Best Places to Visit by the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes hold about a fifth of the fresh water on the surface of the planet, and you can spend a lifetime working your way around their shores without seeing the same view twice. From the shipwreck-strewn shallows off Michigan's Upper Peninsula to the vineyards of the Finger Lakes, here are seven towns worth pointing the car toward, and the wood charts that keep each one on your wall long after the trip ends.

7 destinations by the Great Lakes

1. Munising, Michigan
2. Saugatuck, Michigan
3. Mackinac Island, Michigan
4. Two Harbors, Minnesota
5. Chesterton, Indiana
6. Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio
7. The Finger Lakes, New York

1. Munising, Michigan

Munising sits on the south shore of Lake Superior, and it is the launch point for two of the best days you can spend on the largest of the lakes. The cliffs of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore run for forty miles, streaked mineral red and copper green where groundwater seeps through the sandstone, and the view from a kayak at the base of them is hard to beat.

Superior is also the coldest and deepest of the Great Lakes, which is why its wrecks are so well preserved. Glass-bottom boat tours out of Munising Bay pass wooden schooners sitting upright on the bottom, visible through water clear enough to read the deck planking. It is a quiet town that rewards the people who slow down for it. Stay at the Roam Inn, a former lumber baron's lodge a few blocks from the water, and eat a breakfast sandwich at the Falling Rock Cafe while you plan the day over a book of lake charts.

2. Saugatuck, Michigan

Cross the peninsula to the Lake Michigan side and Saugatuck runs on a different current entirely. More than forty galleries pack a town of barely a thousand year-round residents, and the dunes that back the beach draw hikers and birders all season. The long, soft-sand beaches here are the kind Lake Michigan is famous for, and the sunsets over the water are the reason a lot of people keep a Lake Michigan cribbage board on the porch table. The 1913 Belvedere Inn is the place to stay if you want the artist-colony atmosphere without leaving the neighborhood, and the Saugatuck Dune Rides are worth the tourist-trap risk for the view alone.

3. Mackinac Island, Michigan

Look at a map of the Great Lakes and you will find Mackinac Island sitting right in the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Huron meets Lake Michigan. The island banned automobiles in 1898 and never reversed course, so travel is by bicycle, horse-drawn carriage, or your own two feet. The full loop of the shore road is 8.2 miles and stays flat the whole way, which makes it one of the great easy bike rides in the country.

The Grand Hotel has anchored the bluff since 1887 and still runs the longest front porch in the world at 660 feet. Ride the ferry across at dusk, watch the island rise out of the strait, and it is easy to understand why people have been coming back for well over a century. Bring an appetite for fudge; the island has made it by the slab since the Victorian era.

4. Two Harbors, Minnesota

Twenty-seven miles up the North Shore from Duluth, Two Harbors is the gateway to the wildest stretch of Lake Superior coastline in the United States. The Superior Hiking Trail runs north from here toward the Canadian border along ridgelines that look straight down onto the lake, and two of Minnesota's finest state parks sit within a short drive. Gooseberry Falls steps down through five cascades a few yards off the highway, and the Split Rock Lighthouse stands on a 130-foot cliff that is probably the most photographed spot on the entire lake. Built after a single November gale wrecked or stranded dozens of ships in 1905, it earns the attention. Then drive up Route 61 to Betty's Pies, a roadside institution since 1956, and eat dessert first.

5. Chesterton, Indiana

Chesterton is small-town Indiana with a national park in its backyard. Indiana Dunes became the country's newest national park in 2019, and its fifteen miles of Lake Michigan shoreline hide some of the most surprising biodiversity in the Midwest: open dune, oak savanna, bog, and marsh all stacked within a few miles of one another. The dunes themselves climb nearly two hundred feet above the water. In town, the year-round European Market and a scatter of good eclectic kitchens keep the base camp comfortable, and the whole shoreline sits an easy drive from the same Lake Michigan waters that a wood chart renders in true depth.

6. Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio

Ohio's oldest summer resort has been drawing people to the south shore of Lake Erie since the 1860s, and it still runs on the same mix of vintage boardwalk and lake air. What is new is the wine. This corner of Ohio sits in the Grand River Valley appellation, and the vineyards behind the beach have turned Geneva-on-the-Lake into a genuine tasting destination. Spend the morning on the water, the afternoon at South River Vineyard, and the evening on a cottage porch at The Lodge with Erie a few steps away. Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, which is why it warms up first every summer and why its sunsets carry so much color.

7. The Finger Lakes, New York

The Finger Lakes feed the Great Lakes watershed through the Oswego and Ontario drainages, and glaciers gouged them so deep that a couple of them run below sea level. Seneca and Cayuga are more than 600 feet deep, which is exactly the kind of hidden shape a wood chart is built to show. Haudenosaunee tradition holds that the lakes are the handprint the Creator left on the land, and standing at the rim of Watkins Glen it is easy to see where the story comes from: the gorge drops through nineteen waterfalls in under two miles.

This is New York's wine country too, more than a hundred wineries strung along the lakeshores, plus the astonishing Corning Museum of Glass a short drive south. Base yourself in a lakeside inn, or at Belhurst Castle on Seneca if you have always wanted to sleep in an 1880s stone castle, and hire a driver so nobody has to skip the tasting room. Seneca alone is worth its own wood chart, all forty miles of it rendered narrow and deep.

Carry the trip home in wood

The best souvenir from a summer of Great Lakes road trips is not a fridge magnet. Every road, town, and shoreline you drove is etched into layered birch on a Woodchart map, each layer of wood a real depth contour, so the water reads at its true shape and the coast reads at its true line. Hang one and the trip stays with you: the cliffs at Pictured Rocks, the ferry crossing to Mackinac, the sunset off the Chesterton dunes.

Ready to put the water you know best on the wall? Explore the Great Lakes charts and find your lake, or browse the full collection to start planning the next drive.