Mackinaw Island

We got up early Saturday morning and took the ferry over to Mackinaw Island.  Mackinaw Island doesn’t allow any cars, so the only way to get around the island was by bike, horse or walking.

We rented a tandem bike first and rode all around the island on the outside shoreline.  It was hard to get used to the tandem bike.  I couldn’t see around Mark when I rode in the back, so we switched and he rode behind me.  He kept moving around to mess with me and I would have a hard time steering it.  No crashes, so that was good!  You couldn’t stand up on it and pedal either, so after we rode all around the flat area (8 miles), we turned in the bike and got 2 mountain bikes.  Check out Mark’s goofy hat, I mean who brings a winter stocking cap on vacation?  But it was actually cool, so it was a good thing. :)

 

This was a stop along the shoreline where we walked up to “Arch Rock”.  It was amazing how they built the stairs going up on the hill.  There were about 180 steps to get to the top (I didn’t count them, someone did that came down ahead of us!)

 

This is the arch rock, looking at it from the top of the hill that we climbed to.

Someone put a smiley face person in the water below the arch rock.

View from the top of the climb.  You can see the road down by the water.  It was a black top road.

 

This is another view from the top, with the road down below.  The beach was really rocky, no one really went swimming in the lake.

 

This is the arch rock from the bottom of the road.

 

We rode the mountain bikes (we each had our own) up the hills and around the island.  There was a couple of old cemeteries on the island, a “skull” cave, a lot of old houses, buildings, etc.  We rode around for a couple of hours and then turned in the bikes.

I didn’t get a really good picture of the street when it was really busy, it was wall-to-wall bikes, horses, people.  Pretty crazy.  There was a guy (actually a lot of different guys) that went around and cleaned up all the horse poop, the main street really smelled bad too.  They worked on keeping it clean, but there was just too much.

After we turned the bikes in, we did the horse carriage tour.  I wanted to do that mostly because of the narration that the tour guide gave.  I thought it would be really neat to hear more about the island that way.  The gal that drove our carriage was from Wisconsin and came up to the island for the summer to work and went to college during the rest of the year.  She was a forest ecology major, that was really obvious because she told us all about the plants and the trees in the area, which I enjoyed. 

Here are some pictures from the ferry back to Mackinaw City where we stayed for the night.  The Grand Hotel, and the Mackinaw Bridge are in the bottom two pictures.