A Surfeit of Lakes

This was my first time to the Great Lakes region, and we’d already been by Lake Erie and Lake Ontario bordering New York. Now it was time for the waters that define all of Michigan—Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior—and to finally get what Michiganians mean when they say “UP” and “LP.”  

Until now, I had never appropriately absorbed the concept that Michigan is actually two individual pieces of land—an upper peninsula and a lower peninsula formed by three lakes, linked by a bridge, and united by one state government. The three purple markers indicate our stops on our way north.

 

Northern Michigan is beautiful, no matter how you look at it. We headed for stays at Petoskey (to hang out), St Ignace (to visit Mackinac Island), and Sault Ste Marie (to see the locks). Our choice to drive north through the center of the state caused us to forgo much of the east coast of Lake Michigan (reserving visits to places such as Interlochen and Traverse for another time). In all, we spent a week in the upper part of the lower peninsula, then another week in the lower part of the upper peninsula (how’s that for confusing).

Once you get past the sprawling auto-heartland of Detroit, much of central Michigan is farmland, and we occasionally shared the more rural highways with agricultural equipment.

 

Our home for a week at Magnus City Park in Petoskey. We faced Lake Michigan, with a one-minute walk to the shore. Behind us is a hospital whose 24/7 drone of compressors took a few days to get used to. Running through the park is a 26-mile rail-to-trail bike path from Charlevoix (south) through Petoskey to Harbor Springs (north). Local signage for this Little Traverse Wheelway shows a picture of a penny-farthing above the words “No Driving or Teaming”—a reminder of its 1800s origins as a bicycling path in the days of horse and carriage, before railroads claimed the right of way for use.

 

Petoskey is an easy place to like, both for its beauty and its amenities. It’s a clean, well-kept city, well set up for encouraging people to be outdoors, full of interesting neighborhoods with street-shading trees, late 19th- and early 20th-century homes, and small local businesses tucked in almost everywhere. The downtown was surprisingly large. Just off a marina, the multi-block area contains a small park and is lined with shops and restaurants that seem to draw as many locals as tourists. Name-brand box stores are accessible outside of town, and greenbelts and many little cities worth visiting line the coast. We’d stay here all summer in a heartbeat…it’s just so dang far from Yuma! 

Patchouli gets his first look at Lake Michigan and wonders if it’s an inland sea. We’re more than 300 miles from Chicago down the middle of this lake. I begin to understand how these waters can create their own weather.

 

The area is known for its “Petoskey stones,” which are actually fossils from an ancient coral reef and Michigan’s official state stone. Our beach was pretty picked over, but I did find some large and small samples, plus some fossilized shells. I kept only the smallest. We do live in an RV, after all. (Photo care of wikipedia.)

With lakes come bugs. A hatch of thousands of black, thin winged, non-biting things clustered over anything white (like our entire rig and truck setup) and swirled in clouds so thick you could spot them 20 yards away. These were the hapless victims of a spider who set up residence on our slideout and was never without a meal. (After we left here, the same kind of web showed up in the same spot, stop after stop, all the way to South Dakota. We figured the spider must have backed herself into the awning box against highway winds, although her web was destroyed on each travel day. Once at a Walmart it was covered in dew, and at an RV park in South Dakota it was covered in cottonwood fluff. We didn’t see it again after that, so the spider may have finally jumped ship.)

Staying a week at Petoskey with alternating rainy and sunny weather showed some of the many moods of Lake Michigan. These three pics were all taken from roughly the same spot at similar times of the day.

Sunrise flyer on Lake Michigan.

One clear day we drove south to Charlevoix, a lake-front city full of Victorian houses, condos, and contemporary homes climbing up hills and overhanging shorelines with private docks. The marina has a beautiful park, with the downtown area right behind us.

The day we came through, volunteers were planting the city’s curbsides with miles of petunias in an annual city beautification project that involves a flatbed truck dropping off flats of flowers every few yards for green-thumbed residents to unpack and stick into the dirt. This year’s count was two million petunias.

 

A Lake Michigan beach at Charlevoix. That red box is a lighthouse.

Charlevoix has a weird little grouping of stone homes called the Mushroom Houses, designed in the 1920s to 1970s by self-taught architect Earl Young. Built to blend into their surroundings, from certain angles they look surprisingly small, as if inhabited by Hobbits, but resolve to normal size once you got to their front sides.

 

Yes, that’s a true English-style thatched roof they’re putting onto this building. I wonder what the next-door neighbor in the Victorian thought of this new companion.

 

A street typical to Charlevoix’s older neighborhoods. Some avenues had grand homes kept in stately fashion and some had modest homes kept barely at all, but shading lanes seemed to be everywhere.

 

Getting from Petoskey in the LP to St Ignace in the UP requires crossing the five-mile long Mackinac (pronounced “mackinaw”) Bridge. 

The desire for a suspension bridge linking the two peninsulas had been around since the 1870s (to emulate the successful Brooklyn Bridge), but achieving it took decades of fitful starts and stops because of engineering, funding, and support snags. Finally built in the late 1950s, the bridge replaced a ferry system that had been desperately trying to keep up with moving 90,000 cars a day across the strait. It traces the boundary line between Lake Huron (east) and Lake Michigan (west) and is the fifth largest suspension bridge in the world. This is one of the best views of the bridge from the northeast side in St Ignace…standing among graves in a cemetery. St Ignace did install an informative visitor center/viewing site at the northwest side that’s also worth the stop.

 

Another way to view the beauty of this bridge is by boat. The ferry we took to Mackinac Island included a detour under it. (Mackinac Island covered in next blog.) Here we are in Lake Huron.

Crossing under.

And now in Lake Michigan. Big difference, huh?

Sault Ste Marie (pronounced “soo san marie”) was our last stop in this area of Michigan. It sits between Lake Superior and Lake Huron and is home to the Soo Locks, a critical commercial link on the only path between Superior and the other Great Lakes. Not surprisingly, shipping is constant here—coal, grain, cement, and other cargo move regularly among Great Lakes ports to deliver goods to railroads and trucks bound for all points in the U.S. and Canada. Our site at a city campground gave us a front-porch view of the downstream end of the Soo’s shipping lane (the St Marys River); Canada is directly across. Several websites track marine traffic throughout the world, so we always knew what was coming and going, and could look up details about the ships that passed. This is the Algorail, a 1968 self-unloader registered in Canada.

 

The Soo Locks are so popular that the government built a three-story viewing platform to let people watch the action and wave hello to the crews. We were two of about 40 visitors. Here, both locks are at work…the Frontenac (front) has her lock almost filled, while a sister ship, the CSL Welland, has already dropped below ground level on her way in the other direction. The height difference for these locks is 21 feet. As with the locks on the Erie Canal, the Soo has a long history of use and improvements, dating back to 1797 when fur trappers and Indians set up rudimentary locks in Canada to get canoes past the rapids at this spot. Most ships that pass through today are tugs, barges, and “lake freighters” like these two, specifically built to transport goods among the Great Lakes, but never leave them because they can’t fit through the remaining waterways to the eastern seaboard.

 

As the Frontenac diesels away from the lock, a little yellow tour boat, which has been waiting its turn, comes in. Surprisingly, there is no fee for using the locks. And, yes, they lowered the lock just for this one tiny boat.