The Movie “Somewhere in Time” poster at the Grand Hotel.
View of Grand Hotel porch.
Fudge in Ryba’s Fudge Shop, Mackinac Island.
Resident Historian Bob Tagatz. “This is one of the few places where you can relive the movie as 95 percent was shot on Mackinac Island and 90 percent on our property, and all those things are still there.” Most of the island’s inns, hotels, and shops sit within the so-called downtown area along the port and scenic waterfront. On Market Street, flowers hang from lampposts and galleries showcase paintings of orange- tinted sunsets. And on Main Street, I peer through a storefront window to see mounds of hot, sticky fudge pounded and shaped, as fudge-tasting is one of the island’s favorite pastimes. “We pour it on a marble slab because it pulls the heat out of the candy and cools it,” says Les Parrish of Ryba’s Fudge Shop. First settled by Native Americans and then French missionaries and fur traders, the island became a respite for the Gilded Age rich and famous who built hotels and summer cottages in the late 19th century to escape industrialized Great Lakes cities. Today the island of less than four square miles has become one of the Midwest’s most popular resort destinations. Pointed church steeples and the rounded towers of Victorian homes bring to mind a New England town. Winding pathways twist through forested bluffs, now part of Mackinac Island State Park. And horses are at almost every turn.
“The island is slow-paced because of them, and thus people here take their time and enjoy it more,” says Veronica Gough of Cindy’s Riding Stable, a tour operator offering equestrian jaunts along the island’s 83 miles of crisscrossing roads and trails. A walk up a steep pathway leads to Fort Mackinac, built by the British in the early 1780s but falling to the Americans after the Revolutionary War. Interactive displays and period furnishings fill 14 original buildings, while reenactments and cannon firings reverberate within the stone ramparts. Impressive waterfront views can be seen from the fort’s walls. To explore the rest of the island, 80 percent of which is within the state park, I rent a bicycle and pedal along curvy roads and bike paths where unusual stone formations pierce the tree line. They include Arch Rock, a bridge-like span of eroded breccias carved out of a hillside 146 feet above Lake Michigan’s shoreline; and Sugar Loaf Rock, another breccias mass shooting up 75 feet. Expansive island views can also be seen from nearby Point Lookout and the hilltop site of Fort Holmes. At the end of the day, I enjoy the sunset while in a rocking chair on the Grand Hotel’s elongated porch. “We sell a summer memory, a summer experience,” says
MACKINAC ISLAND
COAST TO COAST SPRING MAGAZINE 2018
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