Twelve, The Most Beautiful Place To Cycle by Marty

That’s a strong comment to make. The MOST beautiful? ANYWHERE? Well let me qualify that: The Most Beautiful week-long trip within a day’s drive. How’s that? More importantly, Where’s that?

The first week in June Edie and I drove up to Traverse City, Michigan and cycle-camped the Leelenau Peninsula. It’s about 20 miles wide at the widest, by 40 miles long, tip to bottom. It’s surrounded by water, that’s why it’s called a Peninsula, although you’d wonder about the word when you think of our nearby town in the Cuyahoga Valley. The Leelenau is truly a peninsula, with Grand Traverse Bay to its east and Lake Michigan to the north and west. The protected waters of the Bay offer small towns like Sutton’s Bay and Northport with pretty harbors and lots of boats, including several tall ships that occasionally make their way to Cleveland, but whose home ports are here. Lake Michigan presents a different shoreline. Miles of sand dunes sculpted by the prevailing westerly winds picking up sand left by the glaciers and depositing it in dunes up to 400 feet high. And from those dunes are towering views of the coastline and offshore islands that themselves have towering dunes. Quite a change from Lake Erie.

Another change from our area is the northwoods feel. The terrain is glacial, rocky, rolling (am I making a pun?), not hillier, but more intimate. Trees abound and those trees are from the northwoods: spruce, cedar, birch, pine. The latter, when in sunlight exudes an aroma that fills me with longing for the North. And there’s lots of sunlight. Clear, bright sunlight. From the Canadian high pressure system that lingers over the area, yielding beautiful, warm, dry sunny weather most of the summer, without the hazy humidity we’re used to. Of course in winter they get about 500 feet of snow, but you’re not up there cycling in the winter, are you?

This is vacation territory for Detroiters and Chicagoans and has been for a century. Hemmingway’s family vacationed up here, as did Henry Ford and many others. Not that they necessarily cycled, but they did lend a pedigree to it, that’s still there in the care and attention paid to the landscape and the houses. The mix of northwoods and open meadows are wonderful to behold. The old homes are stately, and the new ones, to our amazement, transcended the McMansion look and generic taupe colors so prevalent in the typical upscale housing developments we cycle past elsewhere. The new homes looked, well, almost nice. Some, really nice. Trees were spared. Houses were nestled. Someone cared.

Strip malls, franchises, grease pits, and the like; where were they? Banished by local ordinance or common sense and custom. Edie, who owns a local art framing shop, is sensitive to generic franchise stores. Most everything we saw was locally owned, from restaurants to knick-knack shops, and tastefully done. The buildings looked like they belonged. And from this, we felt we belonged too.

We got no flats on this trip. It could be plain luck. But it could be that recycling law Michigan passed 30 years ago where shops are required to take back glass and aluminum beverage containers and pay the refundable recycling fee. Without that litter on the ground, other litter was absent too. No Mc….. wrappers, when there’s no Mc……

You could cycle from B&B to motel or you could camp like us. There’s campgrounds everywhere. Private ones, State Forests, State Parks and the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park. They were nearly deserted in early June, which they won’t be by now. But even if full the State Parks have a rule that backpackers and cyclists who come in near dark are guaranteed a site, regardless. That’s comforting to know. So if you’ve got a week free and even a minor sense of adventure, you might want to look about 8 hours north.

We did and we loved it.

Marty Cooperman