’re history.”
We follow the St. Clair as long as we can, including a stop at Algonac, the Pickerel Capital of the World and home of the annual Pickerel Tournament. Which compels a stop at a restaurant where I can order pickerel.
“By the way,” I ask the waitress, “what is pickerel?”
“Walleye,” says the waitress.
“Well, then, why do you call it `pickerel’ when the rest of the world calls it `walleye’?”
“I don’t know–I’ll ask my boss.”
Ten minutes later, she returns, with an answer: “My boss says it’s because this is where they hold the Pickerel Tournament.”
And Detroit is called Detroit because it’s home of the Detroit Tigers. It’s just around the bend.
It’s also, for us, the end of the road.
DETROIT TO CHICAGO: THE MITTEN ROUTE
– DAY 1
Chicago-Muskegon: 199 miles.
Overnight: Quality Inn & Suites, Muskegon, $109.
Best grub: Breaded lake perch, $10.95; Main Street Pub & Eatery, Muskegon.
– DAY 2
Muskegon-Leland: 230 miles.
Overnight: The Leland Lodge, Leland, $119.
Best grub: Fresh Lake Michigan whitefish, lightly breaded and fried, $8.95 (platter); Bluebird Restaurant, Leland.
– DAY 3
Leland-Petoskey: 106 miles.
Overnight: Stafford’s Perry Hotel, Petoskey, $65.
Best grub: Fresh Lake Superior whitefish, wrapped in a shredded yuca crust, pan-sauteed and presented on Florida sweet corn sauce, $33; Andante restaurant, Petoskey.
– DAY 4
Petoskey-Mackinaw City: 55 miles.
Overnight: Chippewa Motor Lodge, Mackinaw City, $59.
Best grub: Old World Sampler (pierogi, kabanosy and bigos), $8.95; Legs Inn, Cross Village.
– DAY 5
Mackinaw City-Alpena: 111 miles.
Overnight: Holiday Inn, Alpena, $69.
Best grub: Lake perch, sauteed in butter, $10.95; Courtyard Restaurant, Alpena.
– DAY 6
Alpena-Bay City: 153 miles.
Overnight: Holiday Inn, Bay City. $74.
Best grub: Jerk walleye, $13.95; The Lantern, Bay City.
– DAY 7
Bay City-Port Sanilac: 150 miles.
Overnight: Last Chance Motel, Port Sanilac, $28.
Best grub: Fried walleye plate, with a side of fried lake perch, $15.95; Forester Inn, Forester.
– DAY 8
Port Sanilac-Detroit: 122 miles.
Overnight: Hampton Inn, Dearborn, $83.
Best grub: Pickerel dinner (broiled), $11.95; Down Riggers on the River, Algonac.
Total miles: 1,126.
Note: Lodgings are listed primarily to provide pricing information and should not be considered recommendations. Prices are for one person; expect doubles to be slightly higher. The room price at the Last Chance Motel is not a misprint. Miles are actual but include sometimes serious meanderings.
NOTES FROM THE ROAD
Highlights: Grand Haven, Pentwater, Ludington Beach State Park, Leland, Traverse City, farm markets, Petoskey, Legs Inn (Cross Village), Sturgeon Bay, Mackinaw City, Mackinac Island, Cheboygan’s Opera House, Presque Isle lighthouses. Port Sanilac, Port Huron.
Road food: Whitefish, walleye, lake perch, pickerel, fudge, frozen custard, hot dogs, jerky, brats, lemonade, smelts, smoked fish, Upper Peninsula pasties, cherries, peaches and plums.
Essential stop: Mackinac Island.
Easy sidetrip: Upper Peninsula.
Cheapest gas: $1.03, Ludington.
Best lodging: Stafford’s Perry Hotel, Petoskey.
Best lighthouse: Old Presque Isle Light.
Best meal: Thinly sliced pepper-cured salmon on fresh pineapple, with honey-mustard sauce and fennel; Andante Caesar salad; fresh Lake Superior whitefish, wrapped in a shredded yuca crust, pan-sauteed and presented on Florida sweet corn sauce; Andante restaurant, Petoskey.
Best beaches: Lake Michigan–Ludington Beach State Park (north end). Lake Huron–Port Crescent State Park.
Best souvenir: Solid gold cherries, $55; Gold & Silver Center, Traverse City.
Roads best traveled: Lake Michigan–Michigan Highway 119 from north of Harbor Springs, continuing up an unnumbered road along the Sturgeon Bay shoreline. Lake Huron–U.S. Highway 23 from Cheboygan to Alpena.
———-
Alan Solomon’s e-mail address is alsolly@aol.com.
On the road with Alan Solomon. Our road warrior is taking a few weeks off before his final drive of the season. That trip, in September, will be to somewhere in New England for the fall colors. If you’ve got any tips or suggestions on where he should visit (or just want to read his past reports), go to our special board on the Internet: chicagotribune.com/go/drive.
