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Michigan's Mackinac Island
Magic Moments
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Fort Colonial Michilimackinac.
The new morning sun casts a rosy glow across the whitewashed harbor village on Mackinac Island. For centuries, this little, wave-buffeted island has been a summer way station in the Straits of Mackinac between Michigan's Upper and Lower peninsulas.
Ferries bringing this early June day's first visitors won't arrive for a few hours. The bustling summer vacation season doesn't begin for at least a couple of weeks. For now, you have the island and the lands along the straits mostly to yourself.
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Mackinac straight suspension bridge.
"When it's quiet like this," reflects Angie Leonard, manager at the Metivier Inn on the island, "Mackinac seems even more like a place from the past." At the heart of this region, where lakes Michigan and Huron meet, a 5-mile suspension bridge, one of the world's longest, spans the blue water between Mackinaw City at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula and St. Ignace on the southeast shore of the Upper Peninsula (UP). Both are lively visitor bases, as well as departure points for ferries to Mackinac Island.
From Drummond Island, a wildflower-studded wilderness 70 miles east of the bridge off the UP's eastern shore, 110 miles southwest to Petoskey along Little Traverse Bay, you'll find sites where the past unfolds, resort towns and wild places.
