Mackinaw City is the most northern point of the Lower Michigan Peninsular. It's also the most tourist trap-themed place I've yet to come to visit while in the US. If you took your Whitby or your Scarborough on a smaller scale and threw it into America and looked to see where it landed - you'd find Mackinaw (however here it's by a huge lake rather than a seaside ... but there's still sand all the same). Replace candy floss stands with fudge and popcorn factories and you're well on the way to imagining what it's like.
The city is most often used as a base for either heading over Mackinaw Bridge into the Upper Peninsular or as a parking lot for the short ferry ride over to Mackinaw Island. It's probably something of a tourist crime to not visit the island - something which is considered one of the places to visit in Michigan, but our main reason was to see the Headlands Dark Sky Viewing Area once the sun had set. Until then we visited the Popcorn Factory - home to such flavors as Maple to Nacho's, explored around the Old Mackinaw Point Lighthouse and peered through the wire around Colonial Michilimackinac - a representation of the former French and then British fort - yes us British have a long history in these parts until we were somewhat chased off onto the Island .. enough said.
Mackinaw is a huge cultural difference to the quaint fisherman towns along the shores of Lake Huron and Michigan that I had come to love, it sadly seems a little too much built for tourists and little else, just row up row of hotels and motels. While it was worth a visit and there's certainly things I want to do given more time (visiting Mackinaw Island, Ice Breaker Tour to taking a boat trip out to visit the lighthouses) but i'm certainly coming to prefer my smaller, out of the way USA.
How do you prefer your seaside and lake side towns - has tourist traps or small and quaint?
How do you prefer your seaside and lake side towns - has tourist traps or small and quaint?