On Tuesday, July 22nd, we had big plans for our northern Michigan trip – going to Mackinac Island. In the 15+ years I had been visiting Michigan, we had never gone to the island, which does not allow cars and can only be reached by ferry. Since our rental house was only an hour from the ferry, we decided that this would be the year. Laura, McKenna, and I had visited Mackinaw City back in 2018, and we had crossed the bridge on that trip. This time, we would cross the bridge again, to catch the ferry in St. Ignace.

We had crossed the 5 mile long bridge hoping that the St. Ignace ferry would be much less crowded than the one in Mackinaw City.

Finally, the ferry company started running a second boat, speeding up the line. Soon we were off to Mackinac Island.

A couple of days before our Mackinac trip, Finley had antagonized a Great Dane and been nipped on the backside. Laura didn’t want him to lick, and possibly cause to become infected, the small cut that he had, so Finley was on the Mackinac trip with us.

About 15 minutes later, we were at the island with our first views of the main town and the crystal clear waters just offshore.

Finley was out of his mind excited to get off the ferry, so we started by walking Finley around the edge of the island to get some of his craziness out. That mission accomplished, we headed to Mackinac’s “Secret Garden.”

The garden wasn’t as much secret as unmarked, and there was a family at the garden when we arrived. This family had staked out the premier spot to take family pictures with the garden in the background, so we patiently waited our turn, which ended up lasting roughly as long as the wait to get on the ferry at St. Ignace. The family finally left the spot after taking approximately 35,000 photos, but, as soon as we got in position to take a family picture, the same family walked behind where we talking pictures and proceeded to start ANOTHER photoshoot at the bridge in the center of the garden.

Laura’s patience exhausted, she engaged in commentary about the family that was increasingly loud and personal.

• Laura: (in her normal, already loud voice that could be heard clearly throughout the garden) – “Are they really that oblivious?!” (No effect)
• Laura: (projecting her voice so that it was amplified and could be heard distinctly at the nearby Grand Hotel) – “They are incredibly selfish. How self-centered can you be!” (No effect)
• Laura, now bringing out the big guns: (at a volume that startled birds at the distant Fort Mackinac) – “Maybe they are European!!!”

This last was a reference to Europeans we had encountered in our various national parks trips, people who seemed to be unaware of how most people take turns when photographing famous landmarks. Instead, having come to the best spot to, say, take a picture in front of Old Faithful, these tourists would act as if arriving first at the spot had granted them an eternal claim to the location, as they proceeded to unload several bags of camera equipment and a picnic lunch to stay for the long haul. At any rate, either the comment itself was so cutting and hurtful or the volume with which it was spoken was so terror-inducing that the family was finally driven from the bridge in defeat.

Every family has its fun and carefree traditions, and one of ours involves Laura pretending to be a stalker, posing in the background of family pictures, “stalking” family members. At the secret garden, we would add to our “stalker picture” tradition.

This time we changed it up: the stalking was inadvertent, with Laura ACTUALLY prowling in the background. Having just recently ejected the “Europeans” from this bridge, Laura was apparently unwilling to go too far in case her booming voice was needed once more. The downside of this vigilance is that it made getting a clear picture of McKenna, the bridge, and the garden a challenge.

Amazingly, in less than three full days in Michigan, we were able to get multiple inadvertent stalker pictures.

This seems to have been part of an overall strategy to up our stalker game.

Having driven the garden-photographing competition from the field, we were able to also take some stalker-free pictures.

Another can’t-miss place to see on Mackinac Island is the Grand Hotel, an entire complex that includes the Secret Garden.

The eleven of us that went to Mackinac had split into three groups to see the island, but the hotel is such a draw that we all made it there at one point of another.

The hotel looked amazing, so as we were walking around it, I checked to see what it would cost to stay the night there.

After we passed the hotel, we decided to go back through the Mackinac’s “village” on our way to the fort. The homes and bed-and-breakfasts made the walk scenic.

Mackinac Island is pretty big, and we were able to see only a fraction of it. Biking is an option for people who didn’t bring a dog wounded by a Great Dane. Another way to tour the island is riding on one of the carriages depicted above. That’s probably the most relaxing way to see as much of the island as possible, both the town and the natural features along the coast. John and Diane chose this option and got to see the Arch Rock on the island.

The rest of us chose to walk around Mackinac Island, and on this relatively hot day, that meant that by the time we reached Fort Mackinac, we were hot and hungry. Nevertheless, we chose to buy tickets and go see the fort anyway.

The fort, originally built in the late 1700’s during the Revolutionary War on the site of an even older French fort, is the oldest building in Michigan. Even as hot and tired as we were, some of us wandered around to explore and found that the exhibits on medicine and fort life were entertaining.

For the hot and tired people and dog, the views from a shaded porch at the fort offered the best views of the harbor that we had found.

Having learned our lesson from the Petoskey trip, I had scouted out dog friendly restaurants on Mackinac, and we had a ready list of options. We chose the Great Turtle Brewery and Distillery because it had the main things we were looking for: proximity, food, and shade. By the time we had all reached the restaurant, it was after 2pm, and we were hungry enough that we ordered enough food for several meals.

Then we were off to do the most touristy thing of all: shop on the main drag of the village, Lake Shore Drive. There are all kinds of shops and restaurants on the street, which ran right by the harbor. We were not the only people with that idea.

