Michigan's coast is best by bicycle

Though roads are seldom more than a means to get someplace, the cavernous, 21-mile-long Tunnel of Trees is a journey to be savored, especially by bicycle. My older son, Andy, and I soon discovered this last summer on the first leg of a 250-mile bike tour we took in northwest Michigan, a region that seems at least a world away from the grit and grind of industrial Detroit. Route 119 is the only state road in Michigan without a center line, which seems to suggest you should slow down, maybe weave around a little bit and take in the canopy of pines and broad-leaf trees that shade the route.

This was a highlight, but not the only one, in our five-day trek that began at the top-most tip of the lower peninsula and worked south around Traverse City, north up the Leelanau pinkie finger to Northport and down the dune-dotted Lake Michigan shoreline to the fishing town of Frankfort before pedaling back east.

Michigan, of course, is the state that put the world on four wheels, as the Detroit corporate logos of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler attest. But before the car, whose invention prompted Woodrow Wilson to complain in 1906 that "nothing has spread socialist feeling in this country more than the automobile," there was the bicycle. Scores of manufacturers in Detroit pumped out so many bikes from their factories in the 1890s that, according to the Detroit News, outnumbered pedestrians feared crossing the streets because of all the cycling fanatics.

The bicycle gave birth to Henry Ford's Quadricycle in 1896 and, seven years later, the creation of the Ford Motor Co. Though Detroit and the nation gave up the bicycle craze more than a century ago, the generally isolated climes of far northern Michigan offer many miles of roads ideal for getting out of the car and cycling into the joys of the north country.

Anyone can argue convincingly that Michigan is not the economic dynamo it once was. The future of the domestic auto industry is, to be gentle, uncertain. Even up north, where ships and trains were drawn to the region more than a century ago for lumber and fur and made the little villages on the lake boomtowns, those days are long gone. But for those who like their travel on two wheels, Michigan is a broad-shouldered, bicycle-friendly state, and you will be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful landscape than northwestern Michigan to explore on a bike. The route is dotted by nine lighthouses, 460-foot-high sand dunes, breathtaking lake views and touches of rustic charm that define the meaning of getting away.

The beauty of doing this on a bike is that you're far less likely to miss something.

The tunnel

We had no knowledge of the Tunnel of Trees when we strapped our bags to the bikes and departed on a cool, overcast Sunday morning from kitschy Mackinaw City, the southern link of the imposing Mackinac Bridge and a town whose economy is built on hotels, fudge and shops that traffic in T-shirts boasting each of George Carlin's seven words you can never say on TV. Our goal was to navigate some steep climbs on old country roads and make it to the 1920s-era Legs Inn, in Cross Village, for a lunch of pierogies, corned beef and whitefish.

This was an exquisite and wonderfully quiet start to the trip, which led us past the quaint general store in Good Hart to the picturesque resort town of Harbor Springs, with gracious 19th century Victorians facing the harbor and with tourists dressed like they owned those homes. (This is a pretense that is largely out of place up north. Most of northern Michigan is a testament to the arrival of the middle class, with cabins and modest second homes. Harbor Springs, with old Detroit and Chicago money, is the picture of lakeshore affluence and opulence.)

We followed the contours of Little Traverse Bay to the bigger and trendy resort towns of Petoskey and Charlevoix, finding along the way a concrete path that kept us in the comfort of shade trees and away from chaos of traffic. That didn't last long.