Notes from the Upper Peninsula

WE WERE ON THE ROAD LAST WEEK, not in the kitchen, a long overdo revisiting of Michigan’s beautiful Upper Peninsula. Fall colors were everywhere, as were signs about places closing soon for the season—end of October or even earlier. Like the wonderfully weird Mystery Spot.

Things we ate.

Our first dinner was actually just south of the UP, at Legs Inn, in Cross Village, Michigan. Marion’s family regularly vacationed in this tiny village on Lake Michigan when she was a kid, and Legs Inn was one place they always ate. The very handmade, rambling place features Polish and American foods on the menu. We both had the delicious bigos—Polish hunter’s stew. Marion makes an amazing bigos, by the way.

We ate fried whitefish twice, once as fish & chips in Christmas, Michigan, and once as fish tacos at Four Suns Fish & Chips in Hancock, Michigan. We ate wonderful chopped meat sandwiches at Bimbo’s Wine Press, a friendly bar in Iron Mountain, Michigan.

And we ate pasties a couple of times. The pasty (rhymes ironically with nasty, which it is not, instead of tasty, which it is) is a handheld meat pie brought to the Upper Peninsula in the 1850s by Cornish immigrants who came to work in the iron ore mines there. Yoopers (residents of the UP) wholeheartedly embraced the meat-and-vegetable-filled pies, and you can find them everywhere. We also ate wonderful house-made pastries (rhymes with tasty, sort of) from two different places.

Things we did.

First, we entered the Upper Peninsula by driving across the magnificent, almost five-mile-long Mackinac Bridge that connected Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas in 1957. It was breathtaking. We took a boat tour through the Soo Locks that connect Lake Huron to Lake Superior, raising freighters 21 feet in the process to overcome the lakes’ different levels. We noodled around UP cities, taking in neighborhoods and beautiful downtown areas graced with stately historic buildings of red sandstone, colored by iron oxide. Marquette. Houghton. Hancock. Calumet.

We engaged in a time-honored pastime of visitors and Yoopers alike—rock picking. Wandering the beaches, usually stooped over, looking for rocks—collecting and rejecting stones tumbled by the lake’s waves. Many rock pickers are trained geologists, seeking rare finds that tell the history of the lake, the area, the planet. Others, like me, pick simply because we like the way the rocks look. Marion straddles both styles of picking. We came home with, for us, a modest number of rocks.

And we met genuinely nice, friendly people. Everywhere. People who were happy to help us, and proud and happy to call the UP home.

Things we didn’t hit while driving.

Most of our driving in the UP was on two-lane, twisty, hilly roads. I learned to maintain a decent clip most of the time. The second morning I was doing a decent clip and suddenly had to slow waaay down. A dozen or more turkeys were walking across the road at an unhurried pace, a fun thing to see because I’d seen them in time. Late that same afternoon on particularly twisty roads up near Copper Harbor, I also didn’t hit a bald eagle as it suddenly took flight from the roadside where it had been enjoying a meal, rising in front of our car with plenty of room to spare. It was one of three bald eagles we saw on our trip.

Whenever we were driving at night outside cities or towns (which we did more than I thought we might) it was what we call country dark, as in black. Anywhere your headlights aren’t pointed, all you see is black. Fortunately, most of the reflective road lines are kept fresh so you can see where you’re going. Driving along at a decent but cautious clip one night, I had to quite suddenly veer across the road into the empty oncoming lane to not hit deer just standing in the road, in our lane, four or maybe five. Wowser.

So that was our wonderful, too short UP trip. Now we’re home and back in the kitchen. Check back next week—we should have a recipe here for you.