Great Lakes Road Trip: 9 Days - Door County, Upper Peninsula, and Mackinac Island

Pictured Rocks National Seashore in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

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The Great Lakes are a unique and - in our minds - an underappreciated feature of the United States. Left behind from glacier craters and meltwater after the end of the last ice age, the immense fresh water lakes are the largest source of surface freshwater in the world when their area is combined and hold 21% of the globe’s fresh water.

I remember watching a documentary that featured Great Lakes boat disasters years ago on TV. At the time, it was easy for me to fathom a foundering ship on the ocean, but it was hard to get my head around the idea of a similar maritime disaster on a lake. Of course, my lack of imagination didn’t save the ships and people lost over the years to the severe storms that can form over the lakes based on their unique weather patterns.

I couldn’t personally fathom the true, immense size of these bodies of water until I was standing on their sandy, wave-swept shores, starring out at a shimmery, blue surface that might as well have been the ocean.

When planning road trips, we are faced with two main decisions: Do we want to hop in the car and drive from home or catch a flight, rent a car, and drive from there? Obviously avoiding a flight and car rental is more affordable, so in the summer of 2016, we decided to hit the road and see some of the Great Lakes for ourselves. Our nine-day trek took us through four states in addition to our own, and primarily were spent on Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Huron, with a tiny bit of Lake Erie thrown in. Lake Ontario, the smallest of the five, was too far out of reach, and didn’t make the cut for this trip.

Planning our Great Lakes Road Trip

how we determined our route

Our normal first step when planning a trip is picking up an actual, physical travel book, but in the case of this particular trip, we relied instead upon internet research alone.

We knew we were looking at about 10-11 hours just to get from our home in Virginia to the tip of the Great Lakes and a similar distance home. While we know there are people that will knock that distance out in a day, and we certainly have, it’s far from enjoyable. We would much rather be able to stop, stretch our legs, and get a bite to eat.

So, we decided we would need one night in each direction to just help break up the drive. With the remaining time, we decided we could visit three different places. I already knew that I wanted to visit Mackinac Island. Ever since reading about the car-less Victorian island, I had wanted to visit. Door County in Wisconsin, a peninsula punching into the middle of Lake Michigan, appealed to us from our research, and Munising, Michigan was a perfect middle spot, located on Lake Superior in what is known as the Upper Peninsula.

what route did we take?

Our Road Trip Route - minus the trek to Mackinac Island since that spot is car-free - an approximately 35 hour trip in total driving/ferry distance.

While we recommend you read the detailed blogs to follow that bring our travels more to life and highlight the amazing side trips, hikes, and scenery, this will give you an overview of the general flow of the trip. We will have more detailed maps embedded in those other blogs, but you can view the general route on the map below. We spent 1-3 nights in each destination.

Starting at our home in Roanoke, Virginia, we headed up and over the Blue Ridge Mountains into West Virginia. Just a couple of days previously, there had been significant flooding in West Virginia, and we saw the remnants of the storm in lower lying areas with what were normally placid rivers stirred up and over their banks. West Virginia, for those who haven’t been there, is an incredibly mountainous state, so we spent a large period of time winding our way through rural scenery before a brief stint through the capital of Charleston. Our destination for the night: Lafayette, Indiana, an 8.5 hour drive from home.

While Lafayette was quite a bit further than a halfway point, my dad went to college there at Purdue University, and I didn’t expect I’d find many other opportunities to see the area. We spent one night there amidst the desolation of a college town in summer before getting on the road the following morning to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. We spent three nights in Sturgeon Bay and exploring Door County. The county, which is comprised of the entire peninsula is larger than it looks on a map - from one end to the other is a 70 minute drive. There we visited a number of parks for hiking and biking and lighthouse viewing.

Our next destination 3.5 hours away was Munising, the far northern part of the Upper Peninsula, a cute town where we spent two nights. It had an amazing small business that we fell in love with. Falling Rock Cafe and Bookstore is basically the type of place I half-fantasize about opening. The shop is a bookstore and has board games for visitors to sit and play, has a cafe that serves full meals plus an ice cream and coffee counter, and hosts live music some nights. Near Munising is Pictured Rocks National Seashore, and the area was also great for nighttime stargazing!

Heading south again, we drove about 2 hours and then caught the ferry to Mackinac Island, where we stayed in a beautiful Victorian inn, rented bikes, and hiked/biked our way around the entire island - a few times! Lovers of history, we enjoyed exploring Fort Mackinac, which dates to the American Revolutionary War. Beautiful summer weather, live outdoor music, horse-drawn carriages, and lots of crowds in the heart of the town itself, but which rapidly diminished as soon as we headed to the rest of the island.

And then, Toledo. Yeah, I know. It was a bit of a shock to the system going from a carless Victorian island to the heart of the former auto industry. So we did what anyone in their right mind would - we found the botanical garden and spent our one evening there en route home.

Would we return to the Great Lakes region?

Yes, this trip allowed us to scope out areas that were entirely new to us and didn’t give us truly enough time to explore the greater region. We truly loved Munising and Mackinac Island was a fun adventure. While we enjoyed Door County and would recommend it to others, visiting once was probably sufficient with the large list of places we have yet to see. I really enjoyed the quiet, less populated areas along Lake Superior and would probably plan a future trip to spend more time in the Upper Peninsula area and the Canadian side of the lakes.

Lake Superior at sunset, just before some nighttime stargazing

Trip Do-Over: What would we do differently?

There are probably three things that I would change, knowing what I know now. I would have stayed an extra night in Munising to better explore the area, and a second night in Mackinac Island for the same reason. In Door County, I would have stayed further north on the peninsula than Sturgeon Bay since we ended up spending a large chunk of our time there on the road driving from where we stayed to the parks that are mostly on the northern part of the peninsula. Of course, accommodations there are likely more sparse, too.