The first thing to do is to actually get to the island. The cheapest and easiest way to do this is to take a ferry, either from Mackinaw City on the Michigan mainland, or coming from St. Ignace, on the Upper Peninsula. There are three main ferry businesses serving to take you to the island, each with rides taking less than an hour: Arnold Line, Shepler’s Ferry, and Star Line. Transportation between St. Ignace & Mackinac Island is also available via Great Lakes Air. More information regarding transportation to the island can be found here.

Once you’re on the island, you’ll need to get around. Most of us have a pair of good sturdy legs for that purpose, and the island is small enough that it’s all you really need, but at 3½ miles long, and almost 2 miles wide, you may want something more. Now while motorized vehicles are banned on the island, that doesn’t mean you can’t get around. There are a host of bicycle rental places on the island, and the island itself is a cyclist’s paradise. You can also take a ride in a carriage or buggy with Mackinac Island Carriage Tours or Jack’s Livery Stable. If you want to go trail riding, stop by Cindy’s Riding Stable. Click this link for more information about getting around on the island.

Okay, so you’re on the island, and you can get around on the island, the next step is to find the buried treasure! Oh wait, it’s not one of those islands. Humbug! Even without buried treasure though, Mackinac Island isn’t without any treasure in its own right. The number one treasure of Mackinac is most definitely their fudge, famous in Michigan, and known to some degree the world over. With more than a half dozen fudge shops gracing the island, your visit will be Truly Scrumptious! It’s been said that over ten thousand pounds of fudge leave the island every day, in dozens of delectable flavors & varieties. In August each year, the Mackinac Island Fudge Festival is held, with special events, contests, Golden Tickets, and more! Find out more about Mackinac’s fudge at this page.

Mackinac is not short on activities to keep you occupied, with three historic sites, a handful of museums (from art to carriages), and countless other things to do:

• Become terrified at the Haunted Theater
• Visit the Butterfly Conservatory
• Go to the Equestrian Center
• Take a kayak out on the water
• Hike or bike around the island
• Dip your toes in the water
• Play golf at the Grand Hotel
• Enjoy a classic vintage baseball game
• Go to Skull Cave
• Fly a kite
• See the sights

As you go downtown you’ll find a multitude of gift shops, eyeing to exchange their trinkets for your hard-earned cash. A number of grocery stores and art galleries will also happily aid you in parting with your money. Once you get hungry, stop at one of Mackinac’s fantastic restaurants, and enjoy eating a meal that will double your hunger once you see and smell it.

Mackinac wouldn’t be Mackinac without the iconic Grand Hotel, which has played host to Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Vladimir Putin, and five US Presidents. While not everyone can afford stay at the hotel, everyone simply must see it. The hotel contains several interesting shops, and a great ice cream parlor. Non-hotel guests must pay $10 to see the grounds and tour the hotel. Also consider enjoying one of the hotel’s perfectly prepared five-course dinners, or delicious lunches. The Grand Hotel is certainly grand, but there are a host of other lodging options as well, if you feel so inclined.

If there is anything else you want to find out about Mackinac Island before you visit, check out the official website at MackinacIsland.org, and be sure to take a look at their calendar of events, to see if anything extra-special is happening during your visit.

A good way to begin your time at the Sleeping Bear Dunes is to drop by the Philip A. Hart Visitor Center, where there are interactive displays, brochures & maps, and a large relief map of the area! Next, stop by the Maritime Museum, and learn all about marine activity of the past. As shipping activity through the area began to pick up steam in the mid-to-late 1800s, so did shipwrecks, with 214 losing their lives on the Great Lakes during the winter of 1870 & ’71. As a result, Congress allocated funds, and formed the U.S. Life-Saving Service, an organization who’s sole purpose was to save those caught in shipwrecks. Each life-saving station was run by a station keeper or Captain, with an average of 6–8 people from the local community working under him.

In the 44 year period between the forming of the U.S. Life-Saving Service to it becoming a part of the U.S. Coast Guard, they rescued an astounding 178,000 people, with a 99% success rate in their work. With improvements in technology and radio communications, accidents on the Great Lakes became less common, and many of these life-saving stations were discontinued. Today, the station just west of Glen Haven has been converted into a museum, telling the tales of these dauntless men, great rescues, and the maritime history of the area. At 3 pm each day during the summer, there in a reenactment of a rescue drill, with Raggedy Ann & Andy as the shipwreck victims. The rescue is made with the help of the Lyle Gun, which shoots out a rescue line as much as 400 yards, to pull in crew stranded on a ship. The rescue is a great activity to bring your kids to, and they’ll be encouraged to participate.

