Detroit

1. The Detroit Institute of Arts.
2. The 10 story Fox Theatre Building.
3. Detroit Symphony
4. Visit the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
5. The Detroit Historical Society.

Flint

1. The Flint Institute of Arts.
2. The Crossroads Village & Huckleberry Railroad.
3. Learn about the stars at the Longway Planetarium.
4. Tour the Buick Automotive Gallery.
5. Hike to the beautiful Stepping Stone Falls.

Traverse City

1. Visit the beautifully restored State Theatre.
2. Toure the Grand Traverse Distillery.
3. Traverse City State Park offers beautiful hiking, biking, and swiming!
4. There’s lots of fresh air to be had on the TART Trails.

Grand Rapids

1. Tour the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park.
2. Tour the incredible Meyer May House designed by Frank Loyd Wright.
3. See the Gerald R. Ford Museum.
4. The Grand Rapids Public Museum.
5. Walk in the beautiful Blandford Nature Center.

The Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, commissioned Leonardo to create the world’s largest equestrian statue in 1482. It was to be called only Il Cavallo, a monument to the Duke’s father. Over the course of the next 17 years Leonardo drew sketches of the horse, constructed a 24-foot clay model, and amassed several tons of bronze in preparation for the final casting. But then politics got in the way of art–faced with a French invasion, the Duke confiscated the bronze to cast cannons. Even so, his firepower proved insufficient. The French, victorious, invaded Milan. Bored French crossbowmen used Leonardo’s model as target practice until the clay horse fell to pieces. Leonardo never attempted to remake his mighty horse. His notebooks containing the sketches were lost and Il Cavallo faded into legend.

But in 1966, several of Leonardo’s lost notebooks were discovered in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, while others fell into the hands of the British royal family. A decade later, National Geographic Magazine ran a story on the unrealized sculpture, entitled “The Horse that Never Was.” Retired airline pilot and art collector Charles Dent read the article and was immediately enthralled. He devoted the rest of his life to the creation of a tribute sculpture fashioned after Leonardo’s original ideas, founding a corporation for fundraising and building a life-sized clay model of the eventual horse. Dent’s death in 1994 did not put an end to his vision. A full-height version was cast, but structural problems necessitated that the horse be resculpted.

Thanks to additional funding by billionaire retail-chain founder Frederik Meijer, Nina Akamu was hired, first to improve the original horse and then to begin it again from scratch, combining Leonardo’s drawings with the study of equine anatomy. Two 24-foot horses were cast. The first was unveiled in Milan on September 10, 1999, exactly 500 years after the destruction of Leonardo’s original. The second found its home in Grand Rapids. Smaller versions were placed in the Pennsylvania hometown of Charles Dent and the Italian city of Vinci, Leonardo’s eponymous birthplace. An eight-foot version entitled Homage to Leonardo is located in the Meijer Gardens as well, in addition to a tiny replica meant to be handled by blind visitors unable to take in the grandeur of the three-storey original.

Following a series of fatal shipwrecks along the Michigan coast in the 1850s, Congress appropriated money for the construction of a lighthouse at Big Sable Point. An Anglicization of the original Grande Pointe au Sable, the word Sable is still pronounced roughly like the French, rhyming with “wobble.” The lighthouse was not actually built until after the Civil War, in 1867, originally of yellow brick. At the turn of the century the tower was given a metal sheathing to protect it from erosion, which is today painted in 30-foot black and white bands. The Big Sable Point Light didn’t switch from oil wicks to electricity until 1949, the last Great Lakes lighthouse to make the transition. The advent of electric lighthouses made the job of keeper obsolete, but the SPLKA continues to operate at Big Sable, maintaining the buildings and providing tours to visitors.

Lighthouses are often said to be haunted, and Big Sable is no exception. Previous keepers often noted the unaccountable smell of baking bread, and psychics’ hair reportedly stands on end when passing through one of the doorways in the second story of the keeper’s quarters, which is now the volunteers’ residence and off-limits to the public. A strange photograph of the lighthouse that may contain an image of a ghost hangs near the entryway, and a book in the gift-shop was once seen to levitate across the room by multiple observers.

