Refresh on Mackinac Island

How a family vacation felt like culture recovery

We don’t often go on family vacations. Each of us being the oldest of a large family, my husband and I tend to spend our vacation time and money going on family reunions or visiting relatives. I think we’ve been on three vacations with just our family in thirty years of marriage. This year, for our 30th anniversary, we decided this would be our fourth. And we decided to return to Mackinac Island. For one thing, we married in the summer, and traveling north for a summer vacation has always made more sense to me. Also, my husband is a confirmed Michigander who still yearns for the crisp air of the Great Lakes State even after spending most of his life in lush, humid Virginia. Mackinac Island, poised in Lake Huron on the southern edge of the Upper Peninsula, is a place beloved of Michiganders but (fortunately) not well know outside of it. This small island has the distinction of forbidding any sort of motorized vehicles: all travel is done by horse-drawn carriage, bike, or foot, and the island’s village and dwellings are arranged accordingly. Its Amish-like rejection of modernity caused it to be the setting for the 1980s romance time-travel movie Somewhere in Time, starring Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeves, where a man who wants to achieve time travel through mental concentration (a la Dunne’s Experiment in Time) embarks from there. Plaques around the island commemorate where some of its scenes were filmed. Certainly Mackinac, first settled by French and early on hosting the only Mass Native Americans were able to attend in the days of Father Marquette, reached a peak in the Victorian era, when many of its elaborate public buildings, mansions, and the sumptuous Grand Hotel were built. Today its streets and cottages and bungalows maintain a charm, and it’s clear that those who live there year-round lovingly maintain its pristine cheerfulness.

Thirty years ago, my husband and I first visited Mackinac Island as a day trip on our honeymoon and were intrigued by a taste of this remote but gorgeous island. So when we began thinking about an anniversary vacation five years ago, I suggested revisiting Mackinac for a three-day stay. An East-Coaster like me finds the Upper Peninsula fascinating: full of pines instead of deciduous, with plushy moss instead of trailing vines as undergrowth, and forests that have the air of “Narnia and the North.” When I told the plan to our children, my daughters asked if they could dress old-fashioned THE WHOLE TIME we were there, and we agreed to go along with it. Despite the fact that we were usually the only skirted, vested, and hatted denizens on streets crowded with tourists in tees and shorts, it was a magical time. One afternoon we just walked amidst the picket fences and hollyhock filled lanes, stopping in shops to buy fudge and browse gifts, taking photos which wallpapered our screen desktops for years afterwards. So of course we were going back!

Five years ago, strolling the streets in vintage clothing on Mackinac Island.