Throughout the year there are many great events in the community, which you won’t want to miss. Click here for an up-to-date calendar.

The Sleeping Bear Dunes area has a lot of great restaurants, whether you want casual dining, fine dining, or would enjoy to be outdoors, or on the waterfront. Leelanau county also has many great places to shop, selling everything from antiques to ice cream. If you’d like to spend a day indoors, or the weather isn’t at its best, stop by a library or one of several area museums, or enjoy a movie or live music at the theater or the Traverse City Opera House.

A visit to the Sleeping Bear Dunes really ought to last more than one day. If you decide to stay, you can choose from a few campgrounds, or have a memorable stay at a bed and breakfast, or quaint hotel.

For more information about visiting the Sleeping Bear Dunes, visit the Official Visitor’s Bureau Website, or the National Park Service Website.

Airplanes at the museum include:

• Wright Flyer replica
• Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” scale model
• Ford Trimotor 5-AT
• WWII era P-40 Warhawk
• Vought F4U Corsair
• P-51 Mustang
• Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird stealth plane
• Many more!

The airplanes alone are a huge reason to go, but the Air Zoo goes a step further with nearly a dozen great rides and activities. Journey in a 3D Space Shuttle simulation to the International Space Station, join in a mission to Mars, take a ride on the Flying Circus Bi-Plane, or experience weightlessness on the paratrooper jump ride. If you’d like to try flying for yourself, try your hand at one of their full-motion flight simulators! If you’d like to take it up another notch, take a 15 or 30 minute flight ($25 & $39, respectively) in the advanced simulator. There are even more other rides besides these, and lots of great activities for kids, with science experiments, spring break science day camps, and summer camps, or even have an overnight camp out under the SR-71 Blackbird! More information about all this, here.

The main campus is open 9 am–5 pm Monday through Saturday, and noon–5 pm Sunday. The East campus is open 9 am–5 pm Monday through Friday, and noon–5 pm Saturday & Sunday. The Air Zoo is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day.

Admission to the museum is $10, and includes four rides, the $16.50 admission includes those four plus five other additional rides. Individual ride tickets cost $2 each, with each ride requiring one or two. Admission for children four and under is free.

Address:
6151 Portage Road
Portage, MI 49002

Official Website

Henry Ford had a passion for preserving history, and the great advancements of his day. As such, he founded Greenfield Village, to keep that part of the past alive through the ages. Many of the buildings he moved in are extremely significant parts of history, including:

• Orville & Wilbur Wright’s bicycle shop and home.
• The home of Noah Webster, where he wrote his first dictionary.
• An exact replica of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory.
• Henry Ford’s birthplace.
• The birthplace of William Holmes McGuffy, author of the McGuffy Reader, one of the best selling books of all time.
• The Illinois courthouse where Abraham Lincoln first practiced law.
• The Cape Cod Windmill, built in 1633, and one of the oldest in America.

Besides all of these landmark historic buildings, Greenfield Village contains many other sorts of buildings needed to make up a good village, with costumed interpreters demonstrating their craft—watch farming, glass blowing, sewing, cooking, pottery making, and so much more, and learn firsthand what life was like a hundred plus years ago.

While there is a great number of things to see there, there are also several things to do, as well: Take a ride in a horse-drawn omnibus, a Ford Model T, a steam locomotive, or a historic 1913 Herschell-Spillman Carousel!

You’re bound to spend much of the day touring the place, so stop and have something to eat at one of the great dining options, with tasty southern cooking, barbecue, or have a meal served by authentic costumed servers at the Eagle Tavern.

Every Memorial Day weekend the village hosts a Civil War reenactment, remembering and honoring those who died during that great conflict. On the weekend after Labor Day each year, Greenfield Village hosts an Old Car Festival, with more than 500 cars attending! There are many other events that happen throughout the year as well, which you can find here.

Admission to the village costs $24 for adults, and $17.50 for children 5–12. Hours vary with the seasons, but you can see an up-to-date schedule and purchase tickets here.

Address:
20900 Oakwood Blvd.
Dearborn, MI 48124-5029

For more information, visit the official Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village website

• 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.