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Traverse City Adventure: Sunset on a great journey

The sun sets over South Manitou Island in Lake Michigan. We stood on a rise above Fishtown in Leland, Michigan to watch nature’s best daily show.
Dennis Forney
September 25, 2017
The suspension bridge across the Straits of Mackinac included the world’s longest span when it was completed in 1957. Forerunner of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge completed in 1962, the Mackinac bridge connects Michigan’s lower peninsula with its upper peninsula. A man kayaking in the Crystal River near Glen Arbor, near the top of the lower peninsula, said the upper peninsula is nice but the season is short. “It lasts from about 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. on July 3 each year. Miss that and you’ve missed it all.”
The harbor at Mackinaw Island. There are lots of variations on how Mackinaw is spelled - including Mackinaw and Mackinac - but it’s usually pronounced Mackinaw. There are no cars or trucks - other than emergency vehicles - allowed on the island. Transportation is by feet, bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles. Not having to worry about getting run over by cars or trucks when you’re cycling on the island’s roads takes the stress level down a few notches.
An island truck carries a load of new plastic barrels to the Grand Hotel on Mackinaw Island. The driver told us the barrels are used by Jamaican employees at the hotel to ship their belongings home for the winter.
Paul, Mary, Becky, Larry and Allison in front of the Grand Hotel. Rooms - there are 393 of them - run around $450 per night. They charge you $10 per head just to walk in and look around or eat in one of the many restaurants. The high-pillared front porch is 800 feet long and lined with white wooden rockers, red geranium-filled planters and occasional yellow awnings. It’s nothing short of grand.
In downtown Traverse City, a metal fish weir crosses the river to intercept thousands of spawning salmon working their way upriver from Lake Michigan. A volunteer there told us the fish are harvested for food. The ones that haven’t gone bad from their exhausting spawn journey are donated to an American-Canadian food bank while those fully spent and about to die go to cat-food manufacturers. “If the fish weren’t removed from the river in Traverse City, they would die there - as they all do after spawning - and cause a real odor and health problem.” A biologist at the weir told us the salmon - several varieties - are all introduced species and not native to the Great Lakes and their associated rivers. They have become an important food source and support a vigorous recreational fishing industry which is one of many components in Michigan’s outdoors experience.
This photo shows salmon in one of the Traverse City diversion sluices where they are harvested. We kayaked just below another weir in the Platte River and were surrounded by thousands of three and four-pound salmon roiling and finning in five feet of clear water. They massed at the weir - a constantly moving dark shadow - in their attempts to get further upriver to the spawning areas where they were originally placed by state biologists as eggs. There, they began the three- to four-year spawning, growing, migrating-from-river-to-lake-and-back-and dying cycle. The cycle of life, in many ways, for all of us. Swapping souls in and out of a wide variety of bodies.
Downtown Traverse City is a beautiful and vibrant commercial area in this small city along Lake Michigan’s Traverse Bay.

DAY (LOST COUNT) • 25 SEPTEMBER 2017 • LEWES

We started this journey on a dark and rainy August 12 morning, just Becky and me and our bicycles, riding west from our door in Lewes.  We ended with family and friends - the greatest blessings of life - on a dark and dry September 24 evening back in Lewes. Larry and Allison carried us from Michigan to Annapolis.  Then Paul and Mary met us at Larry’s house where we transferred bicycles, packs and other stuff to Paul’s car for the final leg back to Delaware.

It was all good, but most of all the interaction with so many good people bound by good humor, zeal for living and love.

Our adventure, as planned, morphed into a week’s vacation at Paul’s Paradise Cottages on the shores of crystal-clear Little Traverse Lake near Traverse City.  From sausages cooked on the campfire in the morning, washed down with chocolate cherry coffee from Cherry Republic, to shooting stars over the lake at night that practically landed in our laps, we dove deep into the Michigan outdoors experience and enjoyed every minute of it.

We had planned to continue pedaling our way back to Delaware following the vacation, but the pull of home and friends and family proved stronger than the urge to pedal another thousand miles into the shortening and cooling days of October. If the future can pull, Michigan is surely out there with its hands - and lakes and dunes and trails and amazingly clear salmon-filled rivers - pulling on our lines.

We did manage 1,100 miles of pedaling and reached our objective of northern Michigan, which exceeded our expectations.

Paul has been extolling the virtues of that different land for years, and I was thinking he might be overselling the place - but not so.  It didn’t hurt that our timing - according to the locals we met - coincided with the summer season’s finest week of weather. Lucky.  

Author Ernest Hemingway, whose family - like many Chicago families - vacationed in northern Michigan along Lake Michigan’s shores, said he’d rather be lucky than good. When you’re lucky, favorable stuff comes easy.  But when you’re good at something, you still have to work hard to accomplish.

Nature and love are still the best.  The journey reaffirmed our sense that life is an activity. This nation has invested heavily in providing all citizens affordable access to great parks and trails and natural resources. Enjoying them, whether at home or afar, is enhanced by being with others who also appreciate that beauty and thrive on the positive vibes of being outdoors and active.

“Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket.”

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