7 Whimsical Towns to Visit in the Great Lakes

Golf carts have the right of way on one Lake Erie island, and a hand-cranked ferry crosses a Michigan river on muscle alone. Over in Beverly Shores, five houses from the 1933 Chicago World's Fair still line the dunes, barged across Lake Michigan and never sent back. Bayfield smells like berries all summer and apples all fall. Farther north, Grand Marais has kept the oldest art colony in Minnesota running since 1947. Summer packs the arcades and the orchards. Come winter, the same towns head out onto the ice.

Paradise, Michigan

The big waterfall near Paradise runs the color of root beer. Tannins from the cedar swamps upstream stain the Tahquamenon Falls a deep amber, which is how they earned the nickname "Root Beer Falls." The falls sit inside a state park of roughly 50,000 acres. Longfellow put the river in his poem "The Song of Hiawatha," where Hiawatha builds his canoe by the rushing Tahquamenon. In winter the spray freezes into blue-green ice.

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum sits out at Whitefish Point, where Lake Superior has sunk more than two hundred ships nearby. The bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald hangs inside, a memorial to the crew lost in 1975. The Whitefish Point Light Tower next door has run since 1861, the oldest working lighthouse on the lake. The Toonerville Trolley, thirty minutes off, runs a narrow-gauge train and riverboat back toward the falls.

Geneva-On-The-Lake, Ohio

Geneva-on-the-Lake calls itself Ohio's first summer resort. The proof is a mile of Lake Erie waterfront known as The Strip. Arcades and a Ferris wheel still run along Lake Road. The whole stretch is a working time capsule of the 1940s, back when northeast Ohio families drove in by the carload.

Fascination has run on The Strip since 1918, a parlor game that crosses Skee-Ball with bingo. A carousel still turns near the lake, the last piece of the old Erieview amusement park. After dark the dinner theater takes over, the kind of act the resort has booked for decades.

Put-in-Bay, Ohio

On South Bass Island, golf carts and bikes have the right of way downtown. Locals call Put-in-Bay the "Key West of the North," and most people get around by rented cart. Wine has grown here since the 1860s, and the trade left a strange souvenir. Crystal Cave is a chamber of giant crystals the owners call the largest geode in the world, found by accident when a winery dug a well. In winter, colorful ice shanties take over the frozen harbor.

The Miller Ferry leaves Catawba Island every half-hour in summer, and the Jet Express runs from Port Clinton and Sandusky. Above the docks stands Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial, a column raised for the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, with Canada visible from the observation deck on a clear day. Either crossing is an easy hop from Cleveland or Toledo, and boaters who bring their own vessels tie up downtown, where the carts still win every standoff.

Bayfield, Wisconsin

Bayfield runs its calendar on fruit. The town calls itself the berry capital of Wisconsin, and the hillside orchards fill with berry pickers all summer. Erickson Orchards sells cider and preserves out of a country store. Fall turns the town over to the apple harvest, capped by a festival every autumn. At Eckels Pottery and Fine Craft Gallery, anyone can throw a fruit bowl on the wheel.

Kayakers paddle the Apostle Islands sea caves all summer, twenty minutes up the shore. In a hard winter, the lake freezes solid and people walk out to them instead. Madeline Island sits a short ferry ride offshore, the only year-round community in the chain. Once Lake Superior ices over, the ferry stops and an ice road opens in its place, marked with discarded Christmas trees and printed on the state's official maps. When the ice runs too thick for boats and too thin for cars, an airboat called the windsled hauls people across.

Saugatuck, Michigan

A hand-cranked chain ferry has crossed the Kalamazoo River at Saugatuck since the 1800s, the last of its kind still running in the country. An operator turns a crank, a sunken chain drags the boat across, and a few minutes later it lands at the base of Mount Baldhead. Galleries crowd the downtown blocks, James Brandess Studio and Gallery among them. Saugatuck Dune Rides sends open buggies blasting over the dunes instead of up them.

Across the river, a few hundred wooden steps climb Mount Baldhead to an overlook of Oval Beach, and the way back down is a headlong run through the sand. Retro Boat Rentals tours the harbor in vintage wooden runabouts. The Southerner plates Lowcountry cooking a long way from the actual South.

Grand Marais, Minnesota

Painters founded the oldest art colony in Minnesota in Grand Marais in 1947. They still set up easels at Artist's Point, a rocky spit that frames the harbor and the lighthouse. The North House Folk School teaches old northern crafts like birchbark canoe building.

World's Best Donuts has fried cake donuts in a red-and-white shack by the harbor since 1969. The shop opens only late spring through mid-October and sells out most days by noon. Every August, the Lions Club runs Fisherman's Picnic, where the contests include minnow races and a cutest-puppy crowning.

Beverly Shores, Indiana

Five futuristic houses from the 1933 Chicago World's Fair line the Beverly Shores dunes. After the fair closed, a developer barged them across Lake Michigan and left them on the shore. The Century of Progress district preserves all five. One, the House of Tomorrow, is a glass-walled box built to show off the modern home of the future. Ninety years on, the houses still look out of place next to the cottages around them.

The dunes here move. Mount Baldy walks inland a few feet a year, burying the trees in its path as it goes. The 3 Dune Challenge climbs the three tallest dunes in Indiana Dunes State Park back to back.

The Shoreline's Odd Streak

The Great Lakes shoreline runs on its own logic. A waterfall near Paradise pours out the color of root beer. Down the coast, the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald sits in a shipwreck museum. Put-in-Bay keeps a cave it calls the largest geode on earth. Saugatuck sends open buggies barreling straight down its dunes. None of it was built to impress anybody. These towns turned out odd on their own, and the people who live here kept them that way.