Mackinac: One More Summer

Travel

Audio By Carbonatix

There comes a moment every August when you can feel summer beginning to slip away.

The evenings arrive a little earlier. Back-to-school signs appear in store windows. Suddenly, those gloriously unscheduled summer days have an expiration date.

Which is precisely when you should go to Mackinac Island.

Sitting in Lake Huron between Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas, Mackinac feels like someone found a particularly lovely American summer, placed it under glass, and refused to let modern life mess with it.

There are no private automobiles on the island. You arrive by ferry and discover that transportation means walking, bicycling or climbing aboard a horse-drawn carriage. Within an hour, something peculiar happens: you stop missing your car.

Stay Grand

If you’re going to do Mackinac, do it properly.

Grand Hotel has welcomed guests since 1887 and remains one of America’s great destination hotels. The enormous white façade, sweeping lawn and legendary porch overlooking the Straits of Mackinac are unapologetically from another age.

Dress for dinner. Sit on the porch. Have a cocktail. Watch the water.

Don’t hurry.

That’s rather the point.

The Perfect Mackinac Day

Start with bicycles. The roughly eight-mile road circling the island hugs the shoreline and makes for one of America’s loveliest recreational rides. Stop at Arch Rock, rising dramatically above Lake Huron, and give yourself time simply to look.

Then explore Fort Mackinac, where more than two centuries of military history occupy the bluff above town.

By afternoon, surrender to Mackinac’s most famous vice: fudge. The aroma pouring from the shops along Main Street is practically an island landmark unto itself. Watch it being worked on marble slabs, sample shamelessly, and buy a box for home knowing perfectly well it may never make it there.

For lunch, I’d head to The Pink Pony. It’s colorful, lively, waterfront and exactly the kind of place summer vacation requires. Find a seat overlooking the harbor, order something cold, and allow lunch to become an event rather than an appointment.

Dinner deserves something more romantic. Woods Restaurant, tucked into the wooded interior of the island, feels wonderfully removed from everything. Arriving by horse-drawn carriage only adds to the enchantment.

The Moment You’ll Remember

But my favorite Mackinac recommendation costs nothing.

Late in the day, get away from Main Street. Find a quiet place overlooking the Straits as the light begins to soften. Put the phone away for five minutes.

Listen.

Hooves instead of horns. Water instead of traffic. Wind moving through trees instead of another notification demanding your attention.

And suddenly Mackinac’s appeal becomes obvious.

We spend so much of travel trying to see more. Mackinac asks us to do less—and notice more.

That’s why it’s such a perfect late-August destination. It gives families one last bicycle ride, one more ridiculous piece of fudge, another sunset, another dinner where everyone actually talks to one another.

Summer inevitably ends.

But perhaps the trick isn’t trying to hold onto it forever.

Perhaps it’s making sure that before it goes, you give it one more memory worth keeping.