Summertime in North Michigan

A cool breeze of nostalgia and simple pleasures

It was summertime in Northern Michigan.
Splashing through the sand bar, talking by the campfire
It’s the simple things in life like when and where.
Kid Rock, All Summer Long

I could hardly remember a time when I irrepressibly celebrated summer and rued the day it would leave. Turns out it was all simply lying dormant within me like a fragile flower in the long searing heat of a Florida summer.

As we all know, “long” is an understatement when talking about Florida summers and our own brand of cabin fever. That’s why I jumped at a couple of invitations to high-tail it to Northern Michigan last July. It sounded like a refrigerator door opening into hell’s kitchen.

So there I was, before I knew it, whisked from the Traverse City airport by six friends en route to the Old Mission Peninsula Wine Trail. The local airport, by the way, is officially called the Cherry Capital Airport, and the National Cherry Festival just so happened to be happening when we drove through.

Winery #5 and still standing!

We stopped at Folgarelli’s, a foodie haven in this foodie town on the shores of Lake Michigan, for deli sandwiches and dried cherries before making our way around five of the seven wineries. Naturally they all bottle their different versions of cherry wine – from sparkling to cherry sangria, but they also pour samples of better-than-decent grape and other fruit wines.