Mackinac Island is known for its fudge, and I was all about getting the full Mackinac experience. I had done a bit of research on the topic, you know, in the name of science, and I found that, of several awesome options, Joann’s Fudge possibly had a slight edge. I mentioned this to Jesse during lunch, and he responded by asking, “Isn’t all fudge pretty much the same?”

There is no outside opinion on fudge that would have stopped me from buying fudge on the island anyway, so McKenna and I went into Joann’s to see what we could find.

By 6pm, having endured as much of Finley trying pull us into every air-conditioned shop on Mackinac as we could, we took the ferry back and drove to Good Hart. The next day, after the craziness of Mackinac, Laura and I went to, by comparison, a much more sedate place, the coastal town of Charlevoix. The town is known its mushroom houses designed by architect Earl Young, who built without pre-planning the house, just going where the landscape and local materials took him.

Charlevoix has totally leaned into using the mushroom houses as a draw, with free parking right outside one cluster of the houses and numerous guided tours.

We found out while we were there that some of the houses were even available through VRBO and Airbnb, and renting one sounded awesome but also creepy with the number of tours coming through.

Finally, on our last day at the house, we decided to see more of the famous Tunnel of Trees. We had already seen parts on our drives to Petoskey and Charlevoix, especially the parts of the tunnel to the south, but we had not yet seen the northern stretch. Laura, McKenna, Finley, and I hopped in the car to see this wonder of northern Michigan.

We were hoping that we would just be able to drive out of the storm on our way north. That didn’t happen, as we once again were pursued by a storm that matched our speed.

The road is very narrow along the Tunnel of Trees, with some hairpin curves in places, so I cannot recommend touring it in the middle of a torrential downpour. Plus, the trees opened up in places to offer what I can only assume were spectacular views of Lake Michigan on days that, you know, don’t look like this.

Finally, we gave up on trying to see tunnels or views of Lake Michigan and went to Harbor Springs for some shopping, ice cream at Harbor Ice Cream, and a look around the harbor.

On Thursday evening, the plan was to head north to Legs Inn, a famous Polish restaurant in western Michigan that had been named Michigan’s “2nd Most Iconic Restaurant” by Mlive.com. At first it was proposed that, instead of taking three cars, we find an eco-friendly solution by fitting all ten of us in two cars. This inspired panic in some of our group, who envisioned getting everyone into two SUVs as some kind of complex math word problem, as if the “10 people in 2 cars” problem was a new version of the “Wolf, Goat, and Cabbage Riddle.“

The logistics of taking two SUVs being therefore insurmountable, we took it easy on our brains and rode to Legs Inn in three SUVs.

Legs Inn does not take reservations, and, when we arrived at 5:15, we were told that our group of 10 would have about an hour wait. We had expected something like this, but for the kids, the prospect of waiting 60 minutes with us drove them to try activities like:

While the kids were playing, one of the phenomena common to all family vacations occurred: the occasional reversion of sibling relationships to a pre-adult level. The topic of Petoskey Stones came up in our conversation, with Laura asking what exactly made a stone a PETOSKEY stone. Hearing this, Mark and Gayle laughed, responding, in effect, “Ha! You don’t know what a Petoskey Stone is!” as if everyone knows how to define a Petoskey Stone. As a teacher, I see this kind of overconfidence regularly, usually by students who are about to use the same words in a phrase to define the phrase:

• What’s the Northern Renaissance? The Renaissance in the north
• What’s a Total War? A war that is total
• What’s an Absolute Monarchy? A monarchy with absolute power
• What’s a Petoskey Stone? A stone from Petoskey

As everyone knows, the above definition of Petoskey Stone is, in fact, false, since Petoskey Stones are as much “stone” as creamsicle fudge is “fudge.” Since no satisfying definition of Petoskey Stone was likely to be produced and we had some time to kill, we went outside to take some pictures.

And then we had time for more pictures…

Still time for pictures while we wait for that table, but now blood sugar is dropping and people are struggling to keep their eyes open…

Finally, at almost 7pm, the hostess called us over to tell us that they were ready to seat us, but that our group of ten would have to be split between two tables, a 6 and a 4. Gayle, looking at the Legs Inn waiting list, noticed an erratic pattern of names being crossed off, which meant that the hostesses had either missed us with their quaint analog system of table tracking or they found organizing the 10 of us into limited seats as challenging as we had in driving to Legs Inn. At any rate, it seemed unlikely that such a famous restaurant wouldn’t have a table to seat a full family, so Laura challenged the split seating. This led the hostess to ROLL HER EYES AT LAURA. I’m pretty sure this almost happened to the hostess.

At this point, the manager came over and tried to resolve the situation. While he didn’t admit that they had given our table away, we all knew that’s what had happened. The only remaining place where we could all sit together, then, was a table located in the waiting area rather than the dining room, but we were assured that this would not impact our service.

Everything was slow. The drinks took a half an hour to get to the table. By the time the appetizer of pierogies arrived, people were starving to the point that every single pierogy was inhaled before I even had a chance to create a memory of the pierogies. In fact, it’s possible the pierogies never arrived and that the existence of the pierogy plate was just a hallucination caused by hunger. Then there was another lag before the salads arrived. By the time the entrees arrived, we were the only people left in the waiting area other than some staff cleaning up to go home. I think that the main course was really good, but it is possible that this recollection is skewed by the four hour wait to get the food, a wait which may have resulted in a form of trauma bonding with Legs Inn that’s responsible for the positive memory of the entrees. Finally, at 9:15, we were ready to go.