Manistique (Travel Tip Thursday)

Travel Tip Thursday is a writing prompt that encourages us to write about places we’ve gone offering “tips” about places to travel. As one who is always up for a road trip (or train or even plane), I enjoy reading about other people’s travel. Today, I’m taking you to Manistique, Michigan. This is an easy post which is good, because the last month has wiped me out. October promises some changes, but will also be hectic as I’ll fly home to spend a few days with my parents, and then at the end of the month I’ll fly to Costa Rica for a week. Hopefully, I’ll gather a few stories from my travels.

Last summer, when I was in the UP (that’s Upper Peninsula for you non-Michigan folk), I made a stop in Manistique to have lunch with the local Habitat for Humanity director. I’d only been through Manistique once before and remembered the weird water tower in the middle of the town. This time, I took some time to walk around the old Soo Lines that cut through town (see the station below), and to tour the museum inside the water tower that’s only open in the summer. (the tower is no longer in use.) The museum told about the town’s special “Siphon Bridge” and flume built nearly a hundred years ago to channel water and logs into the town’s paper mill. I also checked out the beach, but for some reason didn’t bother to photograph the sand and water (and lighthouse) that was inviting on a warm July day.

I would have also loved sticking around to have watched the sunset over the lake, but in July, the sun doesn't set to nearly 10 PM this far north (and besides, I think the sun wouldn't have set over the lake as the lake is south of Manistique... but in the winter, when the sun sets southward, I think you'd get a nice view of it from the beach. Dress warmly! Probably a nicer view of the sunset (through much of the year) would be at Seul Choix Point Lighthouse about 20 miles east of Manistique. The point juts out into Lake Michigan, providing an opportunity to see sunrises and sunsets.

Manistique is at the end of the Manistique River (which I fished along with the Fox River back in 2007). It use to be a big lumber and paper mill area. The Ann Arbor Railroad ran a ferry to Manistique from Frankfort, MI (in the lower peninsula). The ferry was a small ship and carried no only automobiles, but train cars (and served as the Ann Arbor’s connection to the Soo Line. With the opening of the Big Mac (bridge between the upper and lower peninsula) in 1957, the ferries were doomed and stopped running in the 1960s.

My travel tip for today: take time to visit those less known places.