Return To Mackinac Island: Vintage Photos, 1880-1946
My buddies and I used to go up to Mackinac Island every single summer. I mean EVERY summer. We stayed in various island hotels and were able to walk freely thru the Grand Hotel (can’t do THAT anymore). We’d rent the bikes, climb the cliffs, visit the fort and graveyards, and load up on island food.
We were on the island when Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour were filming “Somewhere In Time” around 1979. That was cool. We were walking up one of the side roads toward the Grand Hotel when who should be heading our way riding bicycles, but Christopher Reeve and his then-girlfriend (I think it was Gae Exton). As they passed by us, Reeve looked me straight in the eye and kept going, maybe hoping we wouldn’t try to stop them. He probably got approached endlessly by fans and was expecting us to do the same. But we just smiled back and let ‘em go on. Yeah, that was cool, too
More buddy trips to the island continued for a couple more years – by then I was older and more responsible… my buddies and I followed our own separate paths and those annual trips weren’t as frequent.
Over the next few decades however, I was able to make it back up there quite a few times. I can’t make it up those steep hills like I used to –bike or no bike - and I am occasionally invited to do book signings at the Island Bookstore.
Riding over and back on the ferry is especially cool at night with the Mackinac Bridge lights shining in the distance. Leaving the island with their homemade fudge is a must – it’s almost unheard-of if you don’t. The gallery below has fifty images of the island going back as far as the late 1800s and some old memorabilia as well!
RETURN TO MACKINAC ISLAND
MORE MACKINAC ISLAND STUFF!