Michigan Is a State of Mind Pt. 2, Northern

A Mushroom House in Charlevoix

 I must say, we were really looking forward to our first visit to Traverse City. I must also say, we were pretty disappointed overall. We'd been hearing the hype from "celebrity" chefs and the like about all the great food and cool places to visit. Don't misunderstand, it's not a complete wash out, but this is not another Santa Fe or some other food centric place like it! We did the usual hard nosed studying of places to hit and tried quite a few...only to keep striking out to the point that our favorite regular stop was the local natural food grocery for cooking at home. Another interesting point, mostly for you fellow RV'ers is that RV parks are few, expensive, and many do not offer full hookups. We figured this out quickly as we began our trek up the Lake Michigan Coast. It's a very short tourist season. The parks have to make it on their open months, so they charge accordingly. We ended up staying the first five days in T.C. (Traverse City, as nick named by locals) in the RV and big rig lot at the new and beautiful Turtle Creek Casino/Grand Traverse Resort complex just outside of town. It was a cool way to test how long we can stay off the grid completely too. In other words, we were simply parked in the lot with no external power, water, or sewer...off the grid. Our amazing solar panel on the roof, which is the newest black quartz, high amperage output type, kept us with TV, lights, and other essentials the entire five days,  without any effort. Our large capacity fresh and waste water tanks were not even close to being spent after our stay. We had a safe, attractive, and fun place to begin our visit, and the cost? Zero! (Although we did manage to spend a few fun hours in the gaming area). We moved over to a little RV park next, called Everflowing Waters. It's on the outskirts of Traverse City, and it gave us a chance to explore the whole Grand Traverse Bay area, which is really pretty large and diverse. We travelled up all the peninsulas to places like Suttons Bay, Leelanau, Glen Arbor, and then all way up the Western Lake Michigan Shoreline to Charlevoix and then Petoskey.

Sunset view from our RV park in Petoskey

 The highly publicized Traverse City Cherry Festival was fast approaching at the end of June (by the way, there are NO cherries ready for picking in the entire area this early in the season...just another strange idiosyncrasy here. A cherry festival..without cherries!), so we had an extra reason to say of the area, "been here, done this." Besides, we quickly fell for the natural beauty and charm of the Petoskey area, and knew right away it's more our kind of place. It is the week before Independence Day, 2013, and we      thought finding a good landing spot for H2 there was not going to be easy. There's an amazing little city owned RV park right on the lake, right in town, and as luck is often on our side, there was a space for us (and our buddies Craig and Linda for one last Michigan visit!). This place is sitting, as I said, right on Lake Michigan, and about three blocks from the center of downtown. Petoskey has to be experienced first hand. It's not enough to say "charming" or "historic" anymore. This town is still a summer playground for those lucky enough to have been left one of the homes that were built in the late 1800's to early 1900's, or just lucky to know this is one of the gems of the entire area and make it an annual summerstop. We saw cars from Texas, Arizona, Montana, Florida, Georgia, and other places..

Downtown Petoskey

lots of them. Not normal for the rest of Michigan. Until we got here our Texas plates got a lot of stares! We definitely felt like foreigners but not in Petoskey! It turns out that Earnest Hemingway spent quite a bit of time around here as a young man. His parents had one of those summer houses. Craig and Linda made another trip up from their home in Three Rivers to join us. We hit another couple of local microbreweries (they're EVERYWHERE, all over Michigan), and one has better brews than the next. Michigan's the fifth largest beer producer in the country, and the industry employs around 6,000 people in the state! We also dined at a few local eateries like Palette Bistro and The Twisted Olive, with their great lakeside views. We found a little bakery called Suzys Pies http://www.suziespies.com/, which is a small storefront in a strip center. Two ladies were there working, making scratch pastries and fresh fruit pies. What we tried, especially the Canadian Butter Tarts, were totally excellent! We took a day trip and a ferry ride up farther north to Mackinac Island. This one's on most peoples' hit list, including us, and the journey is quite worth the time. The iconic Grand Hotel there, made more famous from the movie "Somewhere in Time" actually charges an admission fee just to get close. I guess they figure it keeps the riff raff out. Fortunately, the rest of the island is free to explore. There are more ancient (for this country at least) homes and mansions and a very Disney like downtown area (it came before Disney though!), which must contain half a dozen fudge shops. We drove over the 5 mile long (still the fourth longest expansion bridge in the world) Mackinac Bridge to the little Upper Peninsula town of St. Ignace. That is the farthest north in Michigan we've travelled so far. Another trip, this time down, to another charming water town took us to Charlevoix. We specifically drove there to lunch at Roquette Burger Bistro, where everything, even their soda! is homemade. We also drove around in Boulder Manor, a unique neighborhood made up of whimsical stone homes (see the pic at the top of the story), mostly built during the 1930's. One of the more notable people who lived there was a fellow named Norman Panama, who wrote such famous screenplays as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and White Christmas. These homes are amazing, and the entire area is filled with them! They look like something that The 7 Dwarfs might have contacted their real estate agent about purchasing! (Snow White might have already been living in the neighborhood).

Some Lilac Festival revelers in Mackinac Island

 We had mixed feelings about not climbing farther north into the U.P. of Michigan, but sometimes you have to set a limit, and this was it. The U.P. is a pretty vast geographical area, and we would have had to circle back around to head ourselves eventually into the eastern part of the U.S., so we made the decision to visit there sometime in the future, maybe when we head into Northern Wisconsin some time, coming over from the west.

Roquette does serious burgers!

Our week in Petoskey went by faster than even usual. We said goodbye to Craig and Linda again and headed H2 and Smarty south for our final stop in Michigan, Detroit and it's educated neighbor, Ann Arbor.