Mackinac area adventures

Some highlights of our recent Mackinac/Upper Western Michigan trip... a full list of our finds (and misses) can be found here.

Thursday: Stopped and “Did the Wave” on northbound I-75. J waved at the cars and they waved back! Very fun and a great “drive by” box that lets you stretch your legs before the bridge. While at this rest stop, we actually ran into B’s coworker who was also driving up to the conference, without any planning on our parts. Must be a popular stop. :-)

Friday: We had spent the night in St. Ignace (which was hosting its classic car show this weekend. Neither J or B is really into cars, but it was neat to drive through town and see hundreds of beautiful old cars.) so we started the day looking for Under the Northern Lights and St. Iggy, neither of which we found. They were both in very public places, so we weren’t surprised that we couldn’t find them (though disappointed). We did find Mighty Mac, though. Great stamp and location! Here is B enjoying the view:

And here we are enjoying our stay at the Grand Hotel on Friday afternoon:

Saturday: After B’s conference ended, we hit the local letterboxes! Letterboxing on Mackinac is a great way to see the island “hotspots” but with a purpose. Many of the most popular areas have boxes nearby, so you can walk to Arch Rock and take in the view, as well as get a letterbox. So we spent the afternoon walking along the Bluffs, to Arch Rock, to a cemetery, to a cave, along the boardwalk, to the library, and to the Devil’s Kitchen. The bulk of the boxes we found were by Radio and we really enjoyed his/her (?) clues and stamps. Here is B enjoying one of the many flower-lined trails on the island:

We wrapped up Saturday by leaving the island and driving down to Traverse City. As we still had several hours of daylight left and are obsessive ‘boxers, we decided to get the Wine Country I mystery box. There was a slight mix-up on our part regarding the clues (we may have been accidentally following the Wine Country II clues... maybe) but we figured it out and found the box. We stopped at the The Bowers (which used to be the servant quarters and is the ‘less expensive’ sister of the Bowers Harbor Inn) for dinner. J decided to honor the Wine Country box by having a local wine; she tried the Pinot Noir by Peninsula Cellars. It smelled funny but she drank it!

Sunday: We spent most of Sunday finding SpringChick mystery boxes, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. We did stop to look for the Fishtown box in Leland, but couldn’t find it. It may still be there, but the area was so public that we couldn’t really root around for it. We enjoyed visiting Fishtown, though, and eating cheese curds! Here is just one of the many lovely views we saw during the day of boxing along Lake Michigan:

And a little update on the She Flies box. SC has a note on her site that there is a No Trespassing sign near the box. We were in the area so we decided to check it out; if the sign clearly limited access to the box we would just skip it. However, it really doesn’t. It is at a nearby farmer’s field but not in the same direction as the box... so we felt comfortable retrieving it. And were First Finders on it! :-) Also, there was an entire flock of wild turkeys gobbling away nearby, which was fun.

All in all, it was a great trip. We found a lot of boxes (we are well over 200 now) and though we had a few misses, it was worth it. The only frustrating thing is that there were so many in the area that we had to skip! Oh well, there is always next year’s conference....