Traverse City

We rolled into Traverse City in July, at the exact moment the cherry harvest peaks, and the first thing I noticed was the color of the water. Lake Michigan here does something I did not think fresh water could do — it goes turquoise and jade over the sandbars of Grand Traverse Bay, so vivid that Lia insisted, wrongly, that we must have crossed some invisible border to a sea. We pulled over at the first roadside farm stand, bought a paper bag of just-picked sweet cherries, and ate them sitting on the tailgate spitting pits into the grass. Juice on our fingers, that impossible blue water in the distance: it was, immediately, one of those small perfect American afternoons.

Wine on the peninsulas

Two long fingers of land — Old Mission and Leelanau — reach north into the bay, and both are quilted with vineyards. We spent a slow day on the Old Mission Peninsula, driving the ridge road with water visible on both sides, stopping at cellars where the tasting rooms look out over rows of vines dropping toward the lake. The specialty is cool-climate whites — Riesling above all — and as a Frenchman I arrived skeptical and left genuinely charmed, particularly by a dry Riesling we drank on a terrace as the sun lowered. Lia bought a bottle of cherry wine, more curiosity than conviction, and we saved it for a dune picnic two days later. At the tip of the peninsula stands a squat old lighthouse and a beach where you can wade out fifty metres and still stand.

Sleeping Bear Dunes

An hour west lies the reason many people come to this corner of Michigan: Sleeping Bear Dunes, mountains of sand piled hundreds of metres above the lake. We climbed the famous Dune Climb, legs burning in the soft sand, and at the top the reward was staggering — a wall of dune dropping away to the water far, far below, the lake stretching to the horizon like an ocean. The park rangers warn, only half-jokingly, that people who run down the steep bluff to the shore often need rescuing to get back up. We were sensible and did not, but we sat a long while at the overlook on Pierce Stocking Drive as the wind combed the marram grass and Lia sketched the impossible blues in her notebook.

Downtown, beaches and cherry everything

Back in town, Traverse City’s Front Street has an easygoing, well-fed charm — brick storefronts, an old restored cinema with its neon marquee glowing at night, breweries and bakeries and, of course, cherry everything. Cherry pie, cherry jam, dried cherries, chocolate-covered cherries. We swam off the town beaches where the water was warm enough by August, then ate a whitefish dinner as the sun set fire to the bay. On our last evening we finally opened that bottle of cherry wine on the sand; it was sweeter than I’d ever choose, but shared straight from the bottle with Lia, watching the light die over the water, it tasted exactly right.

Getting There

Cherry Capital Airport sits right in Traverse City, with regional flights connecting through Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis — handy, though most visitors road-trip in. The drive from Detroit takes around four hours up the middle of the Lower Peninsula, and from Chicago roughly five, curving around the bottom of Lake Michigan. A car is essential here: the peninsulas, the wineries, and Sleeping Bear Dunes all lie spread out along the coast, and the pleasure of the region is precisely in the unhurried driving between them, windows down, another farm stand always ahead.