Petoskey

Petoskey announces itself from the water first — a hillside of red-roofed Victorian buildings stacked above Little Traverse Bay, the kind of view that made the town a fashionable steamship resort in the 1870s and still draws summer crowds today. Lia and I checked into a bed-and-breakfast in an old lumber baron’s house and spent our first evening simply walking the bluff, watching the bay turn from blue to pewter as the sun dropped behind the water. Ernest Hemingway summered nearby as a boy, and the town leans into that legacy without overdoing it — a few plaques, a bookshop display, nothing gaudy.

The Gaslight District

Downtown Petoskey’s Gaslight District is a tidy grid of brick storefronts along Lake and Howard Streets, gas-style lamps still lit at dusk, housing fudge shops, independent bookstores, and galleries selling local pottery. We ducked into McLean & Eakin Booksellers, where a handwritten staff-pick card steered us toward a Jim Harrison novel set just up the coast, then split a waffle cone from a corner creamery and walked it down toward the marina, sailboats knocking gently against their moorings in the bay breeze.

Petoskey stones and the shoreline

The real pilgrimage, though, was to the beaches. Petoskey stones — fossilized coral, mottled with hexagonal patterns that only appear when the stone is wet — wash up along this stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline, and we spent an entire low-tide morning at Magnus Park bent double, soaking candidates from a water bottle to check for the telltale pattern. Lia found a fist-sized one that a fellow beachcomber eyed enviously. Afterward we drove the Tunnel of Trees, Route 119’s canopied two-lane road north toward Cross Village, sunlight flickering through hardwoods the whole way.

Getting There

Petoskey is served by the small Pellston Regional Airport about 20 minutes away, with connections through Detroit and Chicago, though many visitors drive up from Grand Rapids (about three hours) or Detroit (about four hours) via I-75 and US-31. The drive itself, especially the final stretch along the Lake Michigan shoreline, is worth the extra time over flying. Once in town, downtown Petoskey is entirely walkable, but a car is necessary for reaching the Tunnel of Trees and the surrounding beaches.