Visitors can make the two-mile trek through the park to merely look at Big Sable year-round, but from May to October the tower and keeper’s quarters are open daily, allowing for a much richer experience. You can watch a documentary about the historic lighthouse in the video room, look at period artifacts on display or purchase souvenirs in what was once the keepers’ living room. And for a $3 donation, you can climb the 130 steps to the top and take in the stunning view.

Address:
5611 N Lighthouse
Ludington, MI 49431

• Driving America, perhaps the most obvious display given the museum’s name, is still one of the finest. The world’s foremost automotive exhibit, it includes a stunning array of historical vehicles, interactive digital kiosks filled with multimedia information, and the stories of hundreds of people–from ordinary Americans to celebrities–about the first car they ever drove.
• Made in America, a celebration of home-style innovation from the 18th century to the present day. Focusing on manufacturing machines and historical sources of power, the exhibit includes the world’s oldest extant steam engine and the automatic lubricator invented by Elijah “the real” McCoy.
• The Dymaxion House, a prototype dwelling of the future designed by polymath R. Buckminster Fuller over the course of the first half of the 20th century. A round aluminum home containing waterless toilets that shrink-wrap waste and an energy-free ventilation system based on the structural properties of silos, the Dymaxion House is a vision of a resource-efficient future that never was.
• Greenfield Village, a historic town put together by Henry Ford containing many important buildings of his day, including the Wright Brothers’ house & bicycle shop, Noah Webster’s home, and the prototype garage where Ford built the Quadricycle.

And there’s much more to do than just take tours and look at exhibits. You can eat regional cuisine at the Michigan Café, grab a hot dog at a 1950s-era Oscar Meyer Wienermobile or have an old-fashioned breakfast at Lamy’s Diner. Want a souvenir? You can choose from a wide selection of unusual items at the Henry Ford Museum Store, or get something for the kids from the Genius at Play Store. An in-museum state-of-the-art IMAX theater regularly shows feature films and documentaries in 3D. Rated among the Top 10 Tourist Attractions nationwide, the Henry Ford Museum is sure to surprise and inform. Address: 20900 Oakwood Blvd. Dearborn, MI 48124

The museum, oddly enough, began as a series of newspaper articles cataloging a tour of Europe and its art, undertaken by The Detroit News founder James E. Scripps and his family. The articles led to an art exhibit organized by the paper in 1883. It was decided that the city needed a permanent museum, and with the support of numerous prominent Detroit citizens, the Institute, known at the time as the Detroit Museum of Art, opened on the first of September, 1888.

The current building was constructed in the 1920s, designed by architect Paul Philippe Cret in an Italian Renaissance style, replacing the Romanesque original. The visitor enters the central court flanked on either side by William Randolph Hearst’s extensive armor collection, beneath the arched roof of the main hall. Within the skylighted court itself you find Diego Rivera’s famous quartet of murals, once extremely controversial, entitled Detroit Industry. But that’s only a beginning. Other collections include:

• The Department of American Art, said to be the third-best such collection in the nation. Featuring art of all periods and media, the collection includes silverwork by Paul Revere, furniture by Louis Comfort Tiffany, James Abbot McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black And Gold: the Falling Rocket, and thousands of other famous works.
• Prints, Drawings and Photographs, a collection featuring a staggering array of works whose only commonality is the fact that they’re on paper. Notable works include Michelangelo’s plans for the Sistine Chapel, Albrecht Durer’s famous engraving Adam and Eve, more than 2,500 sketches by Thomas Cole, and Dorothea Lange’s immortal photo Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.
• The Paul McPharlin Puppetry Collection, containing hand, string and shadow puppets from around the world. The collection focuses on American puppetry around the turn of the century, including Punch and Judy dolls, commedia dell’arte marionettes and famous puppeteer Paul McPharlin’s own work from the 1920s.

Aside from the vast offering of visual arts, the Detroit Institute of Arts also includes the Detroit Film Theater, which regularly shows arts-related documentaries and independent narrative films. The CaféDIA provides a delicious menu and the newly-renovated Kresge Court serves as Detroit’s “cultural living room”–a space to sip a cup of coffee, read a newspaper, or simply cool your heels after a long day viewing the galleries.