We started our day early, leaving our cute little 12-room motel at about 8 am and driving north. It was a gorgeous drive along the lake shore, alternating with woodsy areas. We wanted to make sure that we’d get some sort of hike in and not just drive all day, so I found us a county park right just below (and west of) the Mackinac Straits that is a designated Dark Sky Park, but also has a lot of little hiking trails that can (of course) be used in the daytime. This turned out to be a wonderful decision. The area was beautiful, the trails really well maintained, and we got a mix of coastline and wooded walks on a high bluff above the lake. We ended up walking for about four miles, and then had a picnic in the parking lot (picnic tables were the one thing missing in this otherwise perfect location).
Then we drove across the straits of Mackinac on the lovely bridge which we crossed before, in 2015, when we last traveled to Michigan (including to the Upper Peninsula for a quick visit to Sault Ste. Marie on the Eastern side), and on along very scenic highways along the shore of Lake Michigan, and then straight North to Grand Marais (MI, not MN!) on Lake Superior. I had not expected this area to be as breathtakingly beautiful as it is! Grand Marais is a tiny town with only about 250 year-round residents and a lot of vacationers in July and August, but even now it can be quite cool here, and I imagine the winters are VERY harsh. But it is just drop dead gorgeous, and the town is so very very cute. Again, our motel only has about 20 rooms, and it is right in the center of town, which is about two blocks long and clearly geared toward the summer visitors–but in a very small-time, seasonal way. This was the first weekend for a farmers’ market, for example, and there were only three stands, selling jam and baked goods, because it is too early in the season for produce. One of the sellers told me that sometimes they still have night frost in mid-June!
But it was lovely and warm today and we had a lovely time toodling around. The first thing we did when we arrived at 3 pm was to visit the Pickle Barrel House. This is actually the wonderfully silly reason I picked Grand Marais as our overnight destination to begin with. In my research for notes on Chesnutt’s letters, I had come across friends of the Chesnutts, a white couple named William and Mary (Dickerson) Donahey, who normally lived in Chicago (he was an illustrator and cartoonists; she was an author, mostly of children’s books and cookbooks) but sometimes wrote letters from Grand Marais. I found out they spent their summers on a smaller lake near here (Grand Sable Lake), and lived for about ten years in a cottage that was shaped like a giant pickle barrel, with a little addition for a kitchen, like so:
The nutty reason for this nutty house to be built was that Bill Donahey’s newspaper cartoon characters, the Teenie Weenies, were not only used for children’s books as well as the papers, but that he also drew advertising campaigns for Monarch foods, including for their pickles. The company decided to build him a barrel to live in for a summer cottage, based on one of his illustrations, namely:
The docent at the house told us that this had been a complete surprise but was also very effective marketing–so effective that eventually, the Donaheys got tired of the endless stream of people who wanted to see their house at the lake, and gave it away after summering there from about 1925 to 1935, and built a regular old cabin instead. The town of Grand Marais eventually put it right in the center of town, restored it, and it’s recently been reopened. It is VERY tiny and the Donaheys must have gotten along very well, because there was not a lot of room in that pickle barrel! Even with an upstairs.
After our Pickle Barrel adventure, we checked into our hotel, which was right across the street (but then, the town is so tiny, EVERYTHING is right across the street from everything), and chilled for a little bit, before walking to the nearby beach and the lighthouse (one that still uses a Fresnel lens, but it apparently not always “on” because we did not see it lit up after dark). Very few people were out and about, although the weather was just gorgeous.
And when, after a quick and unspectacular dinner, we drove a couple of miles to Sable Falls and walked down 168 stairs along the gorgeous waterfall to the beach and back up, we again saw almost no one and had the beach to ourselves. I find this entrancing, but it’s also hard to figure out how anyone makes life work here when the tourist season is so